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.

Some very lovely work coming out of McFaul Studio. They are in their own words “Big but small: A pioneering, boutique, full-service design agency with a massive following and global footprint”

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.

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

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.

Since the David McCandless post on data visualisation I have been doing tons of research into info graphics and how to turn complex data into rich, clear and easy to understand visuals. I stumbled upon the portfolio of Nicholas Felton who’s work is really very nice, especially his annual reports.

I am liking these music quote posters from musicphilosphy. They’re nice and playful and you (well I do) tend to read the lyrics in the pace of actual song, which made me laugh out loud.

Very elegant branding, typography and layout from B&W Studio up in Leeds. The minimal application of colour and styling make for very strong, effective pieces of communication. They cleaned up at this years Roses design awards and will no doubt go from strength to strength next year.

Found these lovely posters for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on ffffound.com today. The original work can be found here on the Pentagram site. Designed by Harry Pearce and Jason Ching the posters are a training tool specifically aimed at the Russian police, whose country has a particularly poor track record in drug treatment.