If you can get out of the office for the day and fancy a nice trip to sunny Brighton this month then you should register for Ampersand – The web typography conference.

It is happening on the 17th June at the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, Church Street, Brighton, BN1 1UG, UK. Brighton is the birthplace of Eric Gill don’t you know!

A good one day event with some great guest speakers including David Berlow, type designer & cofounder of The Font Bureau; John Daggett, Firefox developer & editor of the CSS3 Fonts Module and Jonathan Hoefler, type designer & president of Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

I can’t wait to have a play with this new iPad app, LetterMpress: A Virtual Letterpress on Your iPad from bonadiescreative.com

This is a great project on two levels.
I think I am probably one of the last group of people to have had a traditional graphic design education. My initial introduction to design was using type gauge rulers, learning about pica m’s, drawing serifs and sans serifs with Rotring pens etc. lots of work training the eye to understand positive and negative spaces, lots of type paste-up work and using small letterpress machines. So I love rolling up the sleeves for a bit of hands on design work.

Also, before seeing this project I hadn’t heard of Kickstarter but what a fantastic idea!
If you don’t have funding for your dream project then Kickstarter enables you to reach out to the wider creative community to get them involved to help fund your project. Great projects from across the globe that before would never have seen the light of day are being funded and developed by very generous backers. Actually the generosity in these hard times is pretty staggering.

In the case of LetterMpress the project has received more than double it’s required funding within half the allotted time.

A great concept, great platform coupled with great support and backing.

Tomorrow I am going to crack into this little beauty of a book, Just My Type by Simon Garfield. What a great Xmas present.

From what I have read on the inside cover it is a book detailing how fonts took over the world. Why did Barack Obama chose Gotham for his presidential campaign? how did great originators of type from Baskerville and Gill through to Zapf develop fonts?

It also covers the pivotal moments when fonts left Letraset catalogues and were loaded onto computers… and typefaces became something we realised we all have an opinion about. Looking forward to the chapter on Comic Sans then!

It looks a great read, I suggest you check it out.

You can view more info on Simon Garfield’s website.
Also on Amazon and Guardianbookshop.

Nice site for the new year.

I’m not going to comment on the content or intentions of Nike Better World but I like the mix of JS and HTML 5. Nice use of parallax scrolling and non intrusive navigation.

I did think that this would work really well on the iPad but it doesn’t? I thought that the design and nav would be perfectly suited to multi touch scrolling. Not sure if the iPad version of Safari isn’t handling the code well, or there is a different style sheet for mobile browsers (if the iPad Safari is classified as such?) I will have to investigate further, a real shame.

However I think we’re going to see a lot more if this style of publication/website design that is very image and layout led this year and beyond.

Have I just experienced the future of media and the internet?
Am I getting a bit over excited about something I know has been coming for years?
Is it really as good as I think it is or am I being blinded by how much I like ‘The Dude’?

I’m not sure, but what I do know is the whole reason why I invested in an iPad and why I am getting pretty excited about the next few years in digital is for things like PROJECT magazine.

Ok so before I go too far in proclaiming this is the future of everything I obviously understand that it’s not. However smart mobile handsets and tablet devices are really having an impact on how people like to experience, consume and interact with different types of media and content.

I guess what really gets me excited is not what’s happening right now but that the possibilities for this are infinite and mind blowing. When this becomes more personalised, relevant, tailored, and real time we will really see the persuasive power of digital media.

It is also the blend of static & motion graphics, video, editorial layout and interactive design that really interests me as a designer.

I’ll post more when I have spent a bit more time browsing and hopefully done some comparison tests. If anyone out there knows of any other similar ‘digital magazines’ then please let me know.

The point of some of the last posts on this site have been to showcase what people are doing with cutting edge technology, this post is to showcase the everlasting beauty of old school technology. Namely letterpress and the art of relief printing.

I have always loved the process and results generated by letterpress. I still have a couple of mini presses and drawers full of type at my mums house from when I experimented with it an university. Sometimes you just can’t beat getting your hands dirty and being surrounded by physical type and the smell of the inks.

Reverting to Type is an exhibition curated by Graham Bignell & Richard Ardagh, showcasing the work of 20 contemporary letterpress practitioners from around the world.

It looks absolutely stunning, I shall be popping along I suggest you do the same if you’re in or around London over Christmas.

10th–24th Dec 2010 and 4th–22nd Jan 2011
Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD
Open daily 10AM–6PM

I really like this little project on stripping back logos just to simple circles to see if they can still be recognised. Interesting as the more simple the original logo the more recognisable it remains. A note for all brand and identity designers?!

More from the originator Graham Smith here and on the Unevolved brands Flickr set.

A lovely post on the Creative Review blog, U&lc lives. U&lc launched in 1974 was the most important typography publication of it’s time. Hugely influential and still standing the tests of time, Monotype Imaging are making editions available to download in PDF format.

For all the type geeks out there this is a must have edition to your collections.

Here’s a challenge that’s pretty irresistible but the stakes are high! Can you draw the internet? So who’s more imaginative the creative industry or a bunch of 10yr olds?

I think i’ll sit down with my 3yr old and see what we both come up with at the weekend. I think i’ve gone into competitive dad mode, his better not be as good as mine!

This isn’t supposed to be a morbid start to Friday but whilst having a browse over at FormFiftyFive I was completely captivated by Tony Wilson’s Headstone by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly. In time honored tradition it was three years late.

I had the great fortune to meet and chat to Tony Wilson a couple of times when he ventured down to London to visit Malcolm Garrett when I worked at AMX. I always thought he was a genuine really nice bloke, very passionate about music, design, culture and especially Manchester. He was controversial and always divided opinion, but I don’t think people can argue that he is greatly missed.

The other headstone image is of the legendary American graphic designer Paul Rand.