New lecture posted online (in 3 parts) by whiz kid Adam Greenfield of Do Projects and former design director at Nokia. Called “Becoming Real”, Adam chronicles how and why certain projects fail while others succeed.

Produced by the kind folks at AQ. Worth a watch- you’ll learn crazy stuff.

It’s a bit less than a week until the House Industries lecture event here in Tokyo. I would like to welcome Entropy Design and Idea Magazine as sponsors.

Giant thank you(!!!)s to the Cannons and to Muroga-san at Idea Magazine for sponsoring the event!

In a rare and intimate one-night event, apparel/book/font designer, publisher, and manufacturer of design objects, Andy Cruz of House Industries will speak about his work and House’s most recent collaboration with the estate of Charles and Ray Eames.

As a partner in the cutting edge design phenomenon House Industries, Andy has helped steer the course of visual culture over the past fifteen years, creating design work with toes dipped liberally in fine art, Modern design, vernacular commercial art, and brand-oriented graphic design. See the past and the future collide and how the aesthetic of tomorrow will emerge!

Friday, September 17 2010
Doors Open: 19:00
Presentation / Q&A: 19:30 – 20:00
Dinner: 20:00

Oakwood Premier Tokyo Midtown
Address: Akasaka Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052
Map: Click here.
Telephone: 03-5412-3131
Fee: ¥3,500 (Advance) ¥4,500 (Door)
Includes presentation, light buffet dinner, drink, limited edition publication and limited edition print.
Language: English with Japanese Interpretation

RSVP NECESSARY
Email info@nonaca.net before Friday, Sept 10. 6pm.
Advance payment can be made here:

More: nonaca.net

The latest from the amazing Tokyo-based independent art publisher edition nord, a selection of work by Tadashi Kawamata.

box:198mm x 150mm / 64 cards in color / poster: b/w, 786mm x 537mm
Edition of 1000 each

Photographs and Text by Tadashi Kawamata
Selection by Shin Akiyama
Design by Shin Akiyama + Takuya Seki / schtucco
Translation by Tohru Horiguchi
Printed by Sun M Color
Printing direction by Seijiro Kori
Assembled by chiku chiku laboratory

Eli Carrico updates and gives up the goods!

New interview with Chris Palmieri, Craig Mod and myself in Web Designing.

featuring:

Critical Mass
Compiled by Ian Lynam + Idea magazine

A 100-page inquiry into contemporary critical practices in graphic design featuring: 
Mark Owens, Zak Kyes, Jon Sueda, Brian Roettinger, Daniel Eatock, Scott Ponik, Michael Worthington, Yasmin Khan, and Metahaven.

The feature includes two new lengthy essays:

Subterranean Modernism: A Critical Retrospective
By Randy Nakamura + Ian Lynam

On the Uselessness of Design Criticism 
by Randy Nakamura

Critical Mass offers a comprehensive overview of not only critical graphic design practices, but a critical look at the recent history of graphic design, citing undercurrents of informed practice and the effects of historical influence.

New typeface release from Wordshape/MyFonts:

Cooper Black Condensed is a less wide, but not squished variation on Cooper Black.

The history of this typeface:

Cooper Black, the most famous and successful of Oswald Cooper’s type designs was released in 1920, following a year of development fleshing out the weight of the typeface and filling out the full character set. Cooper redrew the lowercase characters multiple times, toying with the rounded forms of the “m” and “n” and engaged in a lively debate with Barnhart Bros. & Spindler’s General Manager Richard N. McArthur over the final form as McArthur requested that the typeface be drawn bolder and bolder. Cooper famously said the face was “for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers”, and the public agreed. Sales of Cooper Black were voluminous, and Barnhart Brothers & Spindler had a difficult time keeping up with the demand for the typeface. Conservative typographers were critical of Cooper Black, though it was overwhelmingly popular, helping to shape the American advertising landscape through the 1920s and 1930s.

1925 saw the release of Cooper Black Condensed, a “condensed but not squeezed” variation on the Cooper Black theme. McArthur and Cooper had the usual lively back-and-forth over the shapes of some of the letterforms, in particularly the uppercase “Q”, resulting in a thoroughly accomplished alphabet. The first showing specimen of Cooper Black Condensed compared the new face with Cooper Black, showing that it was 20 less wide and that it promised to “show something of gentility while being able to spit on its hands and make itself useful”.

This typeface is the result of researching and faithfully redrawing characters from Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the typeface. The typeface includes the full range of punctuation and diacritics that fill out a full character set. The typeface has been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Interno is the latest typographic offering from Wordshape.

Interno is a headline typeface built from a Walter Ballmer Olivetti logo exploration drawn sometime in 1960. Work on Interno commenced in 2006, but was soon abandoned. In 2009, Eli Carrico picked it up and ran with it, completing Interno 1. I picked through Eli’s development stages of the typeface and edited together a slightly different version, Interno 2, utilizing a mix of development characters and original characters.

Interno is Italian for internal (or at least that is what the translation widget told us). A great deal of the classic Olivetti design was down in-house (i.e. internal). Also, the typeface has internal switchbacks reminiscent of a paperclip. Interno sounds a bit like “turning inside” phonetically(In-Turn-O). Additionally, Interno takes the first letter and last letter of Olivetti and flips it.

I’m super-amped to announce the public release of Eli Carrico’s Black-Out Stencil typeface via Wordshape/MyFonts.

Black-Out was used for the cover and interior of the Barbara Bestor book, Bohemian Modern, designed by Eli and Michael Worthington a few years ago over at Counterspace, a stunning book about L.A. architecture and interiors. Since then, it’s seen super-limited use by a select few folks, but Eli decided (with a little prodding) that the time was nigh for public release.

A chunky mix of geometric stencil, system-based slab serif, and a unique feel that falls somewhere between 1967 and the year 3000, Black-Out will sock you in the privates and run off with your money. Or something.