after prufrock

.

Andy Gilmore makes me feel simultaneously alone and interconnected. His illustrations reach out from their depths and spin out into instantaneous fractures, timing the space around them, breaking out into white wilderness of surrounding voids. His designs embrace colours, disciplined pauses in momentum, expeditions into confounded geometry and definitive statements in what makes things happen. There is an electricity in the blueprint of each of his designs that enforces the coexisting measures of light and darkness, of knowledge and the unknown.

.

.
Do investigate his multiple homes on the internet and open up these designs full page – their brilliance will engulf you. Also brilliant, and another platform Gilmore uses is the Space Collective, which branches out into multiple projects propelled by forward thinking terrestrials.
.
.

.

The work of Stephanie Chen keeps me keenly engaged and enertained. From her impeccible sense in typography, to the quietly fascinating exhibitions she curates, everything is like good design measured in spades.  Do drop by, sometime.

In lieu of a Penguin post, (admittedly absurdly delayed), here is a touch of typographic bliss for those of us who remain sold to the lines of the pen.

Cameron Adams, aka The Man in Blue, decided to satisfy his longtime curiosity of the origin of his favourite fonts by engaging their esteemed creators in sending him a sample of their handwriting. The results proved fascinating, seemingly revealing that the correlation between what is organic to the designers’ hand and the final product is relatively weak. However the exposure of the handwritten samples to their static siblings brings out a kind of emotive leap, which in turn gently directs me to the study of graphology. This assumption that the individualised script we each produce is a unique expression of our personality traits, has in time developed into a dedicated muscle group of physiological concepts just waiting to be flexed. Here they are flexing away, and here again, and this is where they snapped a tendon. Of course, when the study of handwriting analysis is compared to the romantic art of palm-reading, how can it not suffer a critical dismissal?

& if you are so inclined, you always try your hand at analysing your own script. I found my own results to be daringly accurate, although much in the same way I find my newspaper horoscopes to be on unsuspecting Sunday mornings.

[Via Slashdot]

1935: Office junior Edward Young spends the day at London Zoo sketching penguins at every angle possible. The idea of the penguin was inspired by the contemporary German publishing house The Albatross Library, and it’s successful paperback design followed closely. Young sets the standards for early Penguin with the classic three-band cover, the simple yet deft Gill Sans typeface and the efficient colour coding scheme (orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography). Young was also responsible for the early marketing of the popular paperbacks, hooking onto the equation of the original cover price of 6d (pennies) as equivalent to the cost of ten cigarettes. In an era where paperback literature was only available with luridly illustrated covers and often bad quality fiction, the affordable penguins reeled in the masses with their smart design and sound choice of texts.

Upcoming Chapter: Penguin Composition Rules & and the Tschichold redesign.