Feminine/Masculine Cliche

Source: Typeforce / The Annual Chicago Show of Emerging Typographic Allstars Feb/March 2010 issue

This is a customized screenprint poster called Feminine/Masculine, created by Delicious Design League's Billy Baumann and Jason Teegarden-Downs.  What Billy and Jason wanted to do was try and take away the social conventions and norms of what it means to be feminine and masculine, possibly changing the ideal of what it means to be male and female.  I think that this definitely succeeds because we normally wouldn't associate femininity with words like strong and bold and masculine with elegance and gentleness (both typefaces  showcased just that).  It's definitely on a different take and makes me wonder about what the definition of femininity and masculinity does exactly mean (especially in today's society).

Victoria Has Many Secrets

Even though catalogs come in the mail all the time, from the stores you've never heard of to Lands 'End, I always look forward to the Victoria's Secret catalogs.  Not just because of looking at the clothes, but I love seeing their design work.  I can't identify this type, so I assume it's handmade just for this particular catalog.  I love how it's chic in it's own way, portraying the essence of their brand and the catalog mailed to me at my house.  Though it's not the most perfectly written font without a baseline, this is a reason why I like it; because it looks someone's handwriting and people don't normally have a baseline for it.  Keep an eye out for Victoria's Secret because they definitely have great designs (and clothes!).

The King of Social Networking Sites

Source

This is the Facebook logo/wordmark, which I believe definitely creates an impact.  You know what it is from just looking at the wordmark with it's cleanliness and simplicity.  I would definitely aspire to create a logo/wordmark like this for our next project.  The font they use has been hard to identify, but many are saying that Klavika is the font of their choice (modifying the font a bit).

Research - Project 2

Source - LogoLounge: 2000 International Identities by Leading Designers by Catharine Fisher and Bill Gardner

For this particular logo, it was designed for Feed Magazine, which is very well-executed in the logo!  The idea of having the two e's connect in that way represents the idea of the two e's feeding off of each other.  It's also a very simple san-serif font and nothing else needs to be incorporated into it.

Source

This logo is for the word Wacky, in which is actually very cool!  I love how it's another very simple san-serif logo and it has the W and the A together!  It's so clever, yet very readable as to the meaning.

Source

This is a really cool design that I found that would be great for anything!  The one item that stuck out to me was how the smart quotes look like two hands giving the thumbs up.  It would be great especially for movie ratings!

Walk This Way!

Photo Credit

It seems like all of the good font inspirations for me come from CD covers.  I believe that a lot of the CD covers actually bring a lot of the music to life (usually better than a book cover).  But this is a CD of The White Tie Affair's called Walk This Way.  I think it brings together the name of the group (especially when taking the T and making it look like a tie).  It sort of brings the idea of Project 2, in which we're only supposed to use type which made me think of this CD.  The font they use is Pontif, which I had never heard of until I looked it up.  Though it's a serif font, I feel that if they would've gone with a san-serif or a different font, it wouldn't feel the same.  So keep exercisin' and rockin' out in those Converse shoes to this CD!

Strong but Sweet

This is Stacie Orrico's self-titled "debut" CD (and I put debut in quotes because it's the only CD she had ever produced).  She is a very good singer, and I believe the type choice on the CD conveyed her tough, but sweet side that came out in her songs.  The main typeface was custom-made, which also makes it extra special.  What also drew me was how there was a different 's' in a lighter pink (which hopefully you can see -- it's lighter in the picture).  I think the overall concept would be also great for a logo design, bringing both names together.  Simple is always better than complicated designs.

Definitely Not My Type

Splash Page

This is a website that I found from Smashing Magazine, which is one of my favorite resources for everything.  It had this website, which is entitled It's Not My Type.  This website is all about inspirations and uses of different typefaces in different designs.  I think the website is really cool, the content in the awning only being movable.  But it's not about the functionality of the website like I did for last semester.  I think the heading font, Clarendon Black, fits perfectly with the web safe text font, Palatino.

Splash Page 2

Also, the Atomic font in the first blog looks very digital and is custom created by Slovakian designer.  Click here to the link to the blog article.

Inside Page

The only bad part about the Palatino font on this website is, especially on this page, the text isn't easily readable since it looks pixelated.