When Mike Monteiro and Erika Hall cofounded Mule Design, neither of them knew anything about the business of design — that is, how to sell it to and deal with clients. They made plenty of mistakes, so he’d like to tell you a few things to avoid in your career as a professional designer.
A few years ago Yves Peters noticed a demand from people to know what typefaces are being used on movie posters. So he started blogging about it on the FontFeed blog.
When you start looking at movie posters all the time, you start noticing some pretty major trends. If the movie is a comedy, it will most likely include large, chubby red or blue type. If it’s a romantic comedy, the font will mostly likely be serif. Indie films? More than likely you can expect some sort of hand-rendered Helvetica or Gotham. But, Yves notes, all type aside, if there are two people laying in bed on the movie poster. You can almost be guaranteed there won’t be any action.
First of all, I think you need to know that, by his own admission, Heath loves the word “verdant.” Because he likes green, growing things. In fact, as attendees of his session discovered, he seems to like vibrant, growing, dynamic things of all types. Especially when they involve community, creativity, and the ways people can nurture both by diving further into their neighborhoods, learning more about the people around them.
Morag Myerscough talked about many things today. Among these a common point that she came back to was her various obsessions. These obsessions are important because they are what ended up being the definitions of her own style. Which when you think about it makes sense.
Michael Johnson set up his presentation today by giving us an outline of what he was going to be talking about. Going from a brief history and overall philosophy of PIXAR to how they work and function as a studio. He delves into how PIXAR started as a spin off of Lucas Film, and eventually merging with Disney.
Thomas Castro of Lust gave an eye-opening talk on the incredible work they are doing in what he calls “digital anthropology.”
Just as her url claims, Jessica Hische is awesome. The self-described Letterer, Illustrator, Crazy Cat Lady, and Secret Web Designer opened today’s TYPO SF with an inspiring overview of how, in just a few short years, she’s come from being “that drop cap girl,” and “that should I work for free flowchart girl,” to being one of today’s most well known and loved designers.
Rod Cavazos kicked things off in what seemed to be his typical, unorthodox style by asking his audience to turn on their cell phones and jack up the volume. If your phone rings, you get a prize. He also made it clear that he was not at the conference to uplift or inspire his audience. He claimed he was only at TYPO for show and tell, but that’s arguable. Rod was charming and his talk was undeniably inspiring.
John Berry drew an audience by discussing a problem every designer encounters. No budget and possibly even *gasp* Kinko’s printing.
Juliette Bellocq of design studio Handbuilt offered a fascinating look at the inspirations and aspirations that drive her work, most importantly artist and designer (and nun) Corita Kent.
After a brief intro to Kent’s art and vision, Juliette provided a kind of conceptual schema for her own design work, breaking it into four categories:
Oliver Reichenstein started his talk by showing the famous Mad Men carousel clip (which you can see here ). Immediately after, he showed the same clip, only it replaced the slide photos with screenshots of the Facebook timeline. It was a clever way to illustrate the stark emotional difference between analog and digital. But why was this the case and where does this need come from? “Is it because Facebook sucks? Because it is badly designed? Because it looks unreal?” We are surrounded with the trend of analog, skeuomorphic design. He argues that such a thing is okay as long as they uphold their promise (he cited the new iPad app, Paper, being a good example).
Educator and design writer Carolina de Bartolo led a workshop on setting body text to perform well under a number of design constraints. The education was aimed at those new to macrotypography, or those just hoping to polish their skills in working with long texts.
