Is the blog of New York based Illustrator / Pattern designer Julia Rotham. Here you will find a commentary on her lovely books, their design, production and content.

Thanks to young Emma for the link.

This is just a quick note, one of the greatest music resources I found over a year ago seems to have disappeared! In fact Epitonic has been gone for some weeks, but I was hoping they might be tweaking with it (or something!).

(Some related links!)

The site has had a very turbulent past when it comes to the design and usability. Originally it was a standard flat easy to use site that probably needed just a spring clean when it came to graphics. But for some reason they went overboard when it came to designing the site. It looked really fresh and new, but without doubt the most painful site to use. It just didn’t work usability wise! It goes to show that usability can make or break a site.

What happens to all the data they collated, does it just get deleted, surely they have information worth money? Surely somebody could take over the project? Why not sell or release the data? Even though it look like its gone (I so wish it wasn’t!!) it was such a resource and I wish they would bring it back.

Until that happens, you’ll find me using Last fm which I’m loving, but I prefer to have lots of resources rather than just one.

This YouTube user has a great selection of title sequences

Over the last couple of months I have been enjoying the ‘Thought for the week’ commentary from Johnson Banks studio, ‘a regular posting-place for our verbal and visual observations’. You might do to…

Daryl Cagle suggests the LA times has been transformed into a ransom note of sorts, with a massive 22 different typefaces above the fold on the front page following a recent re-design.

via Veer

I was going to write a post about Monocle a few weeks ago after a good impression of the first 20 pages, then I decided to wait and read the whole issue before commenting.

Unfortunately my reading stopped after that initial blast, not because it was no good, but because the week started and Monocle was put to one side never to picked up again, I am hoping writing this will spur me on to go back and finish what I started.

Anyway, my point is, If you get the occasional urge for a briefing on global affairs, business and international design stuff, and you would appreciate it presented with excellent typography, beautiful photography on nice
paper then Monocle could be very good for you, that is if you don’t mind parting with 5 pounds once a month. Plus you might like to know the world-wide-web property of the magazine offers the user suplimentary rich media content to the magazine’s lead editorial features.

Semi related to Dom’s earlier post, the Belfast chapter of Bearduary was founded in 2007 by University of Ulster lecturers Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson as part of the international Bearduary movement. They recently had a well publicised shave.. as covered on BB1 (…and Russian TV?)

Murphy and Persson (above) share a research interest in cultivating the return of the beard and are working together to spark a renewed interest in gentlemanly pursuits.

Chris Murphy pictured right, is one half of the design team working on the Glitch Book. The other half being Joe at Qubik Design.

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