Purely positive inspiration from Eric Smith and friends.

Some great news for web designers/integrators who truly care about good typographic standards (I know there are some of you out there!). My former co-worker Stephane Curzi introduces Baseline, a designer framework that beautifully translates classical typographic standards to the web. Baseline is elegant, flexible and robust and it’s available as a free download that contains CSS files, a Photoshop document and a full set of HTML templates.

It’s initiatives like these, with their minute attention to detail, that will finally make the web worth reading. Good work Stephane!

It’s too nice outside to be working today. woe is me…

Following up on my previous post, Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze talk about the strange magic of everyone’s favourite childhood book. I’m really glad to know that Sendak was so deeply involved, a rarity in blockbuster movie adaptations these days.

It’s a bit shocking to me, given my ambivalent relationship with facebook, but one of my all-time graphic design heroes, Martin Venezky of Appetite Engineers, has decided to use a facebook page as portfolio. And given the amount of work they’re posting, and the level of detail they’re showcasing with each piece, it works surprisingly well.

Facebook reticence (and bad image compression) aside, the photo gallery is really worth checking out. Many of the works featured are completely new to me, and they’re some of the most innovative and striking designs I’ve seen in a long time.

I’m currently working on a visual identity project for an exciting arts event this fall in MTL and have been exploring JPG hacking as a technique for generating images. Its a tedious and unpredictable process whereby I mess with the actual code of the file in a text editor, but I think the results are pretty interesting (sometimes).

I’m posting these process shots here in the hope that others that have played with this technique might stumble upon it and offer any feedback/advice on ways to approach the changing/fucking up of code. What do you think?

As of July 1st, Catherine and I have moved into our new apartment. It was a bit of a hellish move and we’ll be living in boxes for a while, but if you want to stop by or send us gifts of encouragement, our new address is:

2139 boul. St. Joseph est
Montréal, Québec
CANADA
H2H 1E6

In counterpoint to Sunday’s post, I’m loving the work of French design duo Helmo. Rigorous, boldly graphic and smart without being pretentious. Their cartographic posters done for lux* blows my mind.

Beautiful, grungy, and poetic design work from Colin Smith of Distorted Perspective. I love the fact that he’s got a lot of his work available as pdf’s for download and I love that he’s working in a style that many have abandoned exploring for the gloss of web 2.oh… stayin’ true to his (and my own) design roots and fighting the good fight. The photography work is also top-notch. All round inspiring stuff (and lots of it) to be found on his recently relaunched website.