This website for UniQlo Japan has an amazing mesmerising appeal to it. Everything is based around a 5 second beat, and it’s been executed beautifully — especially the type and colour. It’s one of hundreds of sites submitted for nomination for a D&AD award this year and I wouldn’t be surprised if it not only gets nominated but also wins an award. The list of submissions that have made it to the nomination round are announced this Friday so I guess we’ll find out soon.

Among other sites submitted for nomination was this campaign for the Nikon D40 SLR camera. Nikon wanted to demonstrate that the camera was easy enough for anyone to use so gave everyone in a small American town a camera and asked them to photograph their lives. The end result for the residents being an exhibition of everyone’s work, while for Nikon it served to create user-generated content for a digital campaign delivered as a website — along with user stories about how easy and fun the camera is to use.

Using real world materials to create type has always interested me. There’s something fascinating about the contrast between the direct meaning derived from the letterforms and the layers of meaning added by the words they create and material they’ve been created in. Here are a few examples I’ve come across recently.

The first is from a Japanese chocolate café, they make some really nice chocolate letters that would make a great gift. The actual design of the café and the signage and packaging is also really nice and quite different from the graphic design I explored while living in Japan.

The second is some conceptual branding work by Sarah France for a hair salon. I really like the exploration of using cut hair to form letters in the word mark.

The third is from one of my favourite designers, Sagmeister. It’s one of the words he created and photographed that formed some quotes he’d written about achieving happiness. It’s interesting to compare the two photos and their meanings, which are of the same object just at different angles – there is only one point where a word is formed but I wonder if the same meaning can exist at other angles.

Gotham (designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones) is a typeface I’ve been quite fascinated with lately. I’ve used it for the title graphic of this blog, and for a recent branding project I designed. It’s almost like a modern version of Eurostile (another of my favourites), with it’s geometric structure and dominate, almost industrial, presence. I quite enjoy the contrast created by applying the pink neon effect in the title graphic. It’s currently being used Barack Obama’s election campaign too. Swiss Dots recently released one of the 41 bonus features found on the Helvetica DVD, which is a disussion about this face by the designers.

And speaking of geeky documenty films, here’s a trailer for a new one about the cult of Apple Macs.. *scary*