inFORM est un dispositif impressionnant pensé par le groupe de recherche The Tangible Media Group permettant de créer une interaction du digital avec le monde environnant, permettant par exemple de faire bouger un objet à distance. Une création absolument époustouflante à découvrir en vidéo dans la suite.
Energy Touch is a concept that gets me into my wishful thinking mode. More like what if we had screenguards so advanced, that they harness the energy from our finger’s touch, every time we use a touchscreen device. Designer Chin-Po Tsai has his own explanation for his theory, which I am sure many of you would like to debate. The question is, can we see this happening in the future? Will we get to that stage at all?
Designer: Chin-Po Tsai
–
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(Power Touchscreen was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Related posts:
     |
Moving from a conceptual stage to an actual Pilot product, the Recon Jet – Heads-up Display (HUD) for Sports, is a highly anticipated wearable technology for cyclists and triathletes. Offering unobtrusive vision to the wearer, the glasses feature a microcomputer and high-resolution widescreen display. Specs on the beautifully designed glasses include a 1 GHz dual core processor, dedicated graphics, Wi-Fi, ANT+, Bluetooth, GPS, HD camera, and a comprehensive suite of sensors.
Designer: Recon Instruments
–
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(Ready-wear Eye Tech was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Related posts:
| |
L’artiste Ottmar Hörl a imaginé cette belle installation publique intitulée « 1000 Roses for Zweïbrücken », une ville située en Allemagne, connue pour être la ville aux roses. Près de 1000 roses rouges en plastique ont ainsi été étalées à intervalles réguliers pour un rendu superbe. Plus d’images dans la suite de l’article.
Sometime, somewhere, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the type designer slowly mutated into a ghost hunter. Faces of the past became sources of inspiration, some quite obvious, others forgotten; all acquired a mnemonic, almost “mediumnic” value. An aura.
It is heaven-sent, then, that the works of Jean Gabriel Bery were summoned and rescued from oblivion, thanks to the pioneering research work of Eric Kindel and Fred Smeijers on the history of stenciled letterforms. Those who visited the astonishing and stimulating exhibition the duo curated for the Catapult gallery in Antwerp last spring know what I’m talking about.
Bery was a stencil maker established in Paris in the 1780s, who sold a set of 400 brass plates to Benjamin Franklin. All these materials, along with a specimen sheet, are now archived in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. They possibly represent the only survival of this craftsman’s remarkable work, and an opening towards an unexpected revival.
In creating Bery Roman, Script, and Tuscan, Smeijers cautiously transferred the brass-made designs into an astute combination of delicacy and strength. Bery and Smeijers’s dialog, a bridge built over a 230-year gap, allows designers to use three distinctive and complementary display fonts that can bring an enlightening flavor to our digital epoch.
I’ve always considered grabbing attention to be the main point of the Grotesque genre. Where Humanists are built for immersion, Grotesques — with their tall x-heights, tight spacing, and narrow apertures — are clearly designed to cover as much surface as possible: Making an impact is the primary task. Trim walks the same path, but doesn’t stop until it reaches a dead end.
Göran Söderstrom uses a seemingly simple trick to great effect in his daring release. It’s all in the name: these letters from Sweden trim diagonals, notches, and rounds aggressively. The resulting word shapes are even more dense than in your standard grotesque, perfectly fitted for attention-craving, hard-hitting tabloid headlines. I can also see this typeface catching on in more artistic design work; its bold angularity reminds me of designer favorites like Kade and Replica.
The family’s latest addition, designed with Patch Hofweber, is Trim Poster. Optimized for compact headlines, the accents are fused with the base glyphs in a fashion worthy of the fancy diacritics Flickr pool. Sadly, the familiar Scandinavian diacritics seem to have received more attention than the rest — the cramped tilde especially suffers.
Trim’s selection of styles is broad, spanning six weights and a stencil cut. All but the stencil are also offered as manually hinted webfonts. The one-weight Trim Poster wisely comes in multiple widths, and also includes six different accent style variations. I wonder if there’s a set of matching italics under development? That would make this already versatile family even more useful.
In Cyrillic and Latin scripts, there are many letters which, when written, look the same. This is something that has intrigued many designers. While some might insist on enforced separation, Nikola Djurek and Marija Juza have reconciled the situation with ingenuity.
The concept of the Balkan Sans type system is quite simple — it represents equivalent letters from both scripts with a single glyph. For example, one tall letter exists when the form is the same in both scripts, while two short letters are stacked when the form differs between the Latin and Cyrillic. After all, these are not two different writing systems; these are two writing systems that overlap. (At least, in former Yugoslavia, it seems that way.)
Besides being entertaining, it’s a cultural thing.
