An article from Fast Company about Six Fonts that Piss People Off, from Ikea's abandonment of Futura for Verdana in its 2010 catalog, to the Nazis' banning of Fraktur for not being "German" enough, to the continuing vitriol against that most deplorable of typefaces, Comic Sans.
Earlier this year I wrote about how hard it was to find interesting, stylish, high-quality calendars year after year. Well, I wanted to warn you against showering me in calendar gifts this Christmas, because I found enough to tide me over for a few more years, at least.
Most exiting is the discovery that illustrator Steve Thomas, whose retrofuturistic space travel posters I showed off a while ago, offers a calendar of his shiny space art. I will have one for my wall.
Etsy of course has loads of beautiful and unique art calendars, particularly of the postcard desktop variety. I like this charming Jardin Desk Calendar by MagnoliaMoonlight.
I'm in love with the stationary company Cavallini & Co., particularly their calendar offerings. They have great vintage art themes like travel, maps, plants, and animals.
I also made a few finds in photography calendars of abandoned places. In the slightly surreal category, there's the beautiful Retrospect Calendar by farhmboy, who explores out-of-the-way locales in his native Michigan.
Amanita Design (creator of Samorost) does it all -- I haven't yet had the opportunity to link to the absolutely beautiful music video they created for Under Byen - "Plantage". The visual style will feel very familiar to fans of Samorost.
I adore this video. The song is "Remind Me/So Easy" by Norwegian duo Röyksopp, and the animation is a strange and wonderful video by French design studio H5 showing a day in the life of a London office worker as told entirely through infographics, from the features of the alarm clock that wakes her up and where her sewage goes after she flushes to dancing pie charts and stock quotes at the office to stats on pints of beer consumed across the country at the end of the workday. Though the style is deceptively simple, the system is bogglingly complex, revealing the amazingly intricate workings of modern life as we move through it in almost total oblivion. Via Le territoire des sens.
"The Child" by Alex Gopher is another video created by H5 in 1999. In this one, the entire story is acted out by animated blocks of typography. Very cool.
