STEFAN SAGMEISTER | The Happy Film

Watching designer Stefan Sagmeister’s autobiographical documentary, The Happy Film, will not leave you significantly happier afterward. But the fast-paced, painfully honest, stressfully contemplative movie will trigger rushes of insight, empathy and voyeuristic pleasure.

In the film, Sagmeister—the prominent graphic designer known for environmental performance typography and whose work appears in museums like MoMA—sets out to analyze, define and capture happiness as a concept, emotion and commodity. He spends most of the film showing how interpersonal minefields, notably his inability to find and stay in love, impede his ability to achieve happiness. From this discordance emerges a highly entertaining confessional that is as much a reality show as experimental art piece.

The Happy Film started as part of a conceptual design project that includes “The Happy Show,” a museum-exhibition-cum-carnival-midway. Its global tour has attracted more than 350,000 people. But while the exhibit encourages visitors to reflect on their own happiness, the film is infinitely more personal; documentary filmmakers often are characters in their own films, but they’re rarely so candid. Sagmeister’s project captures his signature chutzpah, sure, but hinges on an intensely personal search for love and happiness that provides poignant insights into his struggle to make lasting personal commitments beyond his professional life.

Sagmeister derives happiness from upending the status quo with his work. He once gained 30 pounds in one month to document, through daily photographs, what a strict diet of junk food does to an otherwise fit body. In one of his more eccentric pieces, Sagmeister used a razor blade to carve details from one of his many design lectures into his torso, and used a photograph of his scabs in a promotional poster. The Happy Film is like carving into his inner self. He is both investigator and the investigated. And though the movie meant to be autobiographical, “I did not see a lot of things coming during the shooting,” Sagmeister says.

The Happy Film is divided into three sections, each following Sagmeister for one month as he pursues happiness along one of three paths: Meditation. Talk therapy. Prescription drug therapy. The beautifully photographed meditation scenes are in large part set in Bali, where, after various failed attempts to reach nirvana, Sagmeister falls in love with a former student. Happiness at last. But the relationship quickly deteriorates and sadness sets in. The therapy section records him in sessions with a psychotherapist who questions his ability to commit, despite his recently ending an 11-year relationship. This leads him to renew a relationship with a long-lost love in Austria. That relationship fails too, and depression ensues. In the drug section, a pharmacological therapist monitors his intake of mood elevators. “I love pharma,” he notes in the film. Ignoring a warning against making radical life changes until his meds stabilize, Sagmeister immediately falls for and becomes engaged to a woman who allows him to document the rise and fall of their relationship. Those scenes are among the film’s most emotionally taxing and uncomfortable to watch. Happiness is when love hits hard and sadness, invariably, follows.

THE FONTS OF FASHION | Helvetica and Futura

All designers use pretty much the same font families.

Using, the particularly favoured, Helvetica and Futura font variations, high fashion designers and brands stumbled on a way to make clear visual statements.

The preference for Helvetica and Futura is all over the ad industry, and with good reason—they’re clean, readable, and versatile. Saint Laurent’s logo in Helvetica Neue Bold, for example, looks as sophisticated stitched on the side of a purse as it does on a jacket label. Nike’s oblique Futura logo validates the quality of a pair of running shoes and authenticates a basic hoodie as a classic.

While the minimal Chanel emblem makes as much sense on the perfume bottle in your grandma’s bathroom as it does the backpack of a brand-obsessed tween.

If you want your fashion label to have longevity and versatility, give it some classic type.

NEUTRA HOUSE NUMBERS | Honoring an Architectural Icon

When you love clean, modern design it applies to every part of your life, including typography. Neutra, a very popular typeface from the 1930s, was specified by the famous mid-century architect Richard Neutra for his projects and is still favored, especially in metal, by many architects of new contemporary homes. 

Designed by Christian Schwartz for House Industries, the typeface family Neutraface "the most typographically complete geometric sans serif family ever", was based on Richard Neutra's architecture and design principles. Richard Neutra — One of the most influential architects of the twentieth century helped define modernism in Southern California and around the world.  His notable projects include the Kaufmann House (1947) in Palm Springs, the Lovell Health House (1929) in Los Angeles and the Kronish House (1955) in Beverly Hills, among others. 

The Neutra collection is open and unobtrusive....offering functionality and timeless California aesthetic. You don’t need to own a Neutra home in order to enjoy a piece of Neutra history.

