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Herman Miller is heading into the new year with a changed branding identity inspired by its namesake founder’s 1960s-era experimentations with the Helvetica typeface, delivered by the Brooklyn-based design agency Order. The move comes a year after Herman Miller’s 100th anniversary was... View full entry
The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home. — The Los Angeles Times
The LA Times has a really cool new series I am personally obsessed with wherein the “architecture of everyday life” is explored in and around the city. In this iteration, the Times’ style editor Ian Blair waxed poetic about LA’s midcentury typographical elements, best embodied on the... View full entry
Ikea has released a free font called Soffa Sans, inspired by all the memes born from its online “Design your own sofa” planner. The tool allows for customers to design the layouts and configurations of Ikea’s couches, from the Vimle sectionals to the Vallentuna modular sofa series. Once it was discovered that the planner allowed for basically any configuration with no limit to the cost, it inspired some Sims-like creativity from users. — The Verge
The SOFFA SANS font was developed in partnership with UK agency Proximity London and is available for download here. Some of the examples people used the sofa planner as a block-y drawing tool (which inspired the font) below. pic.twitter.com/o75DdhB3D5— forever (@perspectivator) June... View full entry
Decimated by manufacturing losses, some smaller cities are turning for help to an unlikely group of people: typeface designers. Can new fonts really breathe life into the postindustrial city? [...]
Type has a lot of effect on the atmosphere of a place, he says, calling it “the voice of the city”: “I think cities that don’t have this very dynamic energy, they don’t feel the need to change their identity.”
— theguardian.com
Ruedi Baur will discuss, based on examples, the necessary synergy between designers, architects, landscape architects and lighting designers to create a city that goes beyond functionality to improve the quality of life for everyone. — newschool.edu
The Type Directors Club and Parsons The New School for Design present Ruedi Baur: Architectural and Urban Inscriptions, a presentation by this leading European designer on the occasion of his first major U.S. commission, a wayfinding system for The New School’s University Center, a new... View full entry
When asked, the German-born “Father of Fonts” insists that there is nothing similar about designing a typeface and designing a house. “They’re totally different,” he says, in excellent English peppered with correctly implemented expletives. “With a typeface, you design a space. A letter is defined by the inside space, more than it is by the outside. You design for shape, but also for function.”... “In either case,” he concedes, “the design is as much about function as it is about aesthetics.” — dwell.com
