Hasta La Ideas

Anthony Burrill, Buro Destruct, Karl Maier, Leandro Castelao, Noma Bar and Ryan Dixon are among the artists showing at More Is A Bore – a new exhibition of minimalist graphic art which opens later today at The Ship Of Fools gallery in The Hague, Netherlands. While it isn’t quite ready to open to the public just yet, we’ve got some snaps of the show taken this morning as the final pieces were being hung…

Two pieces of work by Büro Destruct on the wall and another work awaits hanging

Three works by Leandro Castelao – who will give a talk at the gallery space (see flyer below for details)

Anthony Burrills work in the show was produced when he was generating ideas for the cover of our April redesign issue

Above: two works by Karl Maier waiting to be hung. On the wall, two pieces by Noma Bar who will also giving a talk at the space during the show

Typographic Moustaches by UK artist Ryan Dixon

For the full list of exhibiting artists and all the info about the show (which runs until June 25) see the flyer below and visit ship-of-fools.nl/

Above: screen grab from McLaren Mercedes F1 site created by Work Club and Pirata which uses the @font-face css rule to use non system fonts in the site design. Read our blog post about it here

In our March 30th Anniversary issue, we asked a range of prominent figures, including practitioners, critics, curators and academics, to tell us about one thing, person, idea or place that they were excited about for the future… Regular CR contributor and writer of the ever enlightening magculture blog, Jeremy Leslie, chose to nominate and write about @font-face css rule that will allow designers of websites to specify and licence a chosen font to use in a website (rather than relying on the limited selection of standard system fonts) which is then downloaded from the website’s server for the end user to see – in the same way that graphics and Flash movies appear on a website.

“Not only does this provide a broader choice of font,” wrote Leslie, “but also gives better control of the font, with properties such as letter-spacing – long available to print designers – now specifiable for the web.”

Various type foundries have been creating their own technolgies to make their faces available to designers in this way and yesterday type behemoth Monotype Imaging announced the public beta of Font.com Web Fonts – which looks to make a whopping 2,000 fonts available for web designers to try out for free and then licence and use accordingly if they so wish in the building / designing of a website.

We put a few questions to the guys at Monotype to find out a little more about Web Fonts and how it works:

CR: What is Web Fonts?

Monotype: It’s a hosted service that, for the first time, enables designers to choose web enabled fonts from the Monotype, Linotype and ITC typeface libraries, in addition to third-party foundries, for website design. Designers can leverage important designs such as the Helvetica typeface, which is exclusive to Monotype Imaging’s web collection. When the service launches commercially later this year, additional world-class designs will be available, including the Frutiger  and Univers typefaces, which are  also widely used for brand and corporate identities.

Web Fonts are fonts that are specially formatted for use on the world wide web. Historically, different browsers have varied in their support for web fonts and only consistently supported system fonts which are resident on client machines could be relied upon.  This gave designers no choice but to design using only a handful of fonts.  Also, fonts are licensed by the foundry according to usage. Foundries have not been comfortable with licensing standard TrueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf) formatted fonts because there was no protection from piracy in this format. More recently the Embedded OpenType format and now Web Open Font Format offered more security but these formats do not necessarily make it simple to support typography across all browsers. Fonts.com Web Fonts overcomes these inconsistencies for web designers to make it fast and easy to select fonts and add them to a style sheet that will then work across all key browsers.

CR: How does it work?

Monotype: To use Fonts.com Web Fonts you just

1. Create a project and assign the domains you want to use the web fonts on,

2. Choose the fonts you want – you can see samples of them first in different sizes, colours etc…

3. Assign the fonts to the appropriate CSS headers in your webpage code

4. Fonts.com Web Fonts generates a string of code to add after your tag

CR: Why is this good news for designers?

Monotype: Fonts.com Web Fonts makes it fast and easy to access thousands of fonts used in every day design.

Now designers can take typography used in their print-based designs online for a more consistent brand approach; websites can be differentiated as clearly as print media.

All browsers (including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera platforms) are catered for making site design simpler.

