“World Comics is a non-profit organization in Finland and India that promotes the use of local comics as a means for social change. Grassroots Comics: A Development Communication Tool (PDF) is a free, downloadable manual for other non-governmental organizations about developing comics with community activists for use in their campaigns. See examples of grassroots comics in India and Africa, as well as videos and posters from grassroots comics workshops.”
How a page gets created
“Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. It provides a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at, one that anyone who’s ever designed a magazine will recognize.”
new iPhone nytimes GUI
Felix Sockwell: “Today the iPhone/ nytimes app releases. I’ve drawn GUI before but this one was special. For my news of choice and another chance to work with renowned web wizard Khoi Vinh and designer Caryn Tutino.”
Daily Heller by Steven Heller
The “new-improved, re-designed, wordier, picture-ier Daily Heller” now in blog format.
Getty Images + Flickr Make a Deal
“Getty and Flickr have just entered into an exclusive partnership to sell Flickr images.
Here’s how it’ll work:
- Getty editors will scour Flickr for images they deem saleable
- They’ll contact photographers whose images are selected to see if they want to make them available for licensing by Getty Images
- Assuming the photographer says yes, the images become available through Getty’s Flickr collection, and accessible to all their existing customers in the image licensing space
It remains to be seen how many images Getty will select, what deal they’ll offer photographers, and how they’ll select images. But people have been wondering what impact Flickr would have on the stock photography space for years, and this is a pretty interesting deal!”
Vernacular Typography Polaroids
From Douglas Wilson: “Polaroids taken of mostly hand-painted signs over the past four years all across the United States.”
SparkFonts: Sparklines as TrueType Fonts
“A key characteristic of the SparkMaker add-in for Microsoft Office is the typographical creation of sparklines by means of specifically crafted TrueType Fonts (TTF), the Bissantz SparkFonts.
The crux of SparkMaker is that each value of the input data is represented by one character which is formatted with an appropriate SparkFont. The SparkFonts embody bars, line segments, pies and other fractions of statistical diagrams. The concatenation of formatted characters results in a “textual image” of the sparkline. This way, you can work with the sparkline just like with normal text. For example, you can put it into table cells or insert it directly into your writings. Another quality is that the sparklines can continuously be scaled with the surrounding text, and printouts are razor-sharp.”
Studio Lettering at House Industries
“The first 200 Studio Lettering buyers will receive a free 64-page hardbound book! Add a refreshing dash of hand lettered flavor to your design with the Studio Lettering fonts, a collection of three charming script faces and a useful ornament font. These genuinely ‘smart’ fonts feature sophisticated OpenType engineering, robust character sets and extensive language support!”
Note from Ben Kiel, a former XPLANE intern currently clicking away at House:
Each of the fonts has thirteen different character sets based on the different ways cultures write (or on the different ways a lettering artist would write in a country). Easiest example is Europeans crossing the downstroke on a seven.
Thanks Ben!
Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
Matt Jones and Tom Coates, a presentation from the 2008 Web2.0Expo: “Today we’re going to… examine what we find a pretty fascinating emerging area — where ubiquitous technology is increasingly impacting our lives, which we call ‘personal informatics.’”