ED BENGUIAT | Drummer, Designer, Typographic Icon

The man who designed ITC Benguiat is considered one of the type industry’s greats – and one of its longest-living. Ed Benguiat has created more than 600 fonts, and has designed some of the most iconic logos and movie titles of the 20th century.

By his own admission, Benguiat’s career has been one made of happy accidents. He says that the only thing he didn’t teach during his 50-year career at the School of Visual Arts was a course in being in the right place at the right time.

Benguiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The kind of kid who “was a smart ass and thought I could do anything”. He had a career as a jazz percussionist, playing the drums in the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, after his father set him up with a drum kit when he was 10 and he took lessons.

Benguiat was interested in art from boyhood. It was a straightforward ambition that landed him in art school: “I didn’t know anything about it I just wanted to paint naked ladies.” It didn’t entirely work out: “My instructor said I better hurry up and get out of the art industry before I destroyed it because I couldn’t draw anything.” But, Benguiat realised, “if it was technical, I could draw it.”

The female form, however, dominated his first job. “Everybody laughs at this, but it’s true: I had to remove the cleavage from photographs of women.” Benguiat worked as a paste-up boy for magazines such as Photoplay, Movie Life and Movie Stars Parade. Under the draconian censorship laws of the Motion Picture Production Code, known in the industry as the Hays Code after its president, “licentious or suggestive nudity” and “excessive or lustful kissing” had to be removed from films - and film magazines.

“The magazines weren’t permitted to show the cleavage of a woman because Hay’s Office said it wasn’t proper,” Benguiat adds. “So I’d use an airbrush and re-touch it, or use a doily or something. I did that for two years.”

Typography had been in Benguiat’s family. His father was the display director of Bloomingdales, so he had access to his brushes and pens. After designing a logo for a company, he was asked to create an alphabet to match. It was his first foray into graphic design and corporate identity.

It was when Benguiat started working as a designer for Photo-Lettering, Inc - known in the trade as PLINC, a company that set headlines and advertising text - that he first started to see that royalty penny drop: “They sold the alphabets as words from the fonts I did, so that was the beginning for me."

Benguiat didn’t stop at fonts and typefaces. He made whole new fonts for films such as The Planet of the Apes and Super Fly and David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks. He was nearly involved in the film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s novels, but production companies and the road accident which nearly left the author an amputee got in the way.

But, much as it was a logo that got him into the industry, it is logos which remain Benguiat’s most-prized work. “I’ve done the logo for The New York Times, I’ve done the logo for New York Magazine. For Sports Illustrated. The logo for Ford Cars.

“They’re my keepsakes in my mind so when I walk down the street I can say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ You know. I’m very proud of it. When I see the New York Times on a building on a wall, I can look up and say, ‘That’s my logo.’ So that’s my contribution to society.”

Benguiat continues to work, designing the odd logo, “sketching and drawing and doodling. But I don’t look forward to it because it’s a lot of work.” He prefers to keep up a weekly lunch date with the rest of graphic design’s old guard. Benguiat’s aware of the impact of the internet on typeface design, but, as someone who innovated the industry himself, doesn’t appear fearful.

HOMELESSFONTS | Arrels Foundation

Homelessfonts is an Arrels Foundation initiative which consists of creating a collection of typefaces based on the handwriting of homeless. The idea behind these typefaces is for people and brands to use them in their announcements. All profits are intended to help the 1400 people supported by the Arrels Foundation.

http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/

TRAINSPOTTING’S FILM POSTER CAMPAIGN | 21 years on

With Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting sequel T2 Trainspotting to be released in the UK this Friday and in the U.S. March 17...The designers of its iconic, often copied, Helvetica-sporting posters, Mark Blamire and Rob O’Connor, talk about working on the project and how they arrived at the designs for the film’s poster campaign with Creative Review.

CR | The posters for Trainspotting were so unusual when they came out especially the campaign around the characters with one poster introducing each one. What was your inspiration for this? How did the campaign come about?

Rob O’Connor | Irving Welsh’s novel, from which the movie had been adapted, was written from the multiple points of view and in the voices of each of the main characters, and we felt it was important to stress the individuality of those personalities.

Mark Blamire | We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned. 

We were working on the main poster – and struggling – and also the individual character posters, which came together almost instantly, and seemed to be the only solution worthy of presenting to the client. We had also taken a literary device from the Trainspotting book by Irvine Welsh to introduce the numbering system [in the book it originally starts at number 63 which was confusing for the poster so it got changed to #1 though to #5].

