26.Aug.2009 My new favourite blog: hilarious!!
I used to teach Computer Graphics courses at uni, so looking at Photoshop Disasters brings back very fond memories. Love this blog!!
08.Apr.2009 Fonts don’t grow on trees, so stop raiding my garden!
For the past 2 weeks I just keep coming across instances of illegal font usage of my fonts. One was Koufiya extracted from my Reading dissertation and available for download on a forum. The audacity is that they complained about a technical error in a unfinished, illegally obtained font. Wow! The second was a big [...]
24.Mar.2009 Frankenstein revisited: Body Shop rebrand
Body Shop is sporting a new logo, and the Arabic follows suit. Thankfully, the new Arabic is much better that the older version. One less monster out there… Yey!!
23.Mar.2009 Frankenstein 3: Al-Counter
I was in Dubai a few weeks ago and saw this shop in the new fancy Atlantis resort on The Palm. The logo has interesting forms, and if we could forget that it is supposed to be Arabic, then it might pass. However, it is meant to be Arabic, and for that reason it sucks. [...]
30.May.2007 When signage fails… “German drives down subway stairs”
I have long complained about signage systems in Germany and the locals never believe me. I think this story backs up my claim: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6705323.stm There’s always something fun — though sometimes plain wierd — and interesting to read on the BBC news website. Among the latest: “Condoms ‘too big’ for Indian men” “Sudan man forced [...]
15.Apr.2007 Bi-Directional Latin
I seem to be unable to convince a fellow designer why I do not find bi-directional Arabic to be a helpful tool in teaching childen brought up in the States to read Arabic.
20.Mar.2007 Frankenstein 2: Body Shop
More fun from the Latinised Arabic. This one is a gem! (Why? The waw is too small; the serifs are all over the place; the Dal and Thal are structurally week; the serif on the Yeh is just hilarious and looks like the end of a vacuum cleaner!)
09.Mar.2007 Arabic newspaper design: Al-Fadjr, Algeria
al_fadjr.pdf Crossing over into the the western part of the Arab world, we have Al-Fadjr newspaper. It seems that the Algerians like their newspapers to have more color than what we are used to in Lebanon. I’ll show another Algerian paper tomorrow. Same thing. Am I being prejudiced here? There aren’t many newspapers that post [...]
06.Mar.2007 Frankenstein
There’s a typographic equivalent of Mary Shelley’s creation. I took this photo in Dubai. It’s almost a joke, but is in fact very real. Another addition to the what-were-you-thinking section! (I am especially fond of the Reh and the Alef; does the designer know that the Reh is never taller than the Alef?) As to [...]
05.Mar.2007 Arabic newspapers design: Al-Ayam, Yemen
Hmm. More on newspaper design with Al-Ayam newspaper from Yemen. This is from the what-were-you-thinking design section. Fonts: The choice of typefaces , especially the headlines, makes this newspapers issue look like it was printed in the 70′s and that is not a complement. The thick horisontal baseline makes for a very solid base in [...]