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*

TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference held in California. It features several lectures by industry leaders within those fields. They publish shorter, edited versions of the lectures on their site. One of which is Sagmeister’s happiness lecture. I saw Sagmeister give a 2 hour lecture in 2004 in Melbourne, very similar to the one he gave at TED. It ended up being quite an inspirational lecture, reflecting on his life and how he finds happiness in his work. He’s also written an essay that explains why design isn’t just about trying to influence people to spend money on things they don’t need, it’s a great essay. Some other lectures I found interesting were David Kelley, John Maeda and Paul Bennett.

Some really nice online campaign work for Bjorn Borg and Jockey has recently been launched. Advertising that features humour in this was always seems to work well.

Large file sizes requiring high speed internet connections are becoming increasingly acceptable, which means a lot more video is finding it’s way online. This allows a strong narrative to be developed and an end user experience that can be much more engaging. At the same time, it’s interesting to note how this is affecting the design and production of online work. A few years ago a small agency had the ability to produce online work with a small team of designers. Today online work requires a lot more specialists such as video producers, motion graphics designers, interface designers, information architecture experts and flash developers etc. Something only a large agency can afford to have on a permanent basis, means smaller agencies need to hire freelancers and therefore increase their production costs.

In some ways this is almost like the rise of the industrial age, (though perhaps not as dramatic!) where the craftsman, who once was responsible for the whole design process from planning to production suddenly found factories and machines could produce their designs quicker and cheaper, but also meant they lost responsibility for the quality of production. So while there is an opportunity to create much better, and more engaging work, having more people involved also opens up more possibilities for things to go wrong and in the end for the final product to suffer.