Author website for Amanda Stuart

After recently writing The Longest Journey, Amanda Stuart wanted to showcase her book online. The website she commissioned is extremely clean and easy to navigate. As the book garners more attention, she will add reviews and reader comments. Possible enhancements might include a sample passage or chapter, a press release and a list of bookstores stocking her book.

Smartr for Gmail

Smartr is a powerful free extension for Google Chrome. It adds a sidebar to Gmail (this is where having a big screen is useful in keeping clutter at bay). The sidebar houses an enhanced contacts manager. When installed, Smartr goes through your contacts and gives you the option of adding your Facebook and Twitter accounts. When you click into an email or start to compose a new email, Smartr calls up everything it knows about the person who sent it or the person you are about to send it to, including recent tweets and facebook updates, photographs and other information. It also gives you a history of your email contact with that person and identifies other people you often email in association with them. Smartr surfaces quite a bit of information from within and outside Gmail in a very effective fashion, and could be very handy for businesses trying to leverage their existing contact lists.

Roman Zenith

Roman sculptors were sometimes very honest in their depictions of the great and the good. They showed sunken cheeks, wrinkles and other flaws. We took advantage of this by using a Roman sculpture for the cover of "Roman Zenith". The stark contrasts and psychologically acute depiction make for a surprisingly modern feel. The subtle backdrop of the Pantheon makes the setting and era clear.

On the Face of it: three recent covers

Our publisher client prefers us to design covers as a single unit -- back, front and spine all part of the same artwork. This encourages the use of large, bold images and prominent use of type. The three front covers featured here all focus on a single face challenging the viewer, a naturally strong composition.

Mind Blowing Bookshelf from Google

Google seems to have more projects than employees. A crew of hard core geeks at Google Data Arts have been experimenting with new ways to display data in your browser (works for both Chrome and Firefox). This animated globe shows Google searches by language, and a fascinating picture of global language dispersion it presents. English scattered widely over the globe, German confined entirely to Germany, Spanish dominating South America and French surprisingly rare in West Africa. Another animation displays 10,000 books in an ascending column -- a novel way to visually search a large number of works. 

Symbolism in Type

Signs and symbols is a useful blog highlighting infographics/dingbat/wingding/symbol resources across the web. Almost everything linked to is free. In a world where much information is viewed via tiny phone screens, simple symbols help cut through the clutter and communicate effectively.

Sins of a Certain Type

Just like grammar, typography attracts pedants. Some of their gripes are legitimate, while others seem rather trivial. One such perfectionist has put together all of his pet peeves on one poster. Ironically, the website showcasing this poster was rather hard to read, both in Chrome and Firefox.

Solve for X

Google may be growing up, but it still maintains an element of Silicon Valley utopianism. Solve for X is Google's attempt to bring together innotive thinkers to address global problems and thus generate potential solutions. Software engineers are a solutions-oriented bunch, so this initiative may make quite a lot of sense. It is certainly in alignment with the higher aspirations of Google's founders.

Festival for the Community

Our client stages a community festival once a year, and tries to appeal to everyone within the city boundaries. They wanted an open, friendly design with a sense of inclusiveness and place. We used the beautiful Mrs Shepperds (Alejandro Paul) for the flourishes of the title, and Archer (Hoefler, Frere-Jones) for the rest. Aerial images of the city helped give the design local context.

View Word Docs for free

Want to view Word docs accurately without the expense of buying the program? Microsoft thoughtfully provides a free Word viewer download. Very handy for those who use open source or browser based word processors that don't always display Word documents exactly the way originally intended. Like the free Adobe Acrobat viewer, the viewer does not provide any editing functionality.

Word

Our client wanted a high-impact type-based design. We used contrast, intense colour and a line of text from each of the stories featured in the anthology. The page curl gives a hint of depth and serves to direct attention from the title down to the subtitle. Typefaces used were Museo Sans and Museo Slab by Jos Buivenga.

Noun Project

A simple idea, well executed: the Noun Project is a catalogue of symbols covering everything from the mundane to the sublime. They are available free of charge, and the web interface is as simple, clean and monochrome as the symbols themselves.

Lost Worlds of Graphic Design

Personal computers and the Internet have opened up new worlds for millions of people, but they have also remade or destroyed dozens of professions and made hundreds of specialist skills obsolete. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies chronicles the items used by professionals in the graphic design and advertising industries. They seem very distant and quaint, but once they were essential tools for serious professionals, and the making of them was an entire industry in itself.

Lions and Lillies

A well-written and tightly plotted historical drama, Lions and Lillies: Book 1 covers affairs of state and love during the Hundred Year War between England and France. We were tasked to design a cover that created a sense of the intensity of the story, and combined military and personal aspects. In other words, the entry to "a world of passion and intrigue". The authors have created an informative website to accompany the publication of their book.

Is it a Bird?

Science imitates nature and the result is art. German inventors have devised a rather beautiful mechanical bird that flaps, flies, soars and returns to land. It's interesting to contemplate humans one day flying in this way, but the lifting power required to get a human off the ground would probably be prohibitive. And the wingspan would be titanic. Armies around the world must be looking at this metal/composite bird as yet another potential surveillance robot.

Good Cover, Bad Cover

Science Fiction covers often provoke amusement amongst those who don't read Sci Fi. For those of us who do, we treasure the remarkable variety of cover art — from melodramatic pulp novels to high concept fiction and everything in between. The covers could be formulaic, but were often wildly inventive and even avant garde. After all, if you are writing about the future, you're not automatically bound by the constraints of the past. This website explores the often hilariously literal and overblown art of the less refined end of the genre, while this one catalogues Penguin's consistently high quality and restrained covers (mirroring the often high polish of the contents).

Dingbats want to be Free

More than just an old-fashioned insult, dingbats are pictorial typefaces packed with symbols useful in a wide variety of design contexts. FontFont have released a sampler typeface (not the full complement of symbols, but a wide variety nonetheless) for free downloading. Erler Dingbats were first released some forty years ago and have now been updated for the digital era with new symbols. Each symbol has been designed to integrate with its fellows. In the usual way of European type, the result is slightly bloodless but eminently useable.

Anatomy of a Typeface

If you thought a stem belonged to a flower and a bowl was what you put the flower in, then visit Thinking with Type for a typographical education. The site is a well designed tour of type design, units of type measurement, classification and use, and hints on mixing typefaces, all written in plain English and elegantly illustrated. The site makes a good case for considering typography as the core of most graphic design, even on the web.

Pay With a Tweet

This product may be a bit of a head scratcher if you aren't an active twitter user, but it will make sense if you are. The idea is that you 'sell' a bit of digital merchandise, or access to a web service via the 'payment' of a pre-prepared tweet lauding your service and tweeted to all of the twitterer's followers. The twitterer is able to edit the message but not the url. The service is designed to create buzz for your digital wares — a bit like women paid to frequent bars and tout particular tipples. Given that Twitter users are supposed by many to be taste-makers, it might be a good idea to try and start a few ripples with that 'community'.

Give Your PDFs some Fizz

Soda PDF is a free PDF reader (in a crowded field) that renders a PDF as if it was a 3D magazine. One turns pages by 'pulling' the page across in a realistic simulation of an actual page turn.  While emulating a print publication in such a literal way might seem retrograde, there is something satisying about the reading experience, and it is an aesthetically pleasing way to preview design work (particularly files destined for print). The effect renders very quickly and smoothly, and can be turned off if you want to go back to old fashioned flat viewing.