pylon.tv is Live!

This job wasnt as straightforward as i imagined.Thanks to Simon and his precious minutes of CSS layout and div jiggery expertise, and Dimitre for his great little email obfuscator and several tests, i’ve learnt quite a bit about the limitations and joys of CSS only layouts, and workarounds for common issues from CSS Mastery by Andy Budd and some of that will be passed on to students.

Ive also developed the site on a mac, which is quite a thing to put yourself through if youve been using a PC since you were 9. in my head there are murmurings of a switch. Ive enjoyed it, especially as this machine i was working on frequently glitched (apparently thats pretty rare though)

anyway off to berlin in an hour, ill post hopefully from transmediale

Upsod returns to our screens with v13. For those who don’t know Upsod is the design diary of American Illustrator Dustin Amery Hostetler whose portfolio is here.

Spotting this has got me reminiscing about the good old times with Public Therapy, a typography diary of sorts my friend Nic put together when we were at University. Who is up for the PTO revvial then!?

For you to visit the ‘Alan Fletcher: Fifty years of graphic work (and play)’ exhibition at the design museum (final day is February 18th). I went on Saturday as part of my 2007 week on week off exhibition policy (poke brought me lots of gallery memberships for xmas, and therefore, to do their generosity justice said policy has been introduced).

I first became aware of Alan Fletcher through his book the ‘Art of looking Sideways’, but it is only since his death last year that I have begun to fully appreciate his infleunce and stature within design, so I went along in attempt to fill in the many gaps.

I’m glad I did, what a great story, from start to finish, his training, travelling, design philosophy and career development was fascinating. I loved the self promotional work created for his first company, Fletcher Forbes Gill, plus the moving card he produced to announce he was leaving New York and the typographic posters he did for a coffee shop and much much more - I left completely exhausted, partly due to my hangover, but mostly because of the lifetime of sheer skill I had just absorbed. If you can get there in time, go for it!

David-Curtis.com is a personal project I have been working on with my friend Dave in a rather disjointed fashion over the last few months, launching tonight just in time for his big exhibition in Paris. GO Dave!

It’s about 9 months since my excellent foundation course in CSS/XHTML with the Nunz, I hope my code is getting better, there will be bugs for sure, especially for those on a PC - Hopefully sort these asap. After the extermination of bugs, next on the list is to pick a really clever person’s brain to help me introduce a slick photo gallery for the products.

Earlier this week we had a visit from type design legend Bruno Maag. As you would expect Bruno gave us a very passionate presentation about the love of his life, typography…

We spoke about the appropriate use of Comic Sans (one of his colleges designed it), his foundry’s unique licence to customise linotype fonts for clients, his take on the present and future of screenbased type and lots of other stuff a multimedia design trained person only understands in places!

If you don’t know, Bruno founded the type foundry Dalton Maag with Angela Dalton 15 years ago. The foundry has been designing fonts and logo’s for a wide range of companies, The National Lottery, BMW, Telewest and Vodafone to name a few.

I came across their work a few years ago, and purchased a sample book they had for sale at the time - Bruno kindly gave us a pack of his latest sample publications, all very nicely designed by Mode.

I’m hoping with a bit of luck ‘Speak to me’ the foundry’s current touring exhibition will make it’s way east in the near future

Lots of women in bikini’s, sourced by a gentleman, zoom avaliable here.

Introducing Leo Kempf’s ‘Speech Bubble Discussion Table’.

Part of a collection of products that ‘take the ideas of Frank Gehry’s laminated conceptual furniture to a more average consumer - creating affordable, modern, practical, unique and environmentally friendly furniture.’

Jeff Han presents the produce of his multi-touch interaction research here. The presentation is nearly a year old, full of great stuff, stuff that perhaps contributed to the iPhone interface?

As I write this people seem to be linking more recent Jeff Han presentations, so go here and enjoy more skill demonstrations.

It’s clubpub tonight, which sees the launch of ‘Gif jockey 2.0′, ‘ A piece of software that seamlessly joins together loads of crap animated gifs’. It’s gonna be real special, the ultimate vj experience some might say.

As the pressure mounts to submit the ultimate animated gif, I timely stumble across the Animated Gif Appreciation Society. Perhaps this will inspire me, or will I just ‘borrow’ one of the showcased gif sequences?