Sometimes, all you designers, sometimes, you’re sitting there making something new. You’re making something new and you’re listening to your favorite album, one of the most popular albums of all time, Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” And what comes out? Slime. That’s what happened to A.C. Bananas when he did just that. And what was the slime? This font. This font is called “Splatter” and it’s also totally free.

Save it and use it for your garage band fliers. The font can be downloaded directly from WFDJ or from Z-Share. Whatever’s up.

Usually I spit upon anything that even vaguely reminds one of a grunge font, that’s any font where it’s supposed to look hand-written but it’s got only one of each of the letters, aw crap, but this one’s good. I say so. I mocked up that little thing above so you could see how with a little modification it can look nice and sticky.

[NOTE: alternate ("correct") spelling - Ayatollah.]

To see more work by Bananas, take a peek at his brütal online portfolio. He’s got lots of metal stuff. Lots of black and white stuff. Lots of rock and roll eeevil.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies font category.

If you’ve got some amazing idea, or pop culture crush, or fantastic set of images that you’ve just GOT to apply to as many mediums as possible, consider this: cookie cutters. Especially around and in the holidays, these are always going to be big sellers, even the lesser-holidays love cookies! I believe today that designer Beverly Hsu’s hit a bit of a jackpot, provided she slides through the font-ownership rules like a breeze, with these cutters made to produce cookies in perfect Helvetica letterforms!

About hand sized, made of metal, produced in limited quantities. For more information on when these will be produced again, contact Beverly Hsu through her webpage link next.

Designed by : Beverly Hsu
Produced by : Greg Saul
Photographed by : Drew

These remind me of the “A” cookies that were given away to hungry mouths free at that one Aesthetic Apparatus super big music and poster party when they first opened their new shop (see below, the pic with only “A” cookies.)

Dew wawnt!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies food category.

Hooray for photographer Landry A! It’s a fabulously graphic-minded photo-taker who covers both au-natural photographs AND unnatural design. I jest, of course, as all good design is natural as the grass. What L.A. has done here is to keep a photo series going of all the excellence in the several countries Landry is able to visit on a regular (and irregular) basis. The set you’re about to peek and flip through is out of Africa. Black and white and color are two separate sets, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell which is which.

The photos you’re about to see are from Niger, Africa, and surrounding areas (I think some from Chad and Mali maybe too.) The collection we’ve got here are mostly the signage and graphic-natured photographs from the set. The extended set you can see on Landry A’s full portfolio site.

“PHOTOGRAPHS” by Landry A.
Based in Barcelona
contact email landry@mydogispolite.com

After you have a flip through this ongoing set, take a look at the rest of Landry A’s works for a treat: Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Aragon, and more Africa! This particular post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies Public Space and Street Signs categories.

All the noodity of lovely bare-legged type. That’s what nakedtype.com was gonna be all about. Juan Carlos Pagan had an idea for a type foundry exploring the perceived humanistic qualities of letters. If you take a look now by clicking http://nakedtype.com/ you’ll see it’s parked by godaddy. We talkin future baybay! For now, while you wait, there’s several really pretty posters for you to peek at. Each of these in the set is 24″ x 32″ printed on medium-weight bright-white paper.

Oh fashionable! The sleek look of the just-picked letterforms from your favorite font. That’s what I’m talkin about. I can’t wait for this site! The Humanistic Qualities of Letters – that’s something you could make a single post about on a blog, but shoot if it isn’t a subject that could be expanded up into a full bigtime educational website. A must do.

This post is a page out of the World Famous Design Junkies book of typography. And then if you’re feeling extra saucy, salt and peppery, you can head over to the official World Famous Design Junkies House of Burlesque.

addl!

Thanks everyone for all the love. But i cannot take total credit for all these posters. The lovely “K” poster was created by the extraordinary talent of Gaius Benbow. Check out his link here http://www.gaiusbenbow.com/.

-Juan Carlos Pagan

Thanks man!

As Emigre turns 25, FontFeed celebrates with a big huge post (you’ve gotta click that), and World Famous Design Junkies gets buckwild. I saw this fantastically red book cover that you see above* and said OH my goodness this is a good cover. The colors. The colors are so lovely I can scarcely believe it. This doesn’t happen just every 10 minutes, so I said to myself then that it was time, OMFG!

Time for the very first World Famous Design Junkies color retrospective!

*If anyone wants to pick this book up for me, that’d be just super.

This book, designed and edited by Emigre co-​founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints, using original digital files, tracing Emigre’s devel opment from its early bitmap design days in the late 1980s through to the exper i mental layouts that defined the so called “Legibility Wars” of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s.

Emigre No.70 is a must have book for those who missed out on all the excitement the first time around and for those who have been long time Emigre fans alike. Any graphic design library would be incom plete without it.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies COLOR category – imagine that!

