From the Free Font Manifesto: “Most typefaces created in the free font movement are designed to serve relatively small or underserved linguistic communities. They have an explicit social purpose, and they are intended to offer the world not a luxurious outpouring of typographic variation but rather the basics for maintaining literacy and communication within a society.”
Category: art
“This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.” And it’s made mostly of gummi bears, licorice, and other confections. [via rebecca blood]
There’s going to be a movie about Helvetica, the typeface you see pretty much everywhere. “Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”
“I am so tired of books about World War II and the Holocaust being tarted up as nostalgia porn.” Bookslut picks the worst book covers from last year.
Marc Singer reviews the MOME Spring/Summer 2006 comics anthology, and riffs on the state of today’s independent comics: “When comics aspire to the stature of literature or art they have to succeed as literature or art, not as not superheroes.” There’s some great discussion there in the comments, where Kevin Huizenga and some others weigh in.
Cinephiles and typophiles might like this growing collection of some of the most original main title sequence designs. [via do]
When I was at the Atlanta History Center on Monday for the exhibit of Martin Luther King’s papers, one particular item really caught my eye: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book!! I wrote myself a note to look for it, and I’m glad I was able to track it down. [via bully says]
Here’s a nice mock-up of the iPhone. This is a nice version featuring professional, rounded corners (ahem).
The Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain made a comic book about Fair Use. Law professor James Boyle talked with NPR about it.
Etsy, which is something like an eBay for hand-crafted goods, just opened a storefront/ lab. It will house the headquarters as well as some space for workshops, galleries, etc.
There are now over 250 games in the Flickr pool called DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play. There’s a new MacWorld game, recumbent bicycle racing, UNIX SysAdmin Adventure, the New Yorker game, Cool Hand Luke, and lots of other good ones.
Photos of surprisingly colorful and exuberant bus stop architecture from the old Soviet Union.
A collection of photos from College Photographer of the Year, Matt Eich.
The British Library lets you browse some classic primary texts online. They’ve got works like Carroll’s original Alice story with his own handwriting and illustrations, Mercatur’s first maps of Europe, and one of Mozart’s last notebooks.
Metacritic scraped the best-of lists from all the major film review publications and presents the aggregated critical favorites from 2006. United 93 and Army of Shadows came out on top.
TMN presents another cool photo gallery, this one featuring aerial shots of Paris.
Brian K. Vaughan on breaking into comics: “Oh, and “writer’s block” is just another word for video games. If you want to be a writer, get writing, you lazy bastards.”
Mark Larson 