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Book Review: Thinking with Type

Note: although this is the first time this review is published, most of it was written in the first half of 2007.

This is a review of Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. The book is published in paperback, and weighs in at 176 pages.

The publisher’s synopsis claims that the book “presents practical information about typographic design that can be immediately applied within the context of design history and theory”, and the book begins with the claim that it is not about fonts, but “how to use them”. I was looking for a practical guide to typography for self-study, and after reading reviews for the book on Amazon, I thought it would be a wise purchase. I would be proven wrong.

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This recession thinking is bullshit

People are in a panic. Withdrawing money from banks, cutting spending wildly. Posters for fashion magazines offer to help you dress well “even in a recession”. Yamamori is offering a “credit crunch lunch” with champagne, like one last hurrah on the Titanic before it sinks beneath the waves.

But if you cancel projects primarily because we are in a recession, you’re a moron. In fact, now is among the best times to take risks with your business.

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Train times on your iPhone

At this week’s OpenCoffee Club I demoed a small application that shows train times on your iPhone that was warmly received — thanks guys! This blog post introduces the application and some features.

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Movie studio does the right thing?

After opening my copy of Day Watch this evening, I was pleasantly surprised to find something you really don’t see all that often… a thank you note.

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State is one of the best-designed magazines out there

Sometimes I’ll drop into a newsagents and have a look over the magazines for design inspiration and, if I find anything I like, I’ll buy it to pour over later.

The first issue of State caught my eye immediately. It is beautiful.

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The real cost of an iPhone in Ireland

A guest post mostly by Des Traynor : Never have I seen such nonsense printed regard a product price, as I have these past 10 days. It’d be one thing if it was just the usual luddites masquerading as technically adept journalists, but it’s everywhere. From 140 character rants on twitter, to lengthy essays about PaddyTax and the ridiculous premium we pay for living in this country. I am not going to speak out in favour of Apple or O2 here, but I would like to inform the debate that surrounds the O2 iPhone in Ireland.

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Didn’t you hire me to design?

As designers, we’ll sometimes get requests from clients that we don’t believe work, or will find our work micro-managed to the point of our role changing from designer to Photoshop technician. We all know why we don’t like situations like these, but I’d like to talk now about why this is bad for our clients. Hopefully this entry will be useful to my fellow designers when raising these concerns and for clients looking to understand why we need to question them. It is adapted from an email.

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Explaining the design of the blog

The new blog design is mostly implemented, and I though it would be a good idea to talk about some of the decisions I’d made while designing. This is a long one, so be warned.

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Live blog redesign

I’m in the middle of transitioning the temporary blog design from the temporary TextPattern theme to the new layout. Things will probably look a bit off for the next day or so.

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Revising the first draft

Earlier this week, I wrote about using the typeface Dolly in both experimental layouts and in a first draft of a homepage design. On reviewing the design, however, I found that it didn’t quite fit with what I wanted to achieve visually. Let me show you why it failed.

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Dolly is delicious

Sometimes you can struggle for weeks to find inspiration, much to your frustration. Other times, it can come up and smack you in the face like a wet trout screaming “Hello! I’m a typeface, and I am gorgeous!“.

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Goals for 2008

Here’s my goals for the next year.

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The first article designs

Sorry for the lack of updates: I’ve been out of action for the last three weeks. But I’m going to shut up about that now, and get on to the latest abandoned concepts. This time it’s the very first designs for a long blog post or article, dating back from early 2005, believe it or not.

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The home page and one persona

Up until now, I have been documenting the exploration process I’ve gone through to build my new site. Two posts later and I’ve realised that this approach falls flat. It may be useful for historical purposes, but it sure makes for dull reading.

From now on, I’ll be trying something new. I’ll tell you what I am or will be doing, and explain why. I’ll start with the content on the home page.

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Three

Three for the price of one this time around. I poked around my folders and found three of the earliest concepts for the Antidisinformation site.

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Approaching the problem, part two

In the first article of this series I talked about my brainstorming process as I tried to understand the problem that a new website would be part of the solution for. In this article, I’ll show my work towards defining the purpose of the site.

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An abandoned homepage concept

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Approaching the problem, part one

If you take on designing a new site, then you’re presented with an awfully big problem to solve. And that problem is not one with an obvious one.

The first step to solving the problem was to try to understand it.

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Starting November 1st, a public redesign of this site

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