UkType and Wallpaper magazine joined forces for some graphic fun but most of all to support the St Bride Library, the world’s foremost printing and graphic arts library. They invited designers –anything from students to superstars– to participate in a design project.  The brief was to use a familiar typeface in order to design a typographic tart card in an inviting and pervasive way (a tart card is a printed card which is used by London’s call girls to advertise their services in telephone booths).  Tart cards are considered somehow part of a cult culture which has influenced the work of many mainstream artists such as Tom Phillips and Sex Pistols designer Ray and Nils Stevenson. The organizers wish to publish a book about the whole project and the profits will be donated to the St Bride Library.

The exhibition will take place at the KesselsKramer Venue, from the 22nd till the 29th of June.

This is one of the newest apps for the Apple iphone. The concept is very simple. Drawing with letters. The first release came out late May, but the project started back in 2005 as an online project for the web. You simply type a sentence or word and then you start drawing. You may save it, email it or upload it to the typedrawing flickr group. The new 1.2 update goes one step further. Now you can set colors, typeface, text size, and undo & redo. This is the type of application that makes you spend many creative hours with your iphone or ipod touch.

Storyabout.net

Alex Haigh is a 25 year old freelance designer from Nottingham who runs a small design studio under the name ThinkDust. A year ago he started a project with the name HypeForType. The original idea was to bring together the most talented designers from any part of the world. After one year designers like Si Scott, Alex Trochut, Jon Burgerman, HelloHikimori, and Luke Lucas started producing some cool original typefaces,  with fresh ideas, exclusive for the Hype for Type project. Several small type foundries have already started working with Hype for Type. You can explore more than 200 individual typefaces. Check it out!

Words are powerful and so is a picture. In advertising, words are mostly used to supplement the picture. Sometimes words become part of the main act, as is the case with the Inligua ad.  In this typographic video, you not only see but also hear and read the ad in the most creative way. A battlefield made out of 3D lettering simulates a modern business environment. A war zone with machine guns, airplanes and helicopters as if taken out of a video game. In another case, the Mercedes-Benz Nederland B.V ad brings you into a driving position across the mainland, through mountains and over rivers, under wind and rain, crossing a town and finally in front of a kid. Watch them both. Two creative typographic videos worth exploring.

Graphica is the leading Graphic Arts Trade Fair event that takes place every 2 years in Athens. Anything from multimedia, creative workshops, publications, visual communication, printing materials, software, paper manufacturers. Companies like Agfa, Canon, Epson, Heidelberg, HP, Kodak, Roland, Xeikon, Xerox  and many others, exhibited their products for 4 days at the end of May. This year, the trade fair moved to a brand new exhibition center the Athens Metropolitan Expo. Parachute® participated again this year with an impressive simple stage/stand while its “disturbing the uncool” concept was far from the usual hard sell notion of such events. Visitors and friends dropped by to learn about new releases, get the all new printed catalog and posters as well as listen to our DJ set. This offered the opportunity for a far more personal touch and a dynamic projection of services and products to graphic designers, marketers, advertisers and visual communicators.