It is a powerful designer indeed who can not only set type, not only illustrate, but also pull the entire day-glo library out and put it in a blender and pour the contents into a Diary Queen Blizzard of a collection of works called ICONBLAST!

Your friends and mine, Minneapolis print duo Aesthetic Apparatus, conjure up a vast collection of test prints from all across their print library. As each color comes from each different print project, it is the skilled pulling of each bit of each unfinished test sheet that makes for a good final piece.

Some unnamed street artists (unless you’ve got some good graffiti interpretation skills) let loose the colorsplosion upon some unsuspecting cargo trains on Broadway and Johnson in North Minneapolis.

A color fantasy as seen through the eyes of OG graffiti superstar Futura 2000 – NOTE: the first comment on the post is from Lenny Futura himself!

Designer Dylan Mulvaney’s three-dimensional colortastic font for Manhattan Magazine is slick.

Another adventure into Minneapolis street art, this time up in Uptown. This is part of a gigantic collection of photos from Intermedia Arts – layer upon layer of lovely, lovely paint.

Photographer Jeff McLane places a color chart in the desert.

International photographer super-deluxe Erin Nicole Johnson captures Toronto’s own Honest Ed’s.

Next, we’ve got poster artist Tyler Stout with this fabulous Flight of the Conchords screenprint. Basically a billion colors, all of them precisely sliced.

During a camera battle for a colorful prize I can only imagine has something to do with the ruling of the entire universe, Akif Hakan Celebi manages to photograph a collection of naturally fantastic architectural colors on the streets of Turkey.

In a moment of genius that almost eclipses the rest of this set of underwater pictures, photographer James Cooper finds the distribution of pink spraypaint to be a new experience in the H2O.

This is mine. It is my favorite. It is a painting I acquired at the estate sale of the late James Burnley. The nunery and churchery is unsurpassed.

Aesop and the Brothers Grimm stories told with a neonic fantasmagorioum of color from who knows what dimension, as illustrated by Yiorgos Yiacos of 12×2 Design Group.

Producer / Artist / Rapper Pharrell Williams collaborates with International Superartist Takashi Murakami to create this Art Basel super-piece entitled “Simple Things” — 26,000 individual fine gems direct from the rainbow later and you’ve got Jacob the Jewelers most colorful (and expensive) project yet!

And of course, a “gigantic” post on World Famous Design Junkies wouldn’t be a complete post without the flea market – this one’s in Deutschland!

Click on through to those other sides or enjoy the gallery below!

So here we are, hello. You all remember the punk rock record shop Extreme Noise; the one World Famous Design Junkies had a mini tour in, right? If you don’t remember that, or would like a refresher, click this so hard: so hard click it. Then take a peek! What we’ve got here is a project by your friend and mine, designer and fashionista Sarah Kissell: she’s taken Extreme Noise and sterilized it. What is punk rock made of?

Studs and chords and stinky feet!

Hay there it’s Sarah Kissell! You know her. Here’s the most straight-laced, line-and-band, perfectly-set, graphiky-modern design project you’ll ever see presented to a punk rock client.

Extreme Noise — Identity System & Process Book

This is a proposed identity redesign for Extreme Noise, a Minneapolis-based, all volunteer, regionally recognized punk rock establishment specializing in selling records, tapes, cd’s, t-shirts, spikes and studs, hair dye, books and ‘zines.

My intention is to create a visual vocabulary and graphic system representational of a contemporary punk rock store — revisiting and remixing the essentials, while celebrating the material aesthetics, cultural spirit, and transgressional history of the 1970s/80s movement.

So nice! Buck the hell out of em. I’ve seen this project in real life and I say again it’s printed so precisely, cut so nice, gridded out so good – the grids, really, are the best. I love me some grids, and I’m glad the punk graphic world finally has some to work with.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies Under the Influence category – under the influence, but under the influence of what? Truly gridly.

Nick Sanchez has a design portfolio on the internet and indeed Nick Sanchez is a designer. I want to show you at least a couple things that he’s done. One of them is this book called “Designers on Design” which has a quote that goes “Try something else. That took me fucking forever to figure out.” – Chip Kidd. The other is the picture above: the mutant poster holder technique.

I swear not a week goes by where I don’t find a new way to hold a poster. You know the ones used most often: that one where the designer holds the poster with their hands, holding it up in front of them, covering up their face – then there’s the one where it’s just those black clips holding the poster up on the wall.

We’ll here’s a new one! It’s a mutated designer! Four hands for three posters – just fabulous I tell you! Now look at the other things Sanchez has for you!

This post is all up in the World Famous Design Junkies posters category.

So I was hanging out on the Japan side of the internet and I happened upon a design team by the name of COMMUNE. They’ve got some lovely designs, some unique explosions of color, and these fabulous New Years cards / business cards. They’re pressure printed! On some book board, no less. That means they are thick. 2mm thick.

