This is what just happened when I saw the lovely little Nevis (hello Nevis!), a beautiful geometric font designed by the very talented Bournemouth-based designer Ed Merrit. It’s a stubborn little typeface, strong yet fun and friendly and very versatile. Ed seems to be quite generously “selling” (at two pounds a pop, it seems more like giving out to me) some gorgeous other typefaces such as the sturdy Eiger and the Asian-inspired Akashi, so it’s definitely worth going over to his site for a look and a drool. Nice one Ed.

It’s also worth seeing for the funny fact that after dropping out of university and “didn’t have to take the normal classes“, he studied calligraphy, which may go some way to explain the efforts Apple has put  into displaying type properly on their products. I quote, “I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.”

Ha!

(Note the fact he is fuelling the fire of the san serif/sans serif/sans-serif debate… But that’s another story.)

See for yourself below.

While undergoing a larger project on the theme of movie-going, they took a series of shots of abandonned old movie houses. The photography is stunning… Go see for yourself on their website.

Today my lovely friend Anna, who runs the homemade food blog Hungry Hollowaiians and knows how much I love my type, brought to my attention the brilliant initiative that is the Wood Type Revival website.

A graphic design project based in Pittsburgh and run by designers Matt Braun and Matt Griffin, Wood Type Revival was born as a kickstarter project and saw the light of day just a couple of months ago. It does just what it says on the tin – Braun and Griffin aim to find rare wood type fonts, digitise them, and sell them on the website. Not only are they giving a new life to some beautiful old faces that wouldn’t otherwise be found on the web, they also conserve the quality of the objects by including a font that conserves the distressed aspect of the wood, should you choose to use that version.

I love everything about this initiative, and just when I thought I couldn’t like it more, I found the lovely Gothic Open Shaded… sigh.

You can also their first free font, Fatboy Husky, here.

Whether it’s in historical Greenwich Village, trendy Williamsburg, stunning Red Hook, or tourist-laden Little Italy, New York is undoubtedly a city you want to get lost in and find hidden little gems in side streets… And that’s just what I did when I was over this past week, taking photos or murals, signs, and shop fronts that I found interesting. Here is a small selection of the dozens I got… please excuse the quality of the photos.

I could look at his prints for hours.

His work speaks for itself, so go have a look over on his photography website.

You can get YWFT Pello here.

It was brought to my attention by the uber-talented illustrator Jessica Hische, one of my favourite contemporary designers, who is curating this week’s Design Envy section on the AIGA website.

It’s a wedding invite designed by Kelli Anderson, for her muso friends. Not content with just being beautifully designed, the invitation is also made to be malleable into a record player, with the flexidisc record included. It’s amazing. You can read about the full project over on Kelli Anderson’s website.

Paper Record Player from kellianderson on Vimeo.