The fine folks at the Klatch were kind enough to hang a few of my mixed media pieces for the month of Decemnber. The Klatch has pretty much the best coffee around, so if you are in the Rancho Cucamonga area, stop by and pick up some of the World’s Best Espresso, or have one of their award-winning baristas make you something special. If you are interested in any of the pieces, feel free to contact me.

Light is an oddly compelling short film directed by David Parker that began as a project intended to bring awareness and create a dialogue regarding energy waste.

Last week I got a very welcome and unexpected gift from a friend I’ve never met. It could not have come at a better time. You may recognize the Holstee Manifesto on the card, which I posted about a couple of months ago. Well, to make a long story short, a wonderful photographer from Australia called Kingsley Burton is a frequent reader (and soon to be contributor) to Faded & Blurred. We have emailed back and forth a couple of times and spoken via Skype once, but I can already tell that he and I will be friends (albeit 15,000 miles away from one another) for quite some time. During our Skype call, I expressed some of the frustrations and such that I have been going through lately and Kingsley sent me this wonderful little reminder that we never run out of choices. Well played, Mr. Burton…well played indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUHck0FViac

One of my favorite designers, Chip Kidd, discusses designing the cover and interior for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. If you are unfamiliar with Chip’s work, The Book Cover Archive has put up a wonderful collection, both as a designer and as an art director.

LINKS

1Q84

I’ve started a new series of Photoshop composites inspired by reworking this image, which I created as part of a Photoshop class I was teaching at a photography school here in southern California. The original version, comprised entirely of random stock photographs, was color, but I think this toned version actually works much better. 

I have always been fascinated by the world of the luchadores. I remember watching luchador wrestling (channel 52, I think) as a boy with my Grandfather, who loved it. It’s almost a mythology unto itself; an epic battle between the rudos and the técnicos (basically good guys and bad guys). I love the costumes and masks, many of which are stylized representations of animals, ancient heroes and even gods dating back to the Aztecs. Talented Mexican designer Josè Guízar has used the golden age of luchador wresting as his inspiration for a fantastic desgin project; a premium, craft-brewed Mexican beer. The variety of styles are named after fictional characters, inspired by the classic style of 1950′s luchadores; Black King (Imperial Stout), Blond Gomez (Lager) and The Vampire’s Son (Red Ale).

Dubois & Barral recently completed a gorgeous new rebranding of the Hotel Excelsior in Paris. They designed everything from the print collateral and the website, to the theming of the rooms, including wall and fabric treatments. The colors, typography and use of vintage ephemera all work brilliantly together to capture the not only the spirit of Paris, but also the history of the 150 year old building itself. 

LINKS

www.excelsior-paris-hotel.com 

www.fabienbarral.com

Typography has long been treated as the red-headed circus monkey of web design. The truth is, typography is just as important to the success or failure of the design of a website as it is to print, motion graphics or any other media. Unfortunately, until fairly recently, it was either difficult, time consuming or both to display anything than Arial or Times New Roman on your website. Sure, there was sIFR, but it was often slow loading and required Flash. Also, due in part to the horsepower required for display, it really wasn’t meant for body copy, but rather for just headers and logos. A few other alternatives followed, such as FLIR and Cufon. FLIR differed from sIFR in that it embedded images, not Flash, to display the chosen font. However, FLIR was ultimately even less accessible than sIFR. Cufon is different than both of the previous methods in that it converts the font paths to vector graphics. Cufon is still used, but primarily just for navigation and headers.

Perhaps the most widely used technique for getting great looking fonts on your website is the use of @font-face. Though it was defined in the CSS2 spec, it didn’t really take off until CSS3. Basically, it allows a font to be stored on the web server and simply referenced in the stylesheet for the page:

@font-face { font-family: ‘DroidSansRegular’; src: url(‘DroidSans-webfont.eot’); }
@font-face { font-family: ‘DroidSansBold’; src: url(‘DroidSans-Bold-webfont.eot’); }

Then, simply call it using font-family:

h3 { font-family: ‘DroidSansRegular’; }

Unlike sIFR or FLIR, @font-face doesn’t require a third-party plugin and, depending on the complexity of the font, is very fast to load. If there is a downside to @font-face, it would be that there are some hiccups in getting it to play nice with Internet Explorer. Not surprising, really, since IE has pretty much always sucked. That being said, @font-face is very easy to get up and running on your website. If you are a WordPress user, there is a fantastic plugin from Google, which lets you not only select from hundreds of free typefaces, but also makes displaying these typefaces on your website as simple as selecting a font from a drop down, then clicking the checkbox next to the element you want to affect (p, H1, H2, blockquote, etc). You can also add custom CSS to apply a selected typeface to elements within a DIV. Let’s take a look at a simple setup of the Google Fonts plugin on a WordPress-powered site.

Install and configure the plugin

You can download the plugin to your machine from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Or, you can simply log into the Dashboard of your website, click Plugins, Add New and enter ‘Google Fonts’ in the search box. Clicking on Google Fonts in the list will open a window where you can install the plugin.

Using the plugin is as simple as selecting the font you want to use from the dropdown, then ticking the check box next to the element you would like to use the selected font. You may also apply custom CSS rules to individual elements. For example, I use multiple fonts on my site and wanted to have my logo display in its own font. To make this happen, I simply added the following CSS into the Custom CSS text box on the plugin configuration screen, allowing me to apply a custom font to an individual DIV:

#site-title a { font-family: ‘Gravitas One’, arial, sans-serif; }

As you can see, whether you are using WordPress to power your website or not, adding custom typefaces is a fairly simple affair and can add a tremendous amount of impact and character to the overall design.

RESOURCES

Google Fonts

Type Kit

Font Squirrel

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.”

For the full article, head over to The Next Web. Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, watch the Commencement Speech he gave at Stanford in 2005.

Jux looks to be a very cool new service that allows users to publish their own content in a very clean interface that fills the entire browser screen, regardless of content type (text, photos, video). The interface and content layout looks fantastic on tablets like the iPad too. You can use Jux for a blog, portfolio, video blog or just to store your thoughts. It’s free to signup, so why not give it a shot?

LINKS
Jux