Type Battle 25: Design the 2008 Typophile Tee

UPDATE: This weeks’ battle is The 2008 Typophile Tee Contest. There’s only 1 week, so get on it.

EARLIER: Stay tuned for next weeks’ Type Battle. We’ve got something up our sleeves.

Wordle Remixes the Tag Cloud

Wordle (no, not worlde) is has a pretty impressive world cloud generator. It’s not quite a tag cloud, as that would imply that it’s linked to content somewhere, but the visual algorithms are pretty cool.

(Lastly, I can’t vouch for the source of the fonts in use - there are a half dozen to choose from. They’re not font names I readily recognize.)

Congratulations on Doublewide, Christian

Congratulations on Doublewide, Christian. The featured face looks double good this week.

Brand Tags: What the world really thinks

The basic idea of Brand Tags is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.

Try it out. You’ll find it’s very addicting. And it’s even more interesting to see what tags emerge for companies like Barbie or Volkswagen.

Ornaments, Frilly Bits, Hand-lettering, &c.

First up. Prolific blogger Cameron Moll posts a roundup of great sources for ornaments, frilly bits, ephemera, &c.

And, Jason, going by the Flickr username InvisibleElement, has consistenly become a favorite in my Flickr contacts for his hand lettering and illustration. Check it.

Cubescape Experimental Animation

Cameron Adams is one of those rare designer/developers that breaks right-brain, left-brain stereotypes. Cubescape is one such example of an experiment in code that performs as beautifully as it is designed.

JetBlue is Back

I love a compelling brand story. And before I jump in, I need to confess my ties to the JetBlue brand, having once designed the logo, identity and airplane graphics (ahem, the livery design to use industry parlance) while I was at Merkeley and Partners.

One Show Pencil Awarded for Typophile Film Fest 4

AmazType: Amazon book search visualizer

amaztype is a cool little mashup tool that creates a visualizer for Amazon's book search.

I heart Freight

There are gimmicky fonts and there are solid fonts. The gimmicky ones are fleeting. Cool for a moment, but they tire quickly. Emigre and T-26 and even some Underware fonts in time will look the same way. Then there are typefaces that feel standard, that feel timeless and hardworking — by that I mean versatile, usable, readable. The problem with those two extremes is you want something that works hard, but that feels fresh. Something that will last but that will still let you pull out some surprise and some sparkle in your system. A few typefaces come to mind — Meta (Erik Spiekermann) had that quality. And more recently Amplitude (Christian Schwartz) and Pill Gothic (Christian Robertson).