Have you every been working on a project- a poster, a flyer, an album cover- and felt like you just couldn’t find the right font? The average person will get about 50 different fonts with the purchase of a computer and operating system- which is more than enough. Most people will recognize these well known typographic choices:

But for graphic designers, these simply won’t cut it. Which is why we have gigantic collections of fonts that could be used for every imaginable project. When we are trying to convey of sense of social responsibility mixed with a youthful enthusiasm- which font works best? When we are trying to make a logo that “looks sort of like the competition, but better” which font do we use? Ligatures? Small caps? There are millions of choices out there from small typographic foundries who sell sets for less than $50 to Large Foundries whose offerings can reach up to $2,500 euros (Like this one.)

There are also many websites offering free fonts for download, though these fonts present their own problems. First of all, you never actually know if a font is free because the creator of the font intended for it to be free, or if it was somehow circulated without his or her knowledge and using it for commercial purposes could later get you into trouble. Some sites, like Abstract fonts, have recently incorporated a tagging system for the fonts they offer, differentiating between, personal use, commercial use and distribution.

Secondly, free fonts are usually incomplete, which you don’t find out until you are trying to type a word with an accent, or use numbers or punctuation marks. That’s always a disappointing moment.

But we’ve seen a new trend emerge in the past couple of years- physical objects as type. I first noticed it a couple of years ago at a graphic design conference I attended in Mar de Plata, Argentina called TMGD. Outside the venue in a grassy field they had placed large letters lit up- TMDG.



It was like a sculpture and people were immediately drawn to them. I later saw a photo of these letters used on postcards advertising events for that weekend.

I have since seen many examples of the “font as object.”

A postcard for an art show, several campaigns (Corrado Mattresses, Imagining Mozambique) from this Italian design group, and on many of the “Do not disturb” segments on Fox television.

So next time you can’t find the perfect font, think about how you might create it yourself- from clay, wood, cloth, legos, branches, metal or whatever else you’d like. Then grab your camera and start shooting. Now you can avoid having to add any 3D effects in Photoshop and the final image will be much more original. Viva “font as object!”

The designs match the aesthetics and include the design elements that all of the superbly branded Vancouver 2010 promotional posters, banners, and clothing.

More that 1 million ticket in all will be printed. Each ticket will be printed with a holographic images, a watermark on the back, microprinting, and special ultraviolet light-sensitive fibres to reduce counterfeiting. The tickets are beign printed by the same specialty printer responsible for the 1996 and 2000 olympic games ticket.

To coincided with the release of the ticket designs VANOC has released more that 150,000 additional tickets for the winter Olympic events. The 21st Winter Olympics, will be held February 12-28, 2010, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with some events held in the resort town of Whistler nearby. Both the Olympic and Paralympic Games are being organized by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC).

Between ticket sales, tourist visits, and the construction efforts VANOC estimates this year alone the Games will inject more than a billion dollars into the economy, most of it here in Vancouver.

More on the ticket designs available at The Vancouver Sun.

Many of those who have gotten to know Vancouver have done so through conventions held at our beautiful Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre (VCEC). Located right on the water with a beautiful view of the harbor and conveniently situated in the heart of downtown, the VCEC offers visitors more than just a typical convention experience. In fact, about one-third of convention delegates enjoy themselves so much that they end up traveling to other parts of the province as part of their stay.

Opened on July 4, 1987, the existing Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre got its start as the Canada Pavilion during Expo 86. According to the VCEC website, “Within 10 years, the convention centre was at capacity with an obvious need for additional space, particularly as Vancouver became known as one of North America ’s leading meeting and convention destinations.” That’s why the PavCo. partnership has decided to build a new convention centre as an extension of the existing waterfront location. The 1.1 million sq. ft. project will triple the convention centre’s existing capacity and help generate an additional $107 million annually in delegate spending. On average, a delegate will spend about $350 per day during their visit to Vancouver, injecting national and international capital into our local economy. In 2010, the VCEC will also be home of the 2010 Olympic Games media and broadcast centres.

One of the most exciting and unique features of the convention centre aside from the spectacular floor-to-ceiling glass, is a six-acre living roof, one of the largest of its kind in the world. “The convention centre expansion not only breaks new ground in terms of design, it will also be a showcase for sustainability with such things as the living roof,” said Olga Ilich, Minister of Tourism, Sport and the Arts and minister responsible for the expansion of the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre. “It is all the more gratifying when a BC firm demonstrates the ability to provide the expertise and creativity required for leading edge projects like this.” The sustainable design of the living roof includes drainage and water recovery systems that will collect rainwater to irrigate the nearly 400,000 native plants and wild grasses that will create a downtown “urban oasis.” With sustainability making the transformation from noble ideal to marketable reality, it is no wonder that businesses, governments and individual citizens are demanding more environmentally-geared projects- especially those financed with public funding.