Croatian and Serbian are very similar languages that, however, use different writing systems. According to the authors, this series of fonts “… demystifies, depoliticizes, and reconciles them for the sake of education, tolerance, and, above all, communication”. This is what particularly strikes me about Balkan Sans — it’s not just a self-contained set of refined forms. In a situation where differing scripts are used to separate people and communities, the type says: “Well, it is not all that different, is it?” Please note, this is not just a witty cultural poster, it’s a typeface! It can be reused to tell the story many times; it even demonstrates it every time you type with it.
The fonts are well encoded, so they can be used to translate Croatian Latin to Serbian Cyrillic and vice versa. Got an email in Serbian and can’t read Cyrillic? Change the font and, voilà! Now you can read it. This type system could become a great educational tool.
Now, if you had to stack letters from two scripts, which one would you put on top? To be fair, Djurek and Juza designed different styles: in one, the Cyrillic is on top, in the other, the Latin is uppermost. And, of course, Balkan designers do need a stencil version (just in case they ever need to design a warning notice for a minefield or, hopefully, something more peaceful).
Good wide display fonts are tough to come by. Period.
As a novice designer in the late 90’s, I was enamored with Microgramma. Maybe it was obsession with things Swiss, having a grandfather born in the country. Perhaps it was a natural inclination to wide type. Whatever the case, the release of Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Idlewild renewed an infatuation that has fallen dormant in the latter years of my career.
“For the longest time,” H&FJ writes in its description of Idlewild, “we’ve been reaching for a typeface that wasn’t there.” So I have I. Maybe that explains the dormancy. But what amazes me is how remarkably well the H&FJ crew pulled it off. Industrious, versatile, and instantly timeless. And that ‘G’, how it perfectly demonstrates the font’s subtle, restrained beauty!
Microgramma still enamors me a decade later, and I’m pretty certain I’ll say the same for Idlewild in the 2020s.
Tal Leming has built a career on his ability to deftly turn both the geometric (United, Bullet, and Mission + Control, for example) and the lettered (Burbank, Baxter, and Shag Lounge) into well-balanced typographic forms that are aesthetically rooted in their source material but function flawlessly in contemporary typographic applications.
This is a design challenge that appears simple at first glance, but it can be an exercise in hair-pulling frustration to get the letterforms sitting comfortably in both worlds while betraying neither. Timonium brings these two sides — the lettered and the geometric — together in a design that achieves lettered warmth within a geometric construction. The design takes a style that I associate with a certain French flavor (the high-contrast sans serifs of Deberny & Peignot, in particular) and with Optima (sans entasis), looks to that style in non-typographic traditions, and merges its influences in a design that doesn’t reference any certain era, but maintains a distinctive character.
Timonium’s capitals — including its small caps — give the family its geometric spine, while the warmth of the curves in the lowercase balances geometry with a letterer’s eye for softness. The italic, sloping at a sharp angle, amplifies the geometric side of the family, calling a good amount of attention to itself. All of this combines to give a designer working with Timonium a wide palette of typographic options.
As always with a typeface from Leming, everything in the family is drawn with deliberate attention to fit and finish, down to the asterisk. There are few typeface families that would work so easily on both a high-end cosmetic package and on a NASCAR race car; this is Leming’s achievement with Timonium.
Display type invites experimentation and creativity, and fortunately Dan Rhatigan and Ian Moore have poured a lot of that into Sodachrome. I find the concept very appealing and I believe it pushes the boundaries of conventional type design.
First, Sodachrome is a chromatic typeface. That in itself is nothing new, but one of its inherent qualities is the way the two layers depend on each other. Chromaticism here is not only a visual gadget, but a faculty without which the design would not function.
Sodachrome consists of two individual fonts — left and right. Set by themselves, those fonts are (to say the least) very odd looking. But when set on top of each other, the two halves produce a whole: a beefy, sturdy serif face.
This is the moment where color — and genius — come into play: overprinting the two fonts in different colors results in beautiful, three-colored words, and immediately the viewer experiences a bright, refreshing look — the look of Sodachrome!
As an added bonus, the letter-halves have been drawn in a way that the overprinted middle reveals a modern sans-serif design. This is awesome.
Use Sodachrome for all kinds of work. I imagine everything crazy going perfectly well with it. Especially when using manual techniques (e.g. screen printing, risography, etc.) in combination with bright colors, fabulous results are ensured.
Sodachrome was designed some years ago, but it was only in 2012 that it became part of House Industries’ Photo-Lettering service; and I think there is really no better place for it. Leveraging the power of Photo-Lettering, designers will not have to go out of their way to achieve dazzling, chromatic effects. The Sodachrome experience is clear from the beginning … and users rejoice.
Finally, the name is just perfect! Sodachrome! No other typeface could be named like that.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