When Monotype Imaging’s solution launches commercially, fonts will be licensed on a subscription basis so you don’t need to worry about licensing individual fonts. There will also be an entry-level tier that will enable users to enjoy more than 2,000 fonts at no charge. Participants in Monotype Imaging’s public beta will be able to use more than 2,000 fonts for free even after the public beta concludes, since these fonts will constitute the free tier. Alternatively, participants may upgrade to a higher level of service when the solution launches commercially later this year.

Websites can become lighter and more effective as fonts can be used for headers instead of graphics improving speed, searchability and accessibility.

Pages can be updated quickly using the service, no need to re-code.

Fonts are secure, and delivered fast over a cloud-based global distribution network with world-class back up.

Designers can try out the 2000 free-tier fonts in prototypes free of charge.

CR: How can CR readers find out more / get involved with the beta version?

Monotype: Your readers can view more about the service and sign up to beta test at webfonts.fonts.com. Here at Monotype Imaging, we’re keen to receive feedback from beta testers who will continue to receive access to the free service fonts after the launch.

It’s a striking street graphic for sure. But at the expense of provocation, its message about the erosion of civil liberties doesn’t quite add up…

The image, created by the Creative Orchestra for citizen-control.tv, forms part of a poster campaign and YouTube film based on the line “It all starts with ‘in the interest of your own safety…'”.

Playing on the notion of the authoritarian voice defending CCTV as being in the interests of individuals, when it’s more in the interests of the state, the idea seems to be that if we don’t wise up to the increased erosion of civil liberties, well, don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

The danger here, however, is that on the way to coming up with a simple, powerful design, the final message gets confused. So we have Hitler = bad and CCTV = bad as well. Both together = very bad i.e. we’re on the way to living in a Nazi state.

Except we’re not. While it’s staggering that the UK does currently have more CCTV cameras on our streets per citizen than any other country, isn’t it rather an insensitive jump to relate this aspect of civil rights concern with Hitler’s Germany?

But then, it’s just an image, right? Or wrong?

Creative Orchestra has also created this accompanying ad:

<object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iUxqMiBgQzk&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iUxqMiBgQzk&hl=en_US&fs=1&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed></object>

Imagery from the campaign can also be viewed and downloaded from citizen-control.tv.

For the Milan Design Week, Italian studio Carnovsky created a series of wallpapers that react to different coloured lights

The designs were created for the Milan shop of Janelli & Volpi, a noted Italian wallpaper brand. Each features overlapping illustrations, different elements of which are revealed depending on whether a blue, green or red light is shone upon them.

This one deals with the human body

Under red light

green light

blue light

This one features the animal kingdon

Photos by Luca Volpe

Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian’s G2 section, has just completed a redesign of Bloomberg Businessweek. Intriguingly, it includes some ideas that were originally intended for The Guardian’s redesign

The redesign comes following Bloomberg’s takeover of Business Week and the magazine’s renaming to reflect that fact. Turley relocated to New York to carry out the project, on which he worked with type designer Christian Schwartz, who also worked, with Paul Barnes, on The Guardian redesign in 2004 (Barnes also worked on CR’s recent redesign).

The original intention on The Guardian had been to use a recut of Helvetica as the main display face. Christian Schwartz and Berton Hasebe completed and expanded Max Miedinger’s Neue Haas Grotesk family (the original name for Helvetica), working from the original drawings to revive Miedinger’s italics and adding lighter weights. However, their work was eventually ditched in favour of The Guardian’s Egyptian typeface.

Turley has now used the Haas Grotesk revival throughout Bloomberg Businessweek.

His choice of serif face is another by-product of the Guardian redesign process – Publico. As Schwartz’s Commercial Type states on its website, “Although this family debuted in Mark Porter and Simon Esterson’s 2006 redesign of Portuguese daily Público, it originated in the design process that resulted in the Guardian collection.” As such, it was originally designed to work alongside the revived version of Helvetica then being planned for The Guardian.

Turley also brought in New York design studio Karlsson Wilker to create graphics for Businessweek. They worked alongside design director Cindy Hoffman.

The cover for the relaunch issue leads on the controversy at Goldman Sachs. Turley, however, had hoped to use a different design utilising this rather nice illustration from Al Murphy