Wordpress 2.7—at last

After 3 years and a bit, I’ve managed to upgrade! It all happened so soon (yeah, right :P) thanks to the instant updater and thanks to ISO50 for the useful tip. The new interface is great, works like a charm and I hope the blog—the website, actually—will soon be looking as well as it runs.

Now, if I could only get an instant designer as well, my long-delayed redesign would be up and running in no time :))

Later edit:
I’ll be tinkering for a while whith some layouts till I manage to finish the design. For now, I’ll be using Cutline 2.2. Please endure the horrors for a while, my CSS/HTML skills are deplorable :)

The Abbreviated Typography—what means what

Fontshop kindly explains for all of us ignorants what those initials that usually come after the typefaces’ names mean. Be sure to bookmark it!

Mickey’s Wave To Hokusai—by Jaybo

A very interesting—and funny—take on Hokusai’s “The Great Wave of Kanagawa“, made by Jaybo—aka Monk, a french graffiti artist who recently exposed his works as projections on the Berliner Dom.

You can read an interview here. And if you’re interested, you can see some other Hokusai’s Wave interpretations here.

(sources: digesting design, iconiconic, style mag)

Baldovino Barani—Beauty of colours

It is not very often that a fashion photographer proves to be so bold, considering how easy it is nowadays to fall into cliché. But Baldovino Barani easily plays with both black&white and colour, creating mesmerizing stories:

(Thanks Catalin for the tip)

Amsterdam Fatastic Film Festival

Talking about Amsterdam designers, here’s another nice logo, yet again for another film festival—AFFF. The typeface is Amplitude, set in black, designed by the prolific Christian Schwartz.

Too bad I can’t find out who made the logo.

Jetset’s Amsterdam Film Night

Experimental Jetset is an Amsterdam-based (lucky bastards!) design studio. Among many cool projets (again, swiss style lives on), they developed the identity of The Amsterdam Film Night festival:

The following year, for the second edition of the movie festival, they made this poster, one of my favourites (also featured in the documentary Helvetica):

I really like the simplicity of the black&white visual identity:

Here are some beautiful badges, they’re from another project they did, but they’d sure go well with the rest of the AFN identity:

Quick tips, apple ones

I switched to Apple last july after working dual, mac at office, pc at home for two years. I wanted portability and the best OS on the market, so an MBP with the new Leopard was the best choice. Unlike many creatives I don’t blog about Apple because I’m not a zealot—or maybe because of my inborn stubborness in doing the opposite of what the majority of my kin is doing :) Besides, my colleague Kit is a lot more well informed than me, not to mention passionate — his MBP review is quite thorough.

But since I’ll always have geek tendencies, I do enjoy shortcuts, tips and especially hidden stuff the Apple guys like to put into their machines. Here’s two of them:

1. Getting fast to the Video panel in System Prefs — especially useful when using a second monitor, there is a strange bug that f*cks up the colour profile usually after the screensaver sets on, making the colours on your MBP screen bluer. Everything returns to normal when you open the Display System Pref panel, but that’s some annoying clicks away unless you press Alt(Option)+F2 (the brightness button — works just as well with F1). The same type of shortcut works for other panels, like the Sound, Expose, Spaces when pressing Alt plus the corresponding F.

2. Zooming in Quick View — the classic Photoshop zoom, Cmd+/- works only in PDF files, so it’s quite annoying that such a great tool doesn’t let you zoom in while viewing jpg or other formats. Well, it does, all you have to do is to keep Alt pressed and you’ll have a magnifying glass to click your way through the picture. Alt+Shift for zooming out, of course.

I hope you’ll find them useful enough, I know I use them daily. And while I’m at it, don’t forget the fun Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+8, which inverts all the colours on your display (sometimes quite useful), a fun prank to play on less experienced users :D Cheers!

Büro für Gestaltung—finest german rigour

Büro für Gestaltung means literally ‘office for design’. Quite a simple and odd name, considering that their expertise ranges from graphic design to environmental design, product design and even bits of architecture. But in the end, design is a very generous word, so it can easily encompass all work made for the benefit of men.

Few design companies have such thorough websites presenting their work. One interesting thing is that most of the team are women, a not-so-often thing in the design world, especially considering the very rational approach the company has. Not to mention their youth, another thing to admire, since they’ve been involved in so many big projects, both for big companies and state/local officials. It’s a great thing to be able to see how their design solutions were developed as a whole.

Take your time, watch and learn—steal if you can ;)