Fontplore Showreel from Mphasize on Vimeo.

This futuristic Fontplore is an interactive application designed for searching and exploring font databases. Fontplore helps you to easily find the right typeface for your project in a collection of several thousands of fonts. It lets you browse, preview, compare and print the fonts you are interested in.
And the clou is: It does all that on an interactive table, using tangible objects to navigate and control actions, so the workflow is easy to understand.

Below: Specimens of types by Erik Spiekermann.

“With its durable vinyl outer layer and plush, quilted-cotton sleeve, the iMaxi helps keep your iPad clean and dry. Plus, the iMaxi’s Velcro-latched, advanced wing design wraps snugly around your device, so your iPad always stays where it should. Best of all, it shields it from all those unsightly and embarrassing data leaks that would make any motherboard worry!” -Hip Handmaids.

]]> http://popyoudesign.com/blog/archives/1113/feed http://popyoudesign.com/blog/archives/1048 http://popyoudesign.com/blog/archives/1048#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:44:37 +0000 popyoudesign http://popyoudesign.com/blog/?p=1048

I am thrilled to have my friend that is excited to join me here on Design in Society. We have been wanting to do something collaborative and that conversation has been way over due. So I asked her today to join me here to write blog posts with me and maybe we can stir up that conversation with couple of beers. While Maggie’s website is being updated, check out what’s she doing through twitter or add her as a friend on facebook.

Ninja, Yo-Landi and DJ Hi-Tek made all their music and music videos on their own with the help of some good friends. They have been bubbling under the media radar for a while, and it finally exploded on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook after the first week of February, when boing boing first blogged about them.

Die Antwoord claimed that they put a Puma logo on their website because Puma gives them free clothes and free shoes (Puma is not giving them money, way to go Puma!). Jagermeister also came across with some freebies — they are probably pouring shots in their mouths as we speak. But Die Antwoord is certainly putting these two well-known brands on the next level.

Die Antwoord began to get noticed after they launched their musik on wat ky kjy, the legendary Zef Afrikaans blog that became Die Antwoord’s home. Google helped, too. Their music videos are streamed by YouTube, and there’s a lot of discussion on Facebook and Twitter or bloggers and news websites.

Live Nation, the biggest events company in the world, wants to make a deal with them. There’s an international bidding war going on at the moment over who’s going to represent them. EMI Worldwide and Interscope Universal are bidding for their soul.

This is truly the music sensation of 2010 and I always love materials from the early stage of a musician’s career, when it’s fresh and it’s popping!

Check out one more video when they were jamming on the taxi:

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

That idea inspired me for this experiment. I created a page filled with the word “typography” in Chinese. Although I can read in Chinese, the crowded page soon becomes unrecognizable, and the negative spaces start screaming loudly when they become forms.

After a long stare, I started seeing shapes that are recognizable again within the negative and positive spaces. That’s where I started punching out some of the shapes into an alphabet. I found the alphabet “A” at first — then, one after the other, soon I had the entire alphabet made out of these unrecognizable Chinese characters.

The alphabet cannot be recognized by itself without the other shapes that give form to the individual letters. Then I matched the discovered letters with some images that I found.

I love to compare the relationship between the unrecognizable shape of an alphabet letter with an out-of-context image. The relationship or the language between the two speak differently to different people. By combining the two forms together, an entire new form is being created.

I am not yet done making these forms into something transparent. So stay tuned for more of the form-making process. In the meantime, check out an experimental type design I created in the past. view

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

After the final message has been collected on Sunday 23 August 2009, all the messages will be collected and exported as a text file and sent to NASA”S Jet Propulsion laboratory in California, where it will be encoded into binary code, packaged and tested before transmission.

The signal will reach the solar system of Gliese 581 around December 2029. Any response will need to travel the same way back, so unless Gliesans have improved communication technologies, the soonest we could hope to receive an answer would be in 42 years around 2051.

The chances are we will be hollering the question into the vastness of the universe for centuries to come. But that doesn’t mean that such cosmic calls are doomed to failure. In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake formulated an equation that predicted the likelihood of detecting other intelligent civilisations in our galaxy. In 2007, Drake told NASA’sAstrobiology Magazine that he estimates we’ll eventually find existing intelligent life in “one in ten million stars.”

Do you have a message to send? go to hellofromearth.net