Codex: The Journal of Typography

Codex Magazine

Codex is a promising new quarterly magazine on typography by John Boardley of I Love Typography. It’s going to feature articles, book and type reviews, interviews, tips, type history, new and notable faces, essays and more. I’m definitely looking forward to this.

The magazine consists of 164 full-color pages, is approximately A4 (about 8″ x 11″) and makes use of Lyon Text & Display, Knockout, & Akkurat Mono.

Issue #1 will include Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes, Paul Shaw, Stephen Coles, Erik Spiekermann, Dr Paul Dijstelberge, Craig Mod, Luca Barcellona, and more. You can pre-order the first issue on the website.

GestalterIn Gallery

Josef Brockmann Opernhaus Zurich

Just when you’ve thought you’ve seen it all, you stumble across something like this Swiss site containing a MASSIVE amount of work from legendary designers like Brockmann, Ruder, Bill, Hofmann, Stankowski, Rüegg, Lohse, Huber, Tschichold and more. This is the motherload folks.

It just goes to show how prolific these designers were, especially Brockmann. I thought I’ve seen most of his work, but this site contains many designs that I’ve never seen, like the one pictured here. It’s like rediscovering him all over again. Not sure how he was able to get all the work completed. I can’t imagine ever producing this amount of work in my lifetime. Amazing.

Really Useful Posters

mash-really-useful-posters.jpg

The uber-talented Mark Bloom of Mash Creative just wrote in about these gorgeous ‘Really Useful’ posters they’ve created, extending the philosophy and thinking behind their State of the Obvious brand. The series consists of four themed posters: Greenwhich Mean Time, Emoticons, Print Sizes and Metric Conversion information and are available in A0, A1 and A2 sizes exclusively from Print Process.

Some people will find these designs to be boring, but I personally find them to be visually stimulating. The obvious grid, simple but rich color palette and staggered typography create interesting designs that are reminiscent of the classic International Typographic Style from the 50s and 60s. This is the kind of stuff that gets my creative juices flowing.

2011 Calendar Wallpapers

2011-Calendar-Wallpaper.jpg

**Update** If you’ve downloaded the wallpapers, please download them again. I fixed an issue with the numbers being misaligned.

A lot of you have been asking about this year’s wallpaper, and I finally got around to getting it done. This year the full calendar is broken up into 3 wallpapers. Each one has 4 months and the colors get darker as the year progresses. As expected, I went with a simple design with more of a focus on the months and I’ve continued the multi-language theme. It comes in only one size: 1920×1200. I hope you enjoy it.

Download the zip file with all three wallpapers.

Mash Creative 2011 Limited Edition Calendar

mash-creative-2011-limited-edition-calendar.jpg

Mash Creative have released a 2011 version of their beautiful limited edition ‘minutes’ calendar, a successor to last years successful 2010 ‘seconds’ calendar. This one has been printed with glow in the dark ink so you can enjoy it at any time of day.

When I posted about last years version, it stirred up a small debate about the design and function of the calendar, so here’s an excerpt from Mash on their thought process:

The human race seems to be obsessed with time, it’s the one thing we never seem to have enough of. The year ‘Twenty Eleven’ (2011) is made up of five hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes, that’s an average of around fourty three thousand, eight hundred minutes a month. Our calendar has been designed to be a typographic representation of the year, each month has been broken down into minutes which have been listed below each month name. The jumbled title text at the top of the poster continues the theme from last years calendar and has been influenced by old analogue flip clocks. The calendar has been printed with glow in the dark ink allowing the design to take on a completely different look at night. Using the idea of sidereal time (star time) the highlighted months glow like a constellation of stars.

Expertly screen printed by Bob Eight Pop – each poster has been printed in white and glow in the dark ink and printed onto high quality 160gsm Raven Black Kaskad. Each poster is hand numbered and signed by the designer.

You can grab one of these beauties from Counter Objects.