Already one of my favourite typefaces, my love for Newzald runs deep. It comes in a selection of weights and works as well at 10pt as it does at 72pt. Also there is a great article on I love typography called Moleskin to Market about the construction of the face.

There aren’t many who don’t have an opinion about Helvetica, it is the Marmite of typefaces. I’m a lover (I’ve painted a canvas & even built a Helvetica/Twitter Mashup dedicated to it) – for me, it’s one of those fonts that works anywhere and everywhere, I restrain myself from using it too much, but it is a true icon of beautiful design.

Caslon & I have a long standing relationship. It’s a beautiful transitional typeface. I used it most recently on an iPhone wallpaper for Type Nuts (which by the way is a great resource for type inspired wallpapers for your desktop/iPhone)

I think the first time I saw Soho Gothic was when i stumbled on the Promotional video on Vimeo, What a way to advertise a font! It’s a modern font with sticking power and it has lots of very tasty weights – including slabs (Ultra and Thin are awesome!)

Other faces that I was really strongly considering but got pipped at the post for one reason or another:

• Clarendon makes for awesome headlines!
• Din great sans-serif face, works well as signage, i’ve used it for a few ID’s in the past.
• Futura one of my all time fave fonts (used it recently when I rebranded GeorgeWiscombe.com
• Garamond works really well at (fairly) small size so tend to use it when there is a lot of body copy. On a side note, this is one of my Dads favourite typefaces (thought I would share)
• Gotham I’m pretty new to the H&J foundry (only just got a few of there faces at work) but I’m already in love with this face. Brilliant in all-caps.
• Mercury as mentioned earlier only really just got my mits on this face, it’s a good solid face.
• Sabon is another face that works well in body copy
• Trajan massively overused but still a great face, with an awesome history
• VAG Rounded in my (humble) opinion the best rounded typeface out there.

If you could only choose 4 faces, which would they be?

I thought I would share my thoughts after building my Twitter-Mashup,
Helveti-Tweet. I adopted new methodologies for this project and it’s been an absolute breeze, this is as a set of semi-rules to building a mashup/app.

Keep it simple, plan it & then run with it!

Big projects have a habit of dragging on over months, even years. Keeping a project simple is often the enabler, especially for those of us that aren’t blessed with a 9-5. Before you start (yes, from personal experiences, that did have to be stressed) decide exactly what it is you are doing and define, if only mentally, the scope of the project and it’s phases…

Helveti-tweet could have been a massive resource of all things Helvetica. It would have taken 10 times as long to build and may have been more impressive… If I want, I can do that in the future. As things stand right now though, I have a working mashup – focus on the now.

Use existing tools & methodologies to make your life easier

I am a designer by preference and profession – I do, however, have a pretty good understanding of CSS/HTML and that’s enough to get by when it comes to prototyping this sort of thing. Moreover, there are so many resources on the web – made by people who are experts at what they do. Use them to your advantage. Grid Systems, Plugins/Extensions & Frameworks can speed up development time massively.

To Build Helveti-tweet I used WordPress as the CMS, a twitter aggregator to bring in the feeds and then sorted out the CSS. In regards to design: I am a big fan of swiss-design (hence the mash-up) so therefore I had a good idea about what I wanted before I had even started drafting it.

Do something your passionate about

This is the most important lesson I have learned from the apps & mashups that I have been involved in. If you are doing something you are truly passionate about, it doesn’t matter how much heart-ache it takes. It will be worth it. To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk – If you love what you do, 5.30-2am is plenty of time to do damage.

Visit Helveti-Tweet

On the eve of World War 2 (1939), 2.5 Million Keep Calm posters were printed, to be distributed in the event of a national catastrophe

Luckily, they remained in storage throughout the war. The poster is actually from a series of three.”Freedom is in Peril” and “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” where also printed.

Following the end of WWII, all but two (known) original copies where pulped, it wasn’t until 2000 that one was discovered by a bookseller who reproduced them and the internet took it by storm!

You can get Keep Calm apparel from the KeepCalm store

“The great benefit of being in the arts [is that] the possibility for learning never disappears…” – Milton Galser

The videos over at Hilman Curtis are always pretty inspiring but I wanted to bring particular attention to this one, it features Milton Glaser, arguably one of the most influential graphic designers.

Probably most famous for his I heart NY logo he is someone that has always inspired me, he has an impressively diverse portfolio – both in terms of style and mediums that spans many decades and is now teaching. Anyway I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.