RO’C | The numbering used throughout the campaign was a nod to the recurring device used by Welsh in the Trainspotting book – Junk Dilemma #63 – and so on.

MB | It was at this stage that we threw away the idea of the group shot and tried to make a combined version of the individual shots to make the main poster using a grid and boxes to contain each character. We introduced the device of a train station departure board (actually inspired by a British airport’s brand identity guidelines from the 70’s which used a yellowy orange colour for its cover) and added the caption ‘this film is expected to arrive 02:96 –  to continue the theme of the departure board. 

CR | The colour scheme – the black and white photography on white ground with bold orange Helvetica. It’s so strong. How did you settle on that? What was the thinking?

RO’C | Black and white photography, we felt, could be powerful without glamorising what we felt was a tricky subject – what with the abuse of heroin being at the forefront of the storyline. It has a gritty realism, and a Richard Avedon credibility and the slight wide angle lens captured a little humour in the characters. However, it needed an accent colour to make the campaign more memorable – orange was a strong option for this without opting for the average client’s ubiquitous favourite colour, red. The choice of orange referred subliminally to warning messages and the visual communication of British Rail – high visibility jackets, signage and so on. The arrow also referred to wayfinding signage. The clear, direct, information-style typography referred to the same visual language, as well as that of warnings found on pharmaceutical packaging.

CR | PolyGram gave you some initial ideas in the form of an image from the Backbeat film – but how much freedom did they give you once you got stuck into the job?

MB | Trainspotting was Danny Boyle’s second film and all the actors were relatively unknown, so the film didn’t come with any of the contractual baggage that you usually have to deal with when doing a film poster. The other great thing about how it all came about is we were given access to the actors and we were briefed about the poster when the film was still being made. Usually by the time the poster designer gets involved, the film is in the can and the actors have all gone home, and you are delivered a folder full of production stills which you have to try and work your magic on to make a good poster. So the film company had been very forward-thinking by giving us time to come up with a solution – and, crucially, the time with the actors to deliver that solution.

The other amazing thing which probably worked in our favour, was that we never got to see the finished film until after the poster was designed, approved and sent to print so again this was very liberating not to take on somebody else’s visual direction of how they wanted their film to look. I think if we had seen the film first and then started designing the poster, we would probably have never have gone for the clean approach that we inevitably took for the final poster.

WATCH | T2 Trainspotting Trailer

ROADLINERS | Uncelebrated Typographers of the Road

Roadliners is a film about inspiration and craft, and the uncelebrated typographers of the road. Filmmakers Pretend Lovers documented a day in the life of Glasgow roadliner Thomas ‘Tam’ Lilley - whose work embodies honesty, beauty, humility, and intelligence.

WATCH | https://vimeo.com/162399433

KÖLN-BONN AIRPORT | So Simple

In the middle of the two cities Cologne and Bonn is a small airport in the very west of Germany. Köln-Bonn Airport​ is ​making a name for itself with the unique and daring corporate design by Intégral Ruedi Baur. The idea was to position the airport as a friendly place where the majority of people will start into their holidays​.

The typeface used for this project is SimpleKölnBonn (or Simple-Airport), a customized version of Simple that Intégral Ruedi Baur had commissioned from Swiss design studio NORM for which a large set of special pictrograms was designed. Simple esthetics, casual atmosphere, and stroke thickness of fonts and icons match perfectly. The colorful background of the large icons are off-set from the thick black outline, leaving a “handmade” impression or one of sloppy printing.​

See more: http://www.koeln-bonn-airport.de/

IKEA | The Epic Swedish Fontroversy

After 50 years of using Futura, Ikea switched to the ubiquitous typeface Verdana. The Ikea catalogue is the third most printed book in the world, behind the Bible and Harry Potter.

IKEA abandoned its elegant typeface Futura in favor of the modern Verdana, and the switch had caused consternation not only among type geeks, but real people. Suddenly there was a font war.

People began talking about their love of one typeface and distrust of another. The arguments showcased the classic battleground of font warfare: new type, old type; a pure intention versus an Evil Empire; a supremely beautiful typeface battling against a supremely functional one.

The New York Times joked that it was “perhaps the biggest controversy to ever come out of Sweden.” Wikipedia wasted no time in accepting a new page called Verdanagate. It became the hot topic — a fontroversy — in Graphic Tweets. The passion some people displayed when it came to type seemed tribal, like the passion of sports fans.

