Wrodle

Today I discovered Johnathan Feinberg's Wordle, an online tool that takes gathered text (such as my design school application) and organizes it visually. An amazing free tool. You can pick your font, colors, orientation and even language. Check it out.

Design School Essay
using Wordle

Ivy Games

It's been a while. Design school applications are eating all of my free time, but I wanted to share some work with you.

Ivy Games Logo copyright Ivy Games LLC 2009

I did this logo in 10 hours (cannot believe I could work this fast) for Ivy Games, a company that is teaming up with Hasbro and JET to produce Taboo: The Jewish Edition. I was lucky enough to be set up by a good friend who referred me to the CEO. I am very excited by the possibility of this logo being used on the game box and instructions that would be sold nationally.

Sad day for futura

My favorite font, Futura, created by Paul Renner in the 1920s, known for being the first font on the moon and VW's chosen typeface, until recently was Ikea's go to font. Now they have replace it in their 2010 catalogue with Veranda, a typeface designed for the screen in 1996. Ikea claims they did it to so that their catalogues would work with Asian languages and could be used on computers. But they have lost so much. Instead of being Ikea-great design and for an inexpensive price, their font reads cheap.

Before (left) and after (right). Ikea Catalog.
Image from NYTimes.com

Here is the NYT article and a link to the Typophile (aka type geeks) form discussing it. As an Ikea customer, it just makes me sad to see them change their advertising campaign to "we're even cheaper" from "functional design"...guess these are the times...