Type

Madita, a New Typeface from Animography.

If you work with After Effects, or you are a graphic designer you might be familiar with Animography, the company that produces animated typefaces that are fully customizable. I’ve been a fan of these guys for quite some time, and always love it when a new release comes out. In the past Animography has done a pretty straightforward promotion of the product, they show the typeface animating, and the variations that can be achieved with it. All of this is an effective demonstration of what they are trying to sell, but the promotional animation for Madita is a winner.

Animography Shows the typeface in use, but blends it with a catchy little story, some wonderful animation, and shows how the typeface can be used in a project before wrapping it up with a simple question, “Where can I get this typeface?” The design and animation by Philip von Borries does a really nice job of showing Madita in use, and combined with the narration, the story hooks you and keeps you interested until the marketing punch at the end, which hopefully gets viewers interested in the font. Even if you aren’t a designer, or animator, the video is worth watching simply for the visuals and the nice little storyline.

More Than Just a Tire.

This Sunday marks the 100th running of the Indy 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and to commemorate the event, Firestone has produced a special tire. Firestone announced this version of the Firehawk racing tire back on February 19th of this year, at the 100-day mark prior to the Indy 500.

The special edition tire has bright red sidewall markings of the brand-name and logo, as well as every driver’s name who has won the 500 using Firestone tires. In all, that number stands at 66 spanning back to Ray Harroun in the first 500 in 1911 and up to the current champion Juan Pablo Montoya in 2015. The tire’s visual design is visually refined by the inclusion of red “F-shield” logos at 90 degree offsets to the red Firestone name, and the 100th Running logo created by the Speedway to commemorate the century mark. The winners’ names are listed in chronological order from Harroun forward, along the sidewall in high-contrast white ink and stand out from the black sidewalls with great definition.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me love graphic design. Yes I know this is a splendid piece of promotional marketing, but in the end someone had to design this. A graphic designer, and an art director for sure. Probably a committee had some say in the final executed result. It doesn’t matter how we got here, its the fact that someone thought about this little detail, and executed it so well. I can’t wait to see every car lined up wearing these shoes tomorrow.

Put Your Type in Motion.

Here is a little Friday afternoon time waster for you. A series of animated typographic treatments from Starov Evgeniy a student in St. Petersburg Russia. That’s right this is student work. This is a testament to how far we have come in the field of graphic design in the last 20 years. I couldn’t imagine creating 12 of these when I was in art school. It would have taken me an entire semester to illustrate and film a single one. Awesome work Starov.

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Type Cycle.

What a nice combination of typography, 3D animation, and bikes. The video below is from Marcel Piekarski. It is a personal project he designed highlighting two things he loves, bicycles and type. He has created an entire alphabet, with posters and still frames for each letter here. This is such a wonderful little project. I hope someone is smart enough to distribute this for him as an actual typeface for designers and artist to use.