The two fonts in question had much to do with this. Futura has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, with a pedigree linked to political art movements of the 1920s. Verdana, on the other hand, despite being a superb font, is linked to something modern and commonly reviled: Microsoft.

Verdana was created with the Web in mind; Microsoft designer Matthew Carter constructed the type for Internet Explorer and it’s now one of the most often-used fonts in the world.

Futura, on the other hand,  has a long and distinguished heritage. It was created by the German designer Paul Renner in the 1920s. Futura was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite typeface, used in the titles and advertising of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was the first font to land on the moon, on a plaque left there in 1969. Ikea has been using a refined version of the font for half a century, and has even commissioned the typeface to be drawn out in more weights and languages specifically for its brand. In fact, it’s called “Ikea Sans.”

The change allows the company to use a uniform font in all countries and to use the same font in print and on the Web. Yet it can’t be denied: Ikea is trading away a font with a tradition of modernist design, having elaborate associations, for one that has only one major association: with the computer screen. This is so offensive to many because it seems like a slap at the principles of design by a company that has been hailed for its adherence to them.

SWISSTED | International Typographic Style Posters

Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce, owner of Stereotype Design in New York City. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have (almost) nothing to do with one another, Mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, new wave, and indie rock show flyers into International Typographic Style posters. Each design is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk medium—not Helvetica. Every single one of these amazing shows actually happened!

http://www.swissted.com

KARLOFF | Convergence of Beauty and Ugliness

Karloff explores the idea of irreconcilable differences, how two extremes could be combined into a coherent whole.

Looking at the high-contrast Didone which are considered by many as some of the most beautiful typefaces in existence, and the eccentric ‘Italian’, from the middle of the Industrial Revolution, a reversed-contrast typeface which was designed to deliberately attract readers’ attention by defying their expectations. Strokes that were thick in classical models were thin, and vice versa — a dirty trick to create freakish letterforms. No other style in the history of typography has provoked such negative reactions as the Italian.

Karloff, the result of this project, connects the high contrast Modern type of Bodoni and Didot with the monstrous Italians. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms lies in a single design parameter, the contrast between the thick and the thin.

WOLFGANG WEINGART | “Enfant Terrible” of modern Swiss typography

At an early stage he broke with the established rules: He freed letters from the shackles of the design grid, spaced, underlined or reshaped them and reorganized type-setting. Later he mounted halftone films to form collages, anticipating the digital sampling of the post-modern “New Wave”. As a typography teacher at the Basel School of Design Weingart shaped several generations of designers from 1968 onwards. They came from throughout the world and helped him achieve international recognition. Weingart’s experimental design approach and the connection between analog and digital techniques that he called for are topical again today. His life’s work is shown for the first time in Switzerland and juxtaposed with works produced through his teaching activity.

SAUL BASS | A Life in Film & Design

Saul Bass is one of the most iconic and influential visual communicators of the 20th century — possibly the most famous graphic designer of all time — having broken out of the conformity of the 1950s to shape the aesthetic of generations of designers and animators with his bold and lively film title sequences and graphic design. His insights on creativity and advice on doing quality work are also a timeless treat for any creator. Yet no definitive monograph of his prolific, monumental work has existed — until now. Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design, designed by Bass’s daughter Jennifer and written by renowned design historian Pat Kirkham, is a 428-page volume featuring more than 1,400 of Bass’s illustrations, many never before published, that offer an unprecedented look at his legacy and the creative process behind his most celebrated posters, title sequences, and logo designs.

Having extended the remit of graphic design to include film titles, he went on to transform the genre. His best-known works include a series of unforgettable posters and title sequences for films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most memorable logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines, and Minolta.

“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” 

~ Saul Bass

Fe2O3 | Mad Scientist Makes an Alphabet Out of Ferrofluids

You can’t really read the Fe2O3 Glyphs alphabet. At least, not in the traditional, A-B-C parallel way you’d expect. Which is not to say the so-called typeface isn’t packed with meaning, because it is.

The Fe2O3 Glyphs alphabet is the collaborative creation of Craig Ward, an ex-ad man who creates unorthodox typefaces, and Linden Gledhill, a biochemist who develops cancer therapies by day and conducts otherworldly chemical experiments in his extracurricular hours. The two have worked together on a handful of projects over the years, the latest being this typeface made from ferromagnetic fluid and black ink.

