Cinco Design (the studio that I work at) recently finished a major overhaul of our web site. We have been relatively quiet in the past while we worked back channels to success. With this site, we are now ready for primetime coverage.

EA calls us when they need great creative and strategy for their game covers. Microsoft calls us any time they are refreshing one of their identities. Nike calls us for all sorts of cool projects. Nixon watches basically shares a brain with us.

We love art directing photo shoots, building brand strategies and creating art for big, multi-application rollouts. We are building up our product design team to continue making amazing objects.

I have been at Cinco for almost 6 years, and I think the team is ready for a giant leap upward.

Cinco Design Office

AceJet 180’s Found Type Friday is especially good this week.

India’s Accidental Type Billboards

[I promised myself to never apologize for not posting since it inevitably leads to never-ending pleading for mercy. I’m so sorry.]

The reason for the hiatus has been a part of my personal reconciliation with the This Day in Type main site. It has been a success by being a place for people to contribute and experiment with type, but it has been a failure by not generating a wider audience or creating an impact on design as a whole. I think the main reason for this failure is my own inexperience in generating deep and cohesive web sites. I can picture in my mind or in Illustrator how to solve many of the problems with the site, but I can’t fix them myself due to a lack of webdev training or money to throw at the problem.

As of today, I am going to put the main site into deep freeze (while still allowing everyone to access everything that has already been published). It has been fun to try this, and I want to thank all the people who posted artwork. It was always great to open up my inbox and see what people were making! The whole experience makes me want to improve my own skills and come back to this project or new ideas in the future.

The potential renaissance of the site (as I see it) would be closer to something like Screenalicious, with easy access to voting, commenting, alternate artwork and would include dynamic updating. The calendar would integrate into the page, and whole site would be more accessible and easy to navigate. If anyone out there wants to collaborate in developing such a piece of work, email me! I don’t want to kill the site, but I don’t want it to limp along either.

Always a great resource for casual fonts and revivals, Flat-it has released three new offerings for August: Nothing (previewed here), Bistro Mono and Rouge.

Brand new typeface Capricorn lands somewhere between a geometric and humanist sans. It carries a warmth of Jens’ hand using all caps, but it also can come off cool and a little repetitive in smaller text blocks.

Capricorn by Jens Gehlhaar.

Graduating never looked better. Congrats Dan, and I can’t wait to use it.

Update: Here’s all the (almost) graduates’ designs from University of Reading.

MyFonts just started their own type designer interview series, beginning with Hans Samuelson of Stockholm, Sweden.

Creative Characters

Process Type Foundry has released the new linear sans Seravek. They optimized it for identity, signage and information graphics. Based on my own background, I can see it becoming a favorite in corporate ID systems. It has a precision that doesn’t come off cold, and its light weights are quite inviting. The italics are especially graceful for a grotesk, with nice informal arcs in the w, y, etc.. I am not as sure about the heavier weights. They don’t feel quite as cohesive, especially surrounding the capital M, but I haven’t actually used this typeface yet. If anyone has some real world samples, I’d love to see them.

Carlos Sulloa’s web site is one of the coolest conceptual flash sites I have seen in a while. And I am rather ambivalent to flash, so kudos. Check out the second icon at the bottom—it’s a dimensional calendar concept that makes my little calendar look sorry. Have fun driving!

I have been meaning to post these photos for a little while so that people could get a better sense of the depth of sugar for my July 16 artwork.

The font Cutiful seemed ideal for the job of conveying anything saccharine. I wanted to buy it for a separate project anyway, so I purchased it that night (god bless instant downloads). I then set sweet sixteen in the type, but felt that it wasn’t showing off the great descenders in the font. Things started clicking in my brain between a few different ideas I had tinkered with earlier, and I went to work stenciling letters and applying sugar. I think I will play some more with this technique so long as my wife doesn’t use all the sugar for her jams. I may have to move over to flocking shirts if that happens!

Cutiful itself is pretty well balanced and useful, especially all lowercase. My only major quibble with the design is with the lowercase r. It seems to have a poorly balanced curve at the top-most arc that creates a little deflation zone at large sizes.