On 26 January, the YouTube account ‘ChuckaChucka2012′ uploaded a video titled ‘Coming Soon’ It features Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller) opening the curtains saying “How can I handle work on a day like today?” over the top of one of the main songs from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). It stimulated a lot of excitement around the internet and even I, personally was really excited for what could be a second Ferris Bueller Film. The video has the date 2.5.12 which is the 5th of February in American format. This date is also the day of the 2012 superbowl. Eagerly awaiting the unveiling of the full trailer, I then came across this video today which will no doubt go viral within the hour. Right now, it’s at 307 views. It has been uploaded by Honda and is the full length version of the previous 10 second trailer. Straight away my heart sank as I realised there was no new movie coming out; just another advertising strategy that is benefiting from viral campaigns.

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The blogs of That Design have been looking a little sparse of late, but don’t worry! We’re still here, just working a lot harder than usual at the moment as we all prepare for our first major hand-in of our final year at University. As with most students, we end up working right to the last minute, but I like to think it’s with the intent that we can get the best of our work out and available with the only thing stopping us being time itself.

I’m planning on creating some seasonal graphics for That Design in the next couple of weeks which you will get to see soon as well as some designs for 2012 coming soon!

For now, have a watch of this well-made music video from an 8-piece crew of School Pupils TA9 that is sure to go viral over the next few days. I saw this earlier and it only had 645 views but as I’m writing this it has 2,198 views. I think it definitely has essence of the Mac generation of bedroom creatives. By that I mean, the type of people who have become well skilled in a creative processes such as music and video and have been able to create a well polished piece in a not-so-professional surrounding.

It’s also hilariously fantastic. Well done lads!

BERG, a design studio based in London have today announced a product they’ve been working on for the past year called Little Printer. “Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.” Running on a new cloud service called BERG Cloud, this little device has the ability to print out some of your most important and fun daily activities that you would usually use your smartphone for. Things such as your daily agenda, news headlines and even fitness statistics from Nike+. It looks like a really unique opportunity to return to having printed media for many daily tasks that are now occupied by our digital selves on the morning commute. Being encapsulated in a small format means that each daily printout can be stuffed into a wallet or maybe stuck on the fridge for all to see.

Here’s how it works:

You have your Little Printer sitting in your home or office, it connects wirelessly to a small box connected to your router and is controlled remotely by an app on your smartphone (Only iOS and Android are mentioned at the moment). The App is used to control what items you would like to printed out for you and at what times in the day. There’s not a great deal mentioned as to what settings can be made but I’d like to think that you could create profiles of different printouts that you’d like. For example, a morning commute that would include the days headlines and a couple of puzzles such as sudoku or crosswords as well as your day’s agenda, or maybe a social networking printout that would display your most popular activity on Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and Facebook. Maybe even a weekend profile that could have the sports fixtures/results or league tables along with a featured list of programmes to watch on TV?









Little Printer will be available in 2012 and you can subscribe directly to BERG to have more information delivered to you directly as they announce it.

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@BERGCloud

I came across this amazing project on Behance recently and I thought it was definitely worth sharing with everyone. At first glance, you may take a look at the photos and think, ‘Wow these are some pretty slick chalk illustrations!’ But then when you look further into the project and watch the video that goes with it you’ll see how it’s taken to another level altogether…

For the 15th anniversary of VIB, a life sciences research institution based in Flanders, Belgium, the creative studio Coming Soon took control of branding the whole event that they were holding in a truly creative manner. Using nothing but chalk and a huge blackboard they were able to create a really striking and informative design throughout the whole collection of media and signage. I absolutely love the detail of the chalk drawings and the precision that they have achieved with their typography and illustration. I personally, would really struggle to wash them off the blackboard based purely on the fact that they are massive pieces art individually, yet the team at Coming Soon seem to get on with the task at hand without hesitation (though they do have a handful of beautiful photographs documenting the process and finished pieces). The style of using chalk drawings on a blackboard may be classed as a bit of a cliché when paired with an educational and research based organisation but I think in this particular instance it work’s exceptionally well for the brand.



I think my favourite part is how this ties in with the website navigation. The header section of the site is a background layer video and the navigation is literally drawn in front of you. Take a look at the website here.