Ferromagnetic fluid was developed at NASA in the 1960s. Researchers were trying to figure out how to move fuel into an engine without the help of gravity. They found that infusing the liquid with nanoscale ferromagnetic particles allowed them to manipulate it with a magnetic field. In his lab, Gledhill exploited this magnetic property by placing a tiny amount of ferrofluid between two glass plates and then spinning it around like a roundabout on a playscape. With every spin, the liquid would scatter into a unique, snowflake-like configuration.

Gledhill showed the inky patterns to Ward. “For me, for someone who worked with symbols and languages, they looked like carvings or hieroglyphics,” he says. Or, “the patterns were like when you look really closely at an insect’s eye.” Ward took Gledhill’s photographs of the different ferrofluid splatters, tidied them with editing software, and created ink letterpress stamps for 138 of them. The series is being printed on heavy stock paper and converted into a downloadable font. The print and digital forms are available through Ward and Gledhill’s Kickstarter campaign.

FONTS ARE BEAUTIFUL | Here’s Why You Should Care

“This is too Tom and Jerry, it needs to be more Don Draper”

Type is everywhere. Every print publication, website, movie, advertisement and public message involves the creation or selection of a fitting typeface. 

Typography is one of the easiest super important parts of civilization to take for granted. It seems like it just sprouted where it is, weed-like. But an enormous amount of effort goes into every letter—here’s a visual tour.

THE RIVER THAMES | And The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove A Man Mad And Sparked A 100-Year Mystery

No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London’s Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.

Over the course of more than a hundred illicit nightly trips, this man was committing a crime—against his partner, a man who owned half of what was being heaved into the Thames. This  founder of the legendary Doves Press and the mastermind of its typeface, was a man named T.J. Cobden Sanderson. He was taking the metal type that he had painstakingly overseen and dumping thousands of pounds of it into the river.

As a driving force in the Arts & Crafts movement in England, Cobden Sanderson championed traditional craftsmanship against the rising tides of industrialization. He was brilliant and creative, and he was concerned that the typeface he had designed would be sold to a mechanized printing press after his death by his business partner, with whom he was feuding.

So, night after night, he was making it his business to “bequeath” it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.

Almost exactly a century later, ex-military divers who work for the Port of London Authority were gearing up to descend into the Thames to look for the small metal bits—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them—that Cobden Sanderson had thrown overboard so many years ago. They were doing this at the personal expense of Robert Green, a designer who has spent years researching and recreating the lost typeface.

It’s not hard to imagine how crazy he must have seemed. A civilian offering to pay the city’s salvage divers to troll the depths of the muddy Thames, possibly for weeks, looking for tiny chunks of metal that were thrown there by a deranged designer more than a century ago? Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.

In the end, it only took them 20 minutes to find some. What they ended up uncovering over their two day dive was several hundred pieces of type.

Why would anyone search for it? What made it so special, so worth saving?

The Doves Press was a unique entity.  At the cusp of the modern age, Doves was founded to preserve a craft that went back centuries. It was also destined to fail, to end up as a historical eccentricity that died out just as the mechanized printing press sprang onto the scene. It valued one thing above all others: Doing things by hand, and doing them with utter devotion.

A-HOLES | A type book

A-holes was inspired by the amusing double entendre of the phrase “A-holes"—the technical term for the negative space in a letter A. Letters’ negative space might seem irrelevant, but it determines a lot about the character of a font. The shape of a hole can tell you if a font is a serif or sans serif, and it can tell you where elements like the stroke, crossbar or bowl are located. Holes are like a traceable pattern, giving you clues about a typeface without seeing it.

A-holes: A type book is a cheeky book that examines typography through the lens of negative space. 

View the book here http://csacreativestudio.com/book/sample.pdf

AMSTERDAMSE KRULLETTER | The Curly Letters Of Amsterdam

What are the origins of the curly letters that are often found adorning café windows across the city of Amsterdam? Who painted them? How old is the style and where were they designed? Do the letters represent an expression of the Amsterdam graphic tradition? 

Venice has stencil, London has Gill Sans and Amsterdam has what locals refer to as “Krulletters”—highly ornamented script painted with a brush, whose history is closely linked to Amsterdam’s traditional cafes and bars known as ‘brown bars’.

This Dutch tradition of letter design, which was overlooked until very recently. In1983 the trade magazine, ‘Grafisch Nederland’ published an issue including an article entitled ‘Kijk! Letters!’ (Look! Letters!), with pictures of several pub facades bearing the style along with an interview with Leo Beukeboom, one of the two people responsible for painting it. 

