Fathom created an experimental project using found fonts from PDF documents:

An edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches. The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.

(via Carolina de Bartolo)

From this book, here’s a couple of my favorite quote:

Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects … the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.

To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.

Wishlisted.

This article is an excerpt from the book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall, a close collaborator with Jobs for over a decade:

Apple encourages big thinking but small everything else. That is, if you feel the urge to speak or act in a manner reminiscent of anything you learned in a big company, it’s best that you do that in the privacy of your own home. Meeting size is a good example. Once Chiat/Day was installed as Apple’s agency of record and we’d settled into our work, we would meet with Steve Jobs every other Monday.

By Yeohyun Ahn and Viviana Cordova. Type + Code, explores the aesthetic of experimental code driven typography, with an emphasis on the programming language Processing which was created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Don’t know Processing language? Well it’s awesome. It’s my next language to learn after I become fluent with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python.

(via graphicporn)

One thing I had completely forgotten about is how communal popular books can be. A few people have spotted “A Game of Thrones” in my pocket or saw me reading it on the subway and then started friendly conversations with me about it, something that never would have happened if I were reading it on my phone, where every book is effectively invisible to everyone but me.

It would be nice if there was a way to replicate that part of the reading experience electronically too, that kind of real world happenstance that doesn’t require signing up or signing in to anything, just carrying around whatever book you’re reading and being open enough in your body language to welcome small talk from perfect strangers. It just goes to show you that the electronic reading experience has a long way to go, and all the time and effort we’ve been putting into crafting perfect layouts might be better used fleshing out some of the things that really make reading a rewarding experience.

I concur with Khoi Vinh here.

100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design

Heller and Vienne write in the introduction:

Big ideas are notions, conceptions, inventions, and inspirations — formal, pragmatic, and conceptual — that have been employed by graphic designers to enhance all genres of visual communication. These ideas have become, through synthesis and continual application, the ambient language(s) of graphic design. They constitute the technological, philosophical, forma, and aesthetic constructs of graphic design.

Sold, where’s the add-to-cart button?

Jim Williams is a senior lecturer at Staffordshire University, where he compiled an excellent series of student handouts about typography. In 2010 the handouts were featured on Creative Review’s blog which generated interest from publishers. The handouts have now been published in book form as Type Matters.

Because type and typography always mattered, dang it.

explore-blog:

The Book of the Future. Until then, we’re stuck with the book of the present and the book of the past. 

(↬ this isn’t happiness)

Without a doubt, wish-listed.

And until I hear God personally say to me, “Boot up and read,” I won’t be giving it up.

Books or codex. Durable.

iPad or Kindle. Not there yet.

But again I seriously think that dead tree book and digital book or ebook can coexist.