The new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco opened in late September 2008 with a similarly green aspirations- a living roof covering almost 2 acres. It is precisely the addition of such a unique environmental feature that has begun to draw a different kind of crowd. The wait to get into the museum on their monthly “free day” in late December was over 2 hours long.

The Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre will be adding 335,000 square feet of function space to the existing 133,000 square feet, for a combined total of 468,000 square feet of meeting, exhibition, ballroom and theatre space. In addition to the employment opportunities created during construction, the project will generate more than 7,500 direct and indirect full-time jobs once it is opened in 2009. With additional public amenities including more accessible outdoor and plaza space, retail space and restaurants one can only assume that this long-awaited expansion will be a source of pride for Vancouverites as well as a source of joy and inspiration for those who have the privilege to visit.

However, technology is also inadvertently responsible for an absence of the human touch, as these days few things are rarely hand-made. Sentiments for loved ones are better expressed by store bought greetings cards and a myriad of fast food restaurants have made it easier than ever to avoid preparing home cooked meals. Instead of stopping by a friend or neighbor’s house we prefer to send a mass email, updating everyone at once as to how we are doing. Given the state of things it seems harder and harder to maintain that personal touch.

One small but interesting idea to combat this trend is to make a font from your very own handwriting. After all, so many of us are using the computer more and more, and handwriting all those Christmas letters or thank you notes for a wedding seems like an impossible task. What about sending out an electronic invoice with your signature confirming a received payment? Wouldn’t printing name tags for an event or labels for scrapbooking seem a lot more personal if they were printed with your own handwriting?

Now some of you may have heard of Fontographer, the most famous and most popular font creation software. Those people probably also know that the most common Bézier drawing programs used for vector output are Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. But most people probably don’t know that it was Fontographer, not Illustrator or Freehand, that was the first Mac-based Bézier drawing program back in 1986. Since then Fontographer has become an important tool for many designers, however at a price of $350 US, it has remained out of reach for most non-designers.This is where the website Fontifier comes in. With the Fontifier website you print out a template, write in each letter, number and symbol (they have a template with accents for writing words in other languages as well), scan the page and Fontifier does the rest! They show you a sample of your new handwriting font and if you like it, for only $9 you can buy the TrueType format (for PC or Mac) that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica or Times New Roman.

I went through the process and found it to be very easy. A couple of my letters didn’t turn out quite the way I had expected (a really fat capital “K” and a lower case “a” without a hole), so after scanning the page in .TIFF format I edited the few screwy letters in Photoshop so that they were consistent with the rest of my casual and spunky print, thus avoiding having to rewrite all the characters on a new template. The final result spreads the letters out a little more than my actual handwriting, but I can easily adjust that in Illustrator. I have used my new font several times already and am glad to have it as one more tool in my arsenal. So if you are looking to add a personal touch to any digital document, try this idea out and see how it feels to have a your very own font!

However, it is commonly understood that while annual and financial reports are a necessary byproduct of all public companies and many privately held ones, most shareholders don’t relish reading them. In fact, Glenn Curtis states in an article for Investopedia, a Forbes media company, that when these reports begin to “clog up mailboxes across the country… a large percentage of shareholders might toss this document in the trash can when they receive it.”

So what should a company do to create a compelling financial report, one that any recipient would find intriguing, even delightful? When faced with just such a dilemma, Podravka, the biggest food company in South-East Europe decided to hire the company Bruketa & Zinić to spice up their annual report. Called “Well Done,” the report consists of two parts: a big book containing numbers and a report of an independent auditor and a small booklet that is inserted inside the big one that contains the very heart of Podravka as a brand: great Podravka’s recipes.

This smaller inner book contains blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that when wrapped in tinfoil and set to bake in an oven at 100 degrees Celsius will reveal both recipes and illustrations of the previously empty plates filled with food.

To see more photos and read in detail about the project, visit Dezeen. The comments are also interesting to read as they reflect everything from praise to a somewhat misinformed outrage about possible environmental impact. I found this project to be an inspiring piece of communication design and it has certainly created a buzz, which is of course a great form of promotion. At the very least I hope it will encourage companies and individuals to introduce and implement creative ideas in traditionally non-creative realms.