Leo Beukeboom was a talented and prolific sign painter, responsible for many of the best ‘Krulletter’ that still can be found in Amsterdam and neighbouring cities. He began painting them in 1967 when he was hired by the Heineken Brewery to be its in-house letter painter and to provide services to the pubs sponsored by the firm. But the history of the style goes back further than that. It was created by the sign painter Jan Willem Visser who from the early 50s to 1968 worked for the Amstel Brewery (the company was sold to Heineken that same year, almost at the same time as Leo Beukeboom began painting the style for Heineken).

It is now a concern that Amsterdam might be about to lose one of the most distinctive and beautiful elements of its graphic identity. Many of the window displays with the painted letters had been lost forever due to renovations of bars or changes in ownership, and there are no letter painters left in the area with the skills to paint the style properly.

In beautiful black and white, photographer Rob Becker documented all existing windows in Amsterdam, Maastricht and Gent in order to capture the ambience and context in which the curly script flourished forming a true artistic homage to the Amsterdam ‘brown’ cafés.

See more at: 

http://www.lecturisbooks.nl/en/webshop/de-amsterdamse-krulletter/62955#sthash.iTuQLSwg.dpuf

30 SEXIEST AMPERSANDS

The ampersand is every typography addict’s favourite ligature.

The shape of the character (&) predates the word ampersand by more than 1,500 years. In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means “and” they linked the e and t. Over time the combined letters came to signify the word “and” in English as well.

The word “ampersand” came many years later when “&” was actually part of the English alphabet. In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” Rather, the students said, “and per se and.” “Per se” means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand.

Here are some of the most unique, sexy and flamboyant ampersand designs found today.

http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/my-top-30-fonts-with-the-sexiest-ampersands

SONY MUSIC TIMELINE | Alex Fowkes

The Sony Music Timeline celebrates 125 years of musical history covering almost 150 square meters of wall space in Sony’s Derry Street offices. Using just CNC cut vinyl as the sole medium, 54 columns measuring over 2 meters tall cover feature nearly 1000 of Sony Music’s signed artists from 1887 to the present day. 

To commemorate this milestone, Sony Music has unveiled an amazing graphic installation documenting the highlights of the company’s 125-year history.  The project was a massive showcase of typography and illustration spearheaded by London-based designer and Creative Review’s  “One to Watch” 2011 winner – Alex Fowkes. The project is called Sony Music Timeline that runs throughout the central atrium of the company’s open plan Derry Street offices.

THE BEST AND WORST RÉSUMÉ FONTS | Using Times New Roman is the typeface equivalent of wearing sweatpants to an interview

A résumé, that piece of paper designed to reflect your best self, is one of the places where people still tend to use typeface to express themselves. It does not always go well, according to people who spend a lot of time looking at fonts.

​There is just one consensus winner: Helvetica.​ ​Helvetica is so no-fuss, it doesn’t really lean in one direction or another. It feels  professional, lighthearted, honest​, Helvetica is safe.

There are other options that, like Helvetica, are sans-serif. ​Do not choose a cheap imitator. If it’s me, I’m using Helvetica. Helvetica is beautiful.

Unless you’re applying for a design job, human resource professionals probably wouldn’t notice a knockoff font. But you would be on the wrong side of good taste. Could you live with that?

If you are very experienced, use Garamond to get your long rap sheet to fit into a single page. Garamond is legible and easy for the eye to follow​. ​It has all these quirks in it, so what that does is allow the eye to see where it should go.

There’s some controversy over the classic Times New Roman. It has been a system font for a long time. It’s been used and misused a lot. Using old faithful might send the wrong sign to your future boss, though. It’s ​saying that you didn’t put any thought into the typeface that you selected​…It’s like putting on sweatpants.

If you want something intentionally upscale, try Didot. It’s very tall, it’s a little fancy, and it’s a little feminine. It’s a good option for a fashion job, but not much else​. It’s like wearing the black dress to the ball. ​Would you wear a tuxedo to your job interview?

​Courier. You don’t have a typewriter, so don’t try to pretend that you have a typewriter. Don’t use Courier, I guess.

We probably do not even need to discuss this, but you should never use Comic Sans. Do not even look at Comic Sans. It should not be on your résumé unless you are applying to clown college.​ ​Don’t look for a Comic Sans-like font. Just let it go.