Recently On My Radar, PT.2
May 30 2012
This post follows on (sort of) from a post I made last year, basically highlighting and sharing a random factor bunch of stuff from the interwebs that as a designer I’ve found interesting. So here goes:
Print is dead — an outstanding collection of book covers, many of them design related.
Weyland Industries — promotional website for the upcoming Prometheus movie (the Alien prequel), I don’t normally go in for this kind of thing as I find most contemporary sci-fi graphics hideous, but this is really well done, fantastic attention to detail.
Just My Type — a collection of nice font stacks from typekit.
Retina.js — no-one’s found the holy grail for responsive/retina images yet, but this handy plugin has helped me out on a couple of occasions.
Spelltower — a beautifully designed site for an ios app word game. Parallax scrolling effects have been done to death of late, some do it well (with restraint and common sense) some don’t, this site does it well.
Stamen maps — I really like these alternatives to google maps, available in toner, watercolor and terrain styles.
Swissted Shop — punk rock meets Swiss modernism, and why not?
Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce, owner of Stereotype Design in New York City. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have (almost) nothing to do with one another, Mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, and indie rock show flyers into International Typographic Style posters.
The story of send — Take a journey through Google’s data centers by following an email along its path.
Brackets — An open source code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Still in it’s infancy and not ready for general use yet, but looks quite interesting.
Leap Motion — If it works like it does in the promo video we’re in for some fun (and maybe sore arms)
Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.
Bariol free typeface — a new rounded sans-serif, that comes in 4 weights, regular is free, thin, light and bold are pay-what-you-want.
FF Chartwell — ever wanted to make simple charts using a font? well now you can, amazingly.
Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a fantastic typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.
The Forty Story — The story of a boy born on the day Pentagram opened and how his life has been tracked (and kerned) by forty years of Pentagram design.
Figure for iPhone — I’ve had a lot of fun playing with this music app on my iphone, but not only is it fun to play with, it’s a refreshing alternative (in purely aesthetic terms) to all the gradiented, brushed metal, drop shadowed, wood background, shiny logo, faux leather style apps out there.