Violence, Ink, and Puppies

Plus a great deal on design books.

Ooh, a leap year!

Hello again. Have you recovered from the thrill of the leap day? A whole additional 24 hours. Exhilarating.
Here are some design bits that have caught my eye throughout the month:

Great design books 📚

(Ends 6th March 2024)

Humble Bundle is offering 24 design books for a charity donation of £14/$17. Skip this if you don’t like reading, but here are some of my highlights:

• Type on Screen
  In-depth study of the best digital typography practices.

• The Business of Design
  You can be creative and business-savvy.

• Extra Bold
  Pushes you to think beyond the safe harbour of Western visual design through the power of diversity and inclusion.

• Never Use Futura
  A light-hearted homage and history of a famous typeface. A good read even for non-designers.

Inky branding 🥋

© Shaun Hill

I discovered work by Shaun Hill, a designer based in South Africa. They frequently combine photography with more illustrative, inky, handmade elements. I particularly like how well it works for MIDORIYA, a Jiu-Jitsu apparel brand that seems to have now disappeared.

There’s a wonderful amount of motion — your art teacher would talk about how many diagonals there are. Combined with the high contrast and busy pattern, it really captures the visceral feeling of martial arts.

Browse by colour? 🌈

70% of YouTube traffic comes from ‘recommendations’¹ or the algorithm. However, some YouTube Premium mobile users have been presented with a slightly different route…

Oh. That’s different.

Sorting videos based on colour isn’t really what I saw coming. I don’t think I’ve ever opened YouTube with the intention of watching “Something green, I guess” for 10 minutes. I’d love to see the analytics data for this.

SORA blew everyone’s minds 🎥

☝️ These doggos are not real doggos.

OpenAI announced SORA, their new AI text-to-video model. This has received widespread coverage, but if you haven’t seen any of their example videos, prepare for amazement/existential horror.

Community-powered alternatives 🗺️

You’ve probably heard of Geoguessr — you’re plopped somewhere in the world and use Google Street View to find your location. But it’s no longer free to play due to increased costs.

Geotastic, however, is a free alternative that is community funded and functionally identical. I really enjoyed the feature that shows your costs as an individual on the platform against your (optional) donations👇

If you’ve donated more than your costs, you can turn off all ads.

Give it a go, and enjoy trying to work out which country you’re in from the design of the roadsigns. If only there was an article you could read about that…

Highway Hieroglyphics: The Type Behind the Signs

hELveTiCa 🧽

Original post by Reddit user /u/Tjhub007

Finally, and still on the theme of signs, some typography fun. This stencil slipped while applying the name to one of Melbourne’s underground stations, creating a very nouveau-looking Helvetica Bold. Is it weird that I kinda like it?

Conclusion

Thanks for reading — did you find something interesting in that selection?

Personally, I’ll be picking up the book bundle. Ellen Lupton books are typography knowledge goldmines. The wonky Helvetica is also pretty fun — it reminds me of the obligatory distorted type featured in every design student’s mood boards at the start of a project. Fond memories.

Best wishes,
Tom 🐢

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1. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-controls/report/executive-summary/