a girl named fred

i may not like snow in my back yard, but i love it on the slopes! a girl can’t argue with 35 cm of new snow at whistler over the past 48 hours. i’ll be back monday. have a great weekend, all.

i don’t do much personal programming on the blog, but i am interrupting my usual “look! pretty pictures!” lineup to show you this picture of snow.

that, folks, is my backyard. this morning. and i know those of you who live east of vancouver are all “hmpfh, she calls that snow! that’s not snow. that’s icing sugar.” but i’m telling you. in my town? this is snow. and it is not supposed to snow in Vancouver at the end of February. it’s supposed to be all snowdrops and crocuses and cherry blossoms. i am not pleased.

i also came upon these tiny little books by harvard business press… what they call their harvard business review classics. in a sea of covers that feature stern-looking white men in suits with their arms crossed in a posture of authority, these covers really stood out for. screen caps are from harvard’s site… so they’re really small. but i think you can still get the point.

[is that not an inspired illustration to communicate the idea of myopia??]

i was in the bookshop yesterday, picking up a book (surprise!) for next month’s book club, when i happened upon this sweet little display of the penguin great ideas series.

here are some close ups of the book covers (but they don’t do them justice… the covers are all letterpress-y and texture-y and these screencaps don’t show that).

and honestly, i dare you to find me a better application of expressive period typography.

i’m telling you, i gasped out loud when i saw this work from studio on fire. out loud!

deets are here.

you know i adore ligatures. maybe not quite as much as this guy…

but i adore them nonetheless. i recently did a logo that features a ligature for a new client (i’ll show you once she’s debuted it herself) and, well, i was as happy as a pig in the proverbial…

niki’s put together a great post on ligatures over here.

i’d love to say i’m just a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl, but i’m not. i’m often teased about my love of a system. a plan. a grid. i like to know where i’m going. which is why i’m so taken with Pentagram’s recent work for MoMA. they didn’t redesign the mark. it didn’t need redesigning. but it did need consistent implementation for it to have maximum impact.

example a: inconsistent application

example b: the system

[i know. it kind of looks like someone applied some make my logo bigger cream, but it works. i mean, that july 2008 brochure was hardly even identifiable as a MoMA publication.]

example c: the system in application

whether or not you like the new system in action, i think you can agree that it has a heck of a lot more visual impact than the old non-system. you can get the whole story here.

i found this terrific self-critique checklist over at david sherwin’s 80 works for designers blog. great stuff. it’s printed and taped to my computer monitor.

please take a few minutes (i think it’s about 6 minutes in total) to watch this video.  first seen over at the memory journalists.

colour schemes inspired by breakfast cereal.