The Uniform Project is my new favorite obsession. I’ve long been a fan of fashion blogs like Lookbook and Hel Looks. The uniform project combines the clickability of those sites and adds a healthy, necessary dose of purposed thought.
The notion is this: Sheena Matheiken has asked her friend and designer Eliza Starbuck to design and create a single dress that she could wear every day. The garment and Sheena’s customizations are based upon ideas of personal flair she picked up in school as a girl. Sheena’s had seven copies of the dress created, and every day she reinvents it in a way she finds sustainable via donated fashion from readers, Ebay finds, and the like. Readers are encouraged to donate funds to the project, and all proceeds go to the Akanksha Foundation for the education of underprivileged children in India. This is such a smart, sweet project. It’s design shining as brightly as it should.
Maybe you’ve heard that we may soon be able to use real typography on the web, as talks are seriously advancing on how to best handle issues of licensing and intellectiual property protection. This document, written by Bert Bos at the W3C, is about a year old, but is a great primer on existing and coming technologies, and opinions from foundries around the world.
Here’s a finger in the face of marketing’s forced march of oversexed, violent teenage stereotypes: a blog looking back at our favorite pictures of our parents from before we were around, and celebrating how cool they were (and are).
This is a service I’ve been waiting on for about a decade: iKern. It’s priced by the project, and kerns your typefaces for you. Anyone who’s ever created a typeface knows the spacing is the worst part. In my case, it actually delayed a couple of collections for years because I can’t kern consistently to save my life, and I’d have to do it over and over. Sometimes I’d kern tight, sometimes loose, depended upon my mood. Well, no more. Maybe I can finish the giant family I started in, um, 2000.
Friends of Type is, by their own definition, a sketchbook and dialogue. Each page is filled with beautiful, handmade typographic illustrations and typesetting.