4.27.2009

Wired Magazine

The EDO held its first lecture of the year last week, inviting the Creative Director of Wired magazine, Scott Dadich, to speak about his involvement with the magazine and the brand new UK edition that's just been launched. It was a glorious technicolor talk with an impressively animated presentation. Read all about it over at the Eye blog.

With an average circulation of 2 million, it was the ethereal dream of the budget that allowed for months of thinking time, grand plans and ridiculous details which made it stand out for us here at Things To Look At. Here are some examples...


You are inspired by a shot from Terminator 2, as many of us are


So you commission some sketches of rockets, some intricate CGI, of many individually crafted rockets with well thought out propulsion systems. A bit of on location desert photography and hey presto, there's your cover!


You get the iconic Martha Stewart to bake you a Wii cake that HAS to taste good and look like a Wii.


You ask the CGI wizards behind Transformers to render out your own 1gig Transformer image which is detailed down to the very last scratch on the eyeball



All so you can achieve the sorts of covers Wired is famed for. Here are a few more from its lifespan, more of which can be seen here or here.



To find out more about the deep processes behind Wired courtesy of Scott's entries on the blog of the US equivalent of the EDO, the SPD. You can even have a crack at designing your own cover here, although we couldn't make the image uploader work.

Other great parts of the talk were of course the amazing infographics



And the amazing attention to detail in some of the photography

4.03.2009

Florid Type

Type samples of fanciful typefaces from the Victorian period of typography, referred to as 'a great weedy jungle'. There was a growing practice of decorating the face of a classic letter style and surrounding it with 'shrubbery and doodling'. It's always interesting when these forgotten faces suddenly crop up in magazines or other contemporary graphic design.


Scroll Alphabet, German Chromolithographer, Louis Prang & Co., Boston, 1864


A leafy Tuscan font from the German calligrapher Joseph Balthazar Silvestre's Album published in 1843


Alphabet Lapidaire Monstre by the Swiss/French type designer Jean Midolle. The bottom third contains the surnames of famous men which correspond to each letter. The font was revived on Urban Outfitter's shopping bags last year.


Initial letters by one of America’s preeminent penmen, Daniel T. Ames, New York, 1879