You can also view the video documenting the whole process below:


coming-soon.be

@comingso_

That Design has been around for a couple of months now, but our website was always *Under Construction* and still very much in a testing space which is why we took the decision to make an official launch as a way of saying “We’re here and we’re ready!” Along with that, we also each made a poster that would commemorate the date of November 11 2011. You can view the launch page and posters gallery by clicking on the screenshots below.


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As I mentioned in my previous post, I was on my way to TYPOLondon for Saturday’s events at the University of London thanks to a free ticket passed on to my tutor from Colin McHenry, which I am massively grateful of! This post is going to be a roundup of all the posts about the lectures that I went and saw as well as some background information on the designers themselves.

TYPOLondon was a collection of lectures held over the three days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) from the 20-22 October of this year, “featuring A-list speakers from the world of typography, information, graphic and digital design, brand experience, film, animation, publishing and education.” It’s been held in Berlin for the past few years and this was the inaugural event for London. I was only able to get a ticket for Saturday’s events, but from what I have gathered from the people I have spoken to; Saturday was the favourite day of events so I’m glad for that fact that I was able to enjoy everything on offer. Logan Hall, in the Institute of Education at the University of London is pretty sizeable lecture theatre and appeared to max out with the seating on almost all of the lectures that I saw there.

TYPO will be returning to London next year as well as also having conferences in Berlin and San Francisco. Stay up to date with their Twitter.

You can view all of my posts with the links below:

Marina Willer – Branding and Spaces

Jeff Faulkner – Extraordinary Machines

Morag Myerscough – Belonging

Dan Rhatigan – How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bad Type

Toshi Omagari – Creating Linotype Didot

Nadine Chahine – Engaging with the Middle East

Bruno Maag – Collaborating Types

Julian Zimmermann and King Bansah – The King is Customer

Jonathan Barnbrook – Virus

Chip Kidd – What Are You Doing Here?

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Quite possibly the funniest lecture I’ve ever seen about anything typographical or design related came from the great New Yorker, Chip Kidd as he closed TYPOLondon 2011 in the Logan Hall.

I’d never seen a talk from him before but had seen pieces of his work online and in books. I would never have guessed just how brilliantly eccentric and ‘fabulous’ he would be though! Opening with a story of his new mantra which he acquired from an overheard conversation in a lunchtime queue at KFC in New York. “I was standing in line at lunchtime, in the Kentucky Fried Chicken off Union Square. I was in the back of the line, at the front there was this skinny little guy who was ordering – I would like 3 buckets of 21 piece original recipe chicken please.” “The woman behind the counter snapped – Is that for here or to go?!” “Excuse me? How the HELL would I sit here and eat three buckets of 21 piece original recipe chicken. Here. By myself.” To which the woman behind counter did not miss a beat and said “BITCH. I DON’T KNOW YOUR LIFE!”



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With his font foundry ‘Virus’, Jonathan Barnbrook took us on a tour of his work and the thought process that he has developed within the typography side of his business. Having set up shop in 1997, it wasn’t until 7 years later that Jonathan first started selling his fonts to the world. “Style is a virus. If we didn’t need style, we’d only have one typeface”. It is quite clear that the fonts in the Virus collection are made by Jonathan for Jonathan. He is not someone who is driven by money or by political correctness and this is totally apparent in his type design. Having named a particular font after a serial killer and created a series of letterforms that represent this, it is no surprise that he has received his fair share of complaint letters over the past few years.



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There was an actual real life King at TYPOLondon. Yes, a King. There had been quite a following generated over Twitter for this event and was predicted to be one of the most popular lectures of the whole series. It sure was indeed! Packing out the Logan Hall, Julian Zimmermann and King Bansah put on a brilliantly hilarious show. I didn’t quite know what to expect before it all started but Julian set the scene well with an opening 10 minutes about who the King is and what he did, before the King himself came out onto the stage.

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After a quick break for lunch it was time for Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag to hit the Jeffery Hall stage with a few of his current interns. This was a talk that I was very much looking forward to and once again, TYPOLondon delivered with a well rounded lecture on the creative processes around typography. This lecture was much more informal than the others as Bruno made comments about his work and then divided the hour into sections from his interns and generated discussion on the stage about their methods and needs as a designer of fonts.

Once again, a big chunk of the lecture was about creating typefaces for regions other than the western world. One of his interns described the process for creating a Hebrew and Thai version of their Ubuntu typeface, which is an open source project which deals directly with the users in an online community in order to make a successful font. The project is very interesting in general and is available to download from Font Squirrel and Google Web Fonts.



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