You know what bookboard is? It’s in most of the books you see everyday. It’s basically just hard-packed cardboard, but specially made for the covers (and sides and backs) of books. All the books you have around your house simply have bookboard covered with nice paper or linen. For the most part, that is. Now take a look at these cards!

厚い、熱い2009年。
MORE SLAVER FOR YOUR USUAL DAYS!
今年の年賀状は、たくさんのヨダレモノ（おもしろいもの）が生まれることででてきたヨダレが、
どんどん溜まって大きな海ができるというストーリーの続き。

印刷の仕様は今年は熱い（厚い）年になるように、とにかく厚い紙をセレクト。
ハードカバーのブックの台紙によく使われる「チップボール」を貼り合わせた「CCボール」という2mm厚の紙に空押し。
光の向きによって見える文字の立体感がおもしろいモノになりました。
さらに丑年なので、ミルクバージョンも作成。
それにこの紙はきっと色あせると味が出ると思いますよ。

コンセプトも大切なんですが、今回は「モノ感」を大切にデザインしました。
数年前からプロダクトを作りたい想いがずっとあるんですが、
紙をとにかく厚くするだけで、「紙」から「モノ」、2Dから3Dになる。
MORE SLAVER FOR YOUR USUAL DAYS!のメッセージと共に、
このセミ・プロダクトを1年間部屋のどこかに飾ってもらえたらいいなぁ。

View the workers!

COMMUNE — 年賀状2009

New year card 2009 / 2008
Art Director：上田亮
Designer：上田亮
Printing Director：佐藤麻奈美

SLAVER!

These cards from the World Famous Design Junkies tiny category – regardless of the name, the category is generally a medium size. Don’t be fooled!

Oxfam: “A group of non-governmental organizations from three continents working worldwide to fight poverty and injustice.” Designers at HeyStudio: turnin up the visual heat. Tilman Solé y Verónica Fuerte of HEY bring you just the right formulae of letters-to-grenades. Ratio perfect. Take a look at the posters as well as the ephemera that remind the world how nice’n'design-conscious Oxfam can be.

Intermón Oxfam
Identidad para Intermón Oxfam jóvenes. El objetivo es renovar la imagen
y crear un mayor vínculo entre jóvenes e Intermón Oxfam.
Para conseguir un lenguaje más visual, las letras se convierten en ilustraciones
que aportan mayor significado a las palabras. Las letras/ilustraciones crean
una gráfica propia, directa y reinvidicativa. Los titulares se reducen a una palabra,
haciendo la comunicación más directa y rápida. Toda la identidad se trabaja
a una tinta negra sobre papeles de colores, creando un sistema económico
y fácil de producir.

Now in Swiss!

Branding project for Intermón Oxfam. The aim was to renew the image of Oxfam
and create an emotional link between the association and its young target.
To create a more visual language, the letters are converted into illustrations, which increases the signification of words and create a own graphical personality, direct and reinvidicative. Titles are reduced to one single word to communicate quicker and more directly. The all identity is based on one single black colour printed on different colour papers, to facilitate the production and lower costs.

HeyStudio is super fun! Take a peek at their ABOUT page to see a really fun animated gif of them doing a little diddy with letters! The lost art of giffery is not lost!

Take a peek at the rest of the World Famous Design Junkies typography category if you love the letter and the pictures and the letters made out of the pictures and so forth.

A super-simple boldfaced statement about the amount of ink you use when you use one font compared to another. Included are some of the more popular fonts worldwide, all of them using roman characters. Take a peek at how designer Matt Robinson does it. Ink for good, ink for evil, ink forever.

Measuring Type

A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface.

And while we’re on the topic, if you’d like a free font that will reduce your ink usage drastically – like if you work from home and have to print out pages of type n such, check out Eco Font – a hollowed-out version of Vera Sans by some Dutch folks.

Stay font finicky!

Not oft is there a three-dimensional, digital-based font that sits up to par with its closest analog neighbor. Here we’ve got a set of letters made for the inaugural issue of Manhattan Magazine. Fantabulous color collection in the set! Positive and negative shapes to spell out the content! So slick.

Letters to keep an eye on: T, Q, C, and of course, G!

Manhattan Magazine: The A to Z of NYC Design
Art Direction: Nathan Nedorostek

Display typography designed for the feature article in Manhattan Magazine’s premiere issue. Available in print and digitally. – DM

This is only a bite of the iceberg lettuce you’ll be eating up on when you visit Dylan Mulvaney‘s design portfolio. And if you’re one of those people who needs several courses to eat, World Famous Design Junkies got you covered. Feast your P and Q’s on the fonts category for your fill of typographic ingredients.