Of course all of these tool and tricks must be used with caution. The internet is full of sites where people show off their photography (Deviant Art, Flickr) and in viewing these you are likely to come across many cityscapes that have been converted into candy-land renditions of an acid flashback. Tweaked beyond repair, these photos are the evidence that in addition to fancy software and a fast computer, in order to produce a truly great photograph one must also possess the more traditional aesthetic mindset which naturally leads to excellent composition, interesting subject matter, appropriate lighting and good taste in general.

Now, even if you have all of the aforementioned items checked off your list, if the photo is out of focus, you’re pretty much out of luck. Of course you can try to work around it, use the Sharpen tool, make a mask and use the Healing tool on the background to increase the contrast between the two…but ultimately, even the most talented photo editor will agree, there is little to be done with an out of focus photo. And in most instances, we cannot go back to that time and place to capture that same magical moment.

This is where Adobe comes into the story, the protagonist and superhero ready to lend an able hand. Or at least, ready to tell you about a prototype of a piece of hardware that they will encourage camera companies to manufacture in order to use a new tool they would like to introduce in their software in say, 10 years. But the hope is there, and the prototype is oh-so-cool, so let’s take a look.

Adobe, most well known for programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, seems to have effectively taken over the market when it come to graphic design. With their purchase of Macromedia in 2005, Adobe now offers a slew of programs to do anything from creating animated banner ads for cell phones to complex websites to laying out entire newspapers and magazines. To stay competitive, the researchers at Adobe came up with a camera lens unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It has 19 small lenses and prisms that capture the same scene from slightly different angles in order to create a “3D photograph,” according to Dave Story in a French press conference in October of 2007.

At first glance, Story shows19 versions of the same photograph, and the difference is so slight that it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. Then he explains, “With that we are able to determine the depth of every pixel in the scene.” Story then shifts the focus from the statue in the midground to the statue in the foreground, then again to focus on the wall in the background, changing the depth of field in a matter of seconds. Very cool. Then he keeps the statue in the midground in focus and the foreground out of focus and goes in with a “focus tool” and essentially “paints” the parts of the image he wants to be in focus. Conversely, he later goes in with an “unfocus” tool and “again “paints” the areas he would like to be out of focus. The result is really impressive- imagine taking just one photo and having all these options that before would have been utterly impossible to do with a camera alone and difficult, messy and unprofessional to do with the current tools available in Photoshop.

There are those who are drooling all over themselves waiting for this new fly-eye lens to come out on the market, and there are those are ideologically opposed, claiming that soon no one will need to have any skill whatsoever to take a decent photograph. Watch the videos yourself and see what you think. The French video is pretty low- quality but is a longer explanation and shows the “focus” tool I mentioned. The NotCot site has a higher quality video but it is much shorter and includes less explanation.

Along with those are the pieces of paper with bent corners which could jam the machine, and my personal favorite- when a solid color is streaking we flood an entire 11 x 17 page with each component color: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These vibrant rectangles of color, sometimes printed over a dozen times to ensure correct saturation, float down into our recycling bins with the same indifference as any other sheet that has already served its purpose.

The bins are then emptied, the recycling collected, and we begin again. But if we have learned anything about the basics of environmentalism, recycle is only the third step in that simplified mantra from grade school- Reduce, Reuse, Recyle. What other uses might this excess of paper have? What could be rescued and utilized a second or third time before a trip to the recycling plant?

Here are a few fun ideas for reusing paper:

- Collect blank sheets and cut into smaller sizes to use as scrap paper or staple into a small notebook. This site has some simple instructions.

- Anyone who knows how to do screen printing or lithography could easily use the colored sheets for posters, flyers, artwork or wallpaper.

- Origami! The stiffer, high quality paper is great for folding. Cranes, paper cups, frogs- you name it. This origami site shows how to make everything from a ballerina to a badger all with printable PDF instructions.

- Apparently many dog shelters use shredded paper as bedding, so call a few in your area to see if they’d like your paper to help keep their dogs comfy and warm.

- Paper planes. Everyone knows how to make one, but there are tons of sites imparting their wisdom as well. This site even includes a paper helicopter, paper blimp, and paper Frisbee, along with the fiercely named Lightning Plane, Sabertooth Plane and the author’s original- Dragon Plane.

- Lastly, if you are an extremely talented and detail-oriented artist, like Danish artist Peter Callesen*, you can take a simple sheet of A4 paper and a pair of scissors and turn it into a master work of art that brings you fame and fortune. Click here to see more examples of Peter’s stunning and original work.

* Note- I first saw photos of Peter’s work in a chain email, though the information was incorrect. The email claimed that they were works of art from many different artists in a contest run by Hirshhorn Modern Art Gallery in Washington D.C. to see what could be done with a single sheet of paper. There never was such a contest, all works were done by Peter Callesen.