Tag Archives: fonts

Friday Links: The Geek Zodiac & lifespan of Saul Bass logos

• The Minneapolis Egoist gives a nice shout out to the winner of this year’s WebChallenge.
• Transformers dance to Thriller.
• Why do apps from the same company look worse on Android?
• What Font bookmarklet quickly identifies web fonts.
• The average lifespan of a Saul Bass logo is 34 years. This is kind of awesome.
• Kind of like the Chinese Zodiac, but not really. The Geek Zodiac.
• Atari iPhone App for all your favorite Atari games.
• 235 Star Trek characters in pixel form on one poster.
• 10 awesomely geeky cakes. Inspiration for The Nerdery’s bakers.
• Since badass is one of The Nerdery’s favorite words, I couldn’t resist this: 25 reasons Katherine Hepburn was an American Badass.

Friday Links: Rokken with Dokken

• ’80s hair band Dokken catapults Norton onto viral video chart (Just so you know, Mark Malmberg bragged all week about how he saw Dokken live in the 80s)
• A Where the Wild Things Are fashion collection inspired by the movie.
• Twitter appears to raise $100 million
• If you follow any of coffee-drinking member of The Nerdery on Twitter, you’ve undoubtedly heard talk of our coffee-making skills (or lack thereof). Perhaps we should all take a gander at How to make the most of office coffee.
• Star Wars in concert
• Arial vs. Helvetica
• Twin Cities leading the way in digital marketing.
• How brands can build successful App strategy.
• This cracked me up: one man gets Oscar Mayer and Wonder Bread on the phone to figure out why there are 10 hotdogs in a pack and 8 buns in a pack.
• Hacked Big Mouth Billy bass recites tweets rather than sing “Take Me to the River.”

Friday Links: *Insert witty Kanye joke here*

• For Sale: Gene Roddenberry’s Original 1984 Macintosh
• Six fonts that piss people off.
• Interesting Play-Doh ads
• Things not to do while robbing a house: Use their computer to login to Facebook and forget to log out.
• Fighting dirty in Scrabble
• Yearbook Yourself iPhone App
• Best meme of the week: Book titles if they were written today.
• Holy buckets do I want this: Who killed Toby? Play The Office version of Clue to find out.
• A collection of 40 inspiring ambigrams. I didn’t know what one was either until I clicked. Pretty clever logos abound.
• 33 most deadly substances on Earth

And here are two links from Mark Malmberg:

• Minneapolis-based Pocket Hercules was recently named Advertising Age’s Small Agency of the Year for the Midwest. Runner-up was another local shop, Mono. (Dig their coolly minimalist Web sites, too.) As AdAge’s Jeremy Mullman notes, “With Pocket Hercules, Mono is evidence that Minneapolis is the new bastion of Midwest creativity.” See ya, Chicago.
• This one isn’t for the squeamish. Easy on the antiseptic, about small local agencies willing to take risks.

Friday Links: Star Wars Design Fails & IKEA font kerfuffle

• IKEA switches to Verdana, much teeth gnashing and garment rending follows.
• The Social History of the MP3, yes, yes a Pitchfork link, but it’s an interesting piece.
• Top 10 UX Myths
• John Scalzi’s Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design
• Confessions of a Comment Addict
• If famous graphic artists were web designers
• What Apple.com might look like in 1983 (it’s just a picture go look at it)
• Vital Tips for effective logo design

Friday Links: Brand tattoos, Helveticons, and sucky SyFy

• Ultimate brand loyalty: 80 tattoos of brand logos. As someone with a Superman tattoo, I shouldn’t judge. But come on! Dell? Marlboro Lights? Popeye’s? People are weird.
• The Online Publisher’s Associate releases new ad units, and they’re huge! Banner Ad designers rejoice?
• Does making it look pretty matter?
• SyFy sucks.
• First US TV Commercial shot on a Canon 5D Mark II.
• Not at all like Decepticons, Helveticons.
• Reimagining 1984 (the book and it’s cover, not the year).
• AdWeak for those who think Agency Spy just isn’t snarky enough.
• Lego’s Making History print ads.

Type so nice it had to be shared

35 truly original hand-made type experiments.

40 examples of beautiful typography in advertising

Now that you’re in the mood for typography, you can find out what font you’d be if you were a font.

Profiles in Nerdery: Sarah Hokuf, calls Buffy a nerd, not slain (yet)

• Astrological Sign: Libra – Should I tell you that or shouldn’t I? Hmmm. . .
• Time at the Nerdery: 5 months.
• Area of expertise: Eating. Oh, you mean my skills? Eating. Well in my past life I lived and breathed design, html, zen cart, and Joomla. Now I just talk about those things and you will usually see me in LinkedIn daily.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: Look at my profile in LinkedIn, it says “Director of Nerds.”
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: By myself, ecommerce. On the Sales side, websites with fun agencies.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have dogs and beer.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Name that font 2. Foods around the world 3. Movie Titles 4. Volleyball rules 5. Your cat 6. How many buttons in a jar. 7. Catch Phrase.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Really, she is a nerd.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That sentence is too long for my attention span.

Minn Post profiles fontographer Chank Diesel

This is a font called Hoosker Do that Chank Diesel created when he worked at Cake magazine. Remember Cake?

Font lovers rejoice! Today Minn Post has an excellent profile about Chank Diesel, Minnesota designer and font guru. In the article Jake Nassif talks to Diesel about typography, design, and art. I especially loved this quote from Diesel:

“I’ve always been about getting non-professionals involved. 95-percent of users are recreational, and I try to reach as many of them possible,” says the self-dubbed American Alphabetician. “I give people the tools to design things differently. If I’m lucky, they keep coming back.”

Read the full profile on Minn Post. Oh, and speaking of fonts you should watch the Font Conference video on College Humor. I can’t read or write about typography without thinking of this video.

AND, one more font related link I found during my Web travels this morning. Flipping Typical, that quickly displays all the fonts on your computer. Sweet.