Whoa, rubylith. Rubylith is a material you can use for screenprinting. It’s a layer of red that blocks light, and a layer of clear that holds the red together. You cut into the red, peel it off, and you have a stencil left, being held together by the clear. This stencil you use to expose your photo-emulsion-coated screen which you then screenprint posters, shirts, ham napkins, or whatever you want with. Also, what this post is actually about is a hand-crafted font called Rubylith. Originally made for a handmade poster, now a fine set-o-letters. From the quite-fancy and nice pages of graphic designer Stefan Coisson.

Take care with the hand-made look. Volatile it is.

Up on Hiawatha. By the roadside there be thus a track: Hiawatha Ave & E 32nd St, Minneapolis, Minnesota And on that track there is a train with many wonders. Today we have a choppy stencil font used for many excellent letters. Do so view.

Photographed April 2nd at about 2PM.

It’s “Nova Sans.” It’s by Brazilian Francisco Martins. Check him out on his portfolio site there, or check basically full details below. Hear his words: ” I make a free interpretation of a musical style in forms printing, translating the world of bossa nova, an original print that brings these concepts in their ways.”

It’s a font called “Nova Sans.” The project which brought such a font about is called “Bossa Tipo Nova.” Bossa Nova is a musical style and / or movement, not to be confused with the Chevy Nova.

Wicked style. Feel the fury in full-on original text:

——————————
Projeto: Bossa Tipo Nova
Cliente: Eu mesmo
Data: 2006-hoje
Participação: design
Orientação: Hugo Werner e Rafael Neder
——————————

“Qualquer pensamento é necessariamente tradução.” (Jakobson)

Bossa Tipo Nova foi o nome dado ao meu projeto de graduação em design gráfico. Nele, faço uma livre interpretação de um estilo musical em formas tipográficas, traduzindo o universo da bossa nova, numa tipografia original que traz esses conceitos em suas formas.

“(…) a música também é um gênero de discurso que, como a tipografia, possui um código de registro que é matemático, abstrato, estruturado e proporcional.” (Bringhurst)

No desenvolvimento do projeto, restringi meu universo musical ao universo da bossa nova, nobre estilo brasileiro, o qual tenho grande apreço. Minha pesquisa então partiu para algo histórico e analítico, em que pude coletar histórias, nomes, lugares, letras e a visualidade criada para o estilo, marcada principalmente pelas capas da gravadora elenco.

Assim como no universo musical, fui obrigado a estreitar meu foco também no universo tipográfico, e foi quando procurei as tipografias que prometiam uma tradução semelhante, ou que partiam de campos abstratos para a forma em letras. Fui de Kurt Schwitter às fontes psicodélicas. O racionalismo da bauhaus e a Universal de Heberty Bayer também foram uma grande referência no projeto, uma vez que eu buscava a síntese e a simplicidade.

Listei também uma série de palavras chaves que me ajudariam a criar uma linha de raciocínio para o desenvolvimento do projeto:

leveza;

suavidade;

ondas;

curvas;

modulação;

linha melódica;

voz pequena;

fraseamento perfeito;

ritmo;

limpeza;

afinação;

síncope;

simplicidade;

ausência de vibratos;

poesia;

escala;

sutileza;

modernidade.

A partir dae, o cruzamento e sobreposição dos dados e informações da pesquisa foram suficientes para começar minha tipografia.

A exploração dos pontos chaves listados se deu principalmente num processo de sinestesia e percepção da forma. Os aspectos estruturais da tipografia desenvolvida foram impostos a partir de comparações de conceitos, analogias, experimentações empíricas e justaposição de informações.

Utilizando a tecnologia Opentype©, ela permitiu a criação de um set expandido para a fonte, contando opções diferentes de design para alguns caracteres (alternates), ligaduras, ornamentos e dingbats, todos em um mesmo arquivo de fonte.

Nova Sans faz uma referência ao estilo “modernista geométrico”, sendo aquele que não possui contrastes em seus traços, arcos circulares sem eixo e de serifas ausentes. Ela foi construída dentro de um sistema regular de grids geométricos, com módulos curvos e ondulais que se repetem ao longo do alfabeto.

Nova Sans foi desenvolvida apenas em caixa baixa já que se propõe como tradução de um estilo musical, e a partir do momento que não existe uma diferenciação dos caracteres enquanto da linguagem cantada, as caixas altas foram tomadas como desnecessárias nesse projeto e suas posições na tabela da fonte, bem como seu acesso pelo teclado, foram preenchidas com opções de alternates.

veja set completo aqui.

“(…) a música também é um gênero de discurso que, como a tipografia, possui um código de registro que é matemático, abstrato, estruturado e proporcional.” (Bringhurst)

“(…) The music is a genre of discourse, as the printer has a code of record that is mathematical, abstract, structured and proportionate. ” (Bringhurst)

That’s fresh. See info on the making of and of the final font, then buy the font at MyFonts.