The Donut Project

This past weekend I have the delightful experience of going to Orange Beautiful’s new studio/shop in Chicago (located on Damen Ave, right off the Brown line). I’ve been following Emily (the wonder mind behind Orange Beautiful) via The Scoop for several months now, and couldn’t wait to see her shop with my own eyes. I felt like a kid in a candy store…except with paper goods! Emily creates simple, yet beautiful little pieces…that have a little quirkiness to them that I adore. She letterpresses by hand in the studio and has some wonderful bound journals/photo albums. She has a selection of other designer/artist’s pieces to please the eye as well. It was a struggle to decide what to purchase!

If you’re in the Chicago area, I highly recommend checking out the shop. And if you’re not in the area, don’t worry! Orange Beautiful sells online too!

Thanks again to Emily for letting me poke around through your shop and studio, and for the sneak peak at limited prints! Also to fellow TDP-er Ricky, for trucking through the ridiculous heat so I could visit the shop :)

For those of you who haven’t had their taste of summer vacation yet take this moment to travel from New York to San Francisco with this viral video from Levis. The catchy tune you are hearing is titled “Home” by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros coming from their 2009 album “Up From Below” (a personal favorite of mine). Also check out the route they traveled.

If you’re looking for a gift for me, I’ll take one of these sweet Chicago L-Shirts.

If you know Chicago, you know the ‘L’. And now you can wear it.

The current CTA ‘L’ signage is a modification of the original 1969 design, known as the “Kennedy-Dan Ryan” signage, set in Helvetica and color-coded to match the eight corresponding CTA ‘L’ lines.

Chicago pride is induced by the kinship we feel with our neighborhoods and the transit lines that connect them. That sense of pride, coupled with our affection for typography and design, have inspired us to create this series of transit t-shirts (also known as L-Shirts).

Currently, the only stops available for sale are the four Chicago Avenue stops along the Red, Blue, Brown and Purple lines. We hope to have more available in the future.

I’m a blue-liner, so blue please. Buy shirts at www.chicagolshirts.com.

Everyone is somewhat familiar with Twitter. We all see various updates and statuses from our friends, family and co-workers. Many times there is a link posted in a tweet too. This is happening more and more with companies jumping on the social media bandwagon. In most cases, we have to go to each link individually, jumping back and forth between the twitter feed and the posted link.

Enter Flipboard. This iPad app takes care of that jarring experience and creates a digital magazine style output of your Twitter feed. No matter what type of content is shared via a tweet, Flipboard displays it appropriately. It is also possible to pull your Facebook account into Flipboard. At the writing of this post, their servers were having issues so I could not test the Facebook part. In addition to your own Twitter feed, Flipboard also has some nice built-in sets of feeds (design, style, tech, etc.)

The overall interface is great. Great typography, very intuitive. The price – FREE!
This is the sort of app that makes having an iPad justifiable.

It is also important to note that Teehan+Lax out of Toronto have a similar idea in the works too. It’s called TweetMag. Knowing Teehan+Lax, this app will be great and will give Flipboard a run for its money.

iTunes Link

Join the School of Visual Communication Design in a celebration of the life and creative spirit of Eric May in an exhibition of his work from Type High Press. August 4–21, 2010

Location:
The show is to be held at the Downtown Gallery located at: 141 East Main Street in the heart of Kent, Ohio. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Friday 12-5 PM and Saturday 10-4 PM

Downtown Gallery
141 East Main Street
Kent, Ohio 44240

Reception:
A reception, open to the public, will be held at Saturday, August 14, 2010, 6pm-9pm

For more information on the show visit theericmayproject.com or vcd.kent.edu

This is not the A-frame you stayed in during that summer at church camp. The Allendale House known as “A Cabin of Curiosities” is the combination of three sections of A-frame linked together.

“The house aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section by augmenting and revealing the extreme proportion in the vertical direction”

The interior of the cabin utilizes exposed storage and open shelving to fill the odd shape of the space and to square the rooms off. No details were spared on this cabin in the woods. See more photos of the Allendale and project renderings at wojr.org

If there was ever a Lite-Brite for adults this is it. Beck’s, DJ Cheeba and Outside Line studios collaborate to create an interactive music and light experience. As Cheeba pulls the pump a sample and custom flash application are triggered to change the sound and display. Where can I get one of these?

Via cpluv

From The Smithsonian Museum comes “Spacesuits.” A look into the development and history of the suits that helped take man into outer space. This book features dramatic photographs of the Smithsonian’s collection, as well as never-before-published historical images of spacesuit development and testing—range-of-motion studies (reminiscent of old Henry Dreyfuss studies). Be the first to own a copy of this amazing collection. Purchase your copy of Spacesuits here.

Unless you live under a rock in the deepest part of the ocean with no internet connection, you’re probably atleast semi-aware of the Old Spice online phenomenon that happened this week, which we tweeted about several times.

It all started with a few clever commercials that were very well received online over the past few months. The Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa) is a hyper-masculine character along the lines of the many legends of Chuck Norris, who claims that using Old Spice body wash will make your man smell like he looks like him.

This week, Old Spice (and ad firm Wieden+Kennedy) took this already successful campaign and brought it to the people. Old Spice guy began answering questions from Facebook, Twitter & the rest of the internet with short 20-60 second videos wearing just a towel in his bathroom. He made videos for some of the top blogs online, some top celebrities, and many everyday folks.

In all, by my count, they produced 183 videos over the course of two days, posting them in real time. Many of the responses were posted less than an hour after the users’ questions. With this many videos, it’d be easy to be repetitive and get tired, but the writing and delivery as so well executed you can spend hours of your day watching these.

We’ve selected five of our favorites. Continue reading to see them, including a back & forth between Alyssa Milano which included him actually sending her flowers and one true-life marriage proposal (She said yes).

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This Fall The Cooper Union will join forces with the Type Directors Club to offer a Certificate in Typeface Design. Principles, techniques, and history are just some of the areas in which the program aims to take its participants. For more detail check out coopertype.org