Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux
Absolutely stunning.
I’m always interested in how art becomes a means to communicate social and cultural movements. However, I’ve never seen a font used that way — until now.
Meet Ugly Gerry, a font made of gerrymandered congressional districts.
Information Is Beautiful: 100 Days of Beautiful News
Happy Birthday Beautiful News! We’ve just published the 100th graphic in our project celebrating good news, positive trends, uplifting statistics and facts.
To celebrate, we’ve compiled a few uplifting statistics about the Beautiful News project itself.
There are some amazing and inspiring data visualizations here. Whether you are an information enthusiast or a designer, you owe it to yourself to look over the great work here.
AdAge: These Ads for Stabilo Boss Highlighters Cleverly Emphasize History’s Forgotten Women
The ads, by DDB Germany, take black and white historical images and then use a highlighter pen to pick out the woman in the photograph: for example, Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician responsible for calculating Apollo 11’s safe return to earth, is highlighted in the corner of a room full of men.
Another woman highlighted is Lise Meitner, the discoverer of nuclear fission whose male partner was awarded the Nobel Prize. There’s also Edith Wilson, the First Lady and wife of Woodrow Wilson, who took over his responsibilities after he had a stroke, pictured just below her husband, who is the subject of the photo.
I kind of love these.
This is the first major update to Helvetica in 35 years.
Helvetica® Now is a new chapter in the story of perhaps the best-known typeface of all time. Available in three optical sizes—Micro, Text, and Display—every character in Helvetica Now has been redrawn and refit; with a variety of useful alternates added. It has everything we love about Helvetica and everything we need for typography today. This is not a revival. This is not a restoration.
monotype.com
This is a statement.
Dieter Rams is one of my all time favorite designers, and I try to return to these principles in everything I do.
In celebration of 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement, 99designs has shared a couple of great posts you should check out.
100 years of Bauhaus: what today’s famous logos would look like in Bauhaus style
And 2019 marks the 100th anniversary since this one-of-a-kind design revolution first started. To celebrate its impact, both then and now, we’ve asked our community of graphic designers to reimagine the most popular logos of today in the Bauhaus design style.
Aside from being fun, educational and demonstrative of their skill, what our designers created just goes to show how the timeless principles of Bauhaus design still hold up after all this time.
Matt Ellis
Everything you need to know about Bauhaus: an infographic
Bauhaus is one of the greatest design movements of the 20th century. Founded in 1919, the famous design school has influenced all kinds of cultural fields with its revolutionary ideas and theories. Its indelible mark has been stamped on art, design and architecture. But you don’t need to be an artist to have heard about Bauhaus. We all have a feel for what Bauhaus design looks like, but can’t necessarily explain it. Until now…
We’ve put together this Bauhaus infographic to summarize everything you need to know about the movement. Scroll down and let us take you on a Bauhaus journey, from its principles and characteristics to the history, milestones and evolution of the Bauhaus movement in graphic design today.
Monique Zander
via Kottke.org
Links:
These are a great set of overviews from UnderConsideration’s BrandNew blog about some of the most notable brand refreshes that happened in 2018. Some surprises include:
What really struck me about the worst reviewed designs isn’t that any of them are outright bad. It’s how remarkably unremarkable they are. For example, the Best Buy and Argentina updates make their brands look generic. In contrast, some outright confounding redesigns, like the Library of Congress don’t make the worst-reviewed list at all.
In a way, it makes sense. In today’s market, the last thing you want to be is forgettable. An unremarkable brand identity makes you forgettable. Generic is worse than bad.
Myself, I’m not sure how much I care. If a website fails to do do what it sets out to do, that, I care about. Design is failing there. But if a website has a design that is a bit boring, but does just what everyone needs it to do, that’s just fine. All hail boring. Although I admit it’s particularly ironic when a design agency’s own site feels regurgitated.
My emotional state is likely more intrigued about your business model and envious of your success than eyerolly about your design.
As long as I’m playing armchair devil’s advocate, if every website was a complete and total design departure from the next, I imagine that would be worse. To have to-relearn how each new site works means not taking advantages of affordances, which make people productive out of the gate with new experiences.
I’ve certainly leaned on templates and frameworks for web design in the past. (I haven’t even created a unique WordPress template for this site.) And I certainly feel where the author is coming from. Yes, any designer wants to put their own unique stamp on a client’s site or other project, but that should not get in the way of the site’s usefulness.
If your site is useful, clean, and easy to navigate, then I can forgive it having a similar look-and-feel to other sites.
Simply Robert 