One Hundred Dollars by The Ministry of Type for Wired
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The full illustration.When creating, or even looking at, a banknote design, one of the first things you realise is their inherent and very deliberate imperfections. There’ll be an apparent mis-registration of colour, a strangely ragged line, a discontinuity in a pattern or an odd serif or ligature on a piece of lettering, but it’s exactly how it was designed. Without it, it wouldn’t be right. The design of banknotes represent something I find gloriously poetic — imperfect perfection — if it was perfect by our usual standards, it would be imperfect. Wonderful. So tried to capture some of that in my design, overlaying colours with an offset, adjusting the lettering a little bit to reflect the kind of oddities on real dollar notes and creating the odd layer of extra guilloche-work barely fine enough to see. I’m glad Wired is well printed and that it all came through.
The design of currency is fascinating in its intricacies.
Penguin Classics team up with (RED) for typographic covers
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Penguin has collaborated with AIDS awareness fund (RED) and a team of designers to produce new covers for eight Penguin Classics. Each cover replaces the usual black band with red, employing a quote from the text of the book as the visual hit (covers by Coralie Bickford-Smith shown left and Non-Format, right)…
While a repackaging isn’t something the Classics series is necessarily crying out for, we particularly like the way that this small run of eight titles has been handled – with the typographic designs occasionally encroaching over the (RED)-inspired band and the link with the organisation brought out in the bracketing of the Penguin Classics identity. Jim Stoddart, art director of Penguin Press plans to use a different typographer for each cover commission and more are planned in the near future.
Click on the link above to see the whole series. Fantastic.
360° Color: A Peek Inside Pantone
/It is fascinating to see how the ubiquitous Pantone chips are made.
via vimeo.com
Google Font Directory Now Available Under Open Source License
/The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.
View font details to get the code needed to embed the font on your web site. Please also visit our quick start guide and FAQ page. For more help and suggestions, use our moderator page
Also available is a Javascript WebFont Loader co-developed with Typekit. Another step towards beautiful typography on the web. /via @daringfireball.

