We love a bit of good stuff here at Rawww, so that’s why we’re taking a bit of time to top up our creative juices with the latest, greatest, and just downright best things we’ve seen while out and about. We’ll be rounding off our week every Friday with 30 minutes of good stuff, and telling you all about the highlights.
My Life in Typography
For our first 30 minutes of good stuff, Fred stepped up to show us a TED talk all about one of our favourite subjects – typography. We watched Matthew Carter, creator of Georgia and Verdana, reminisce about his life as a typeface designer. We enjoyed having a bit of a blast from the past.
“There were a few gasps when Carter told us all about the two years it took him to design the Bell Centennial typeface, created especially for the phone book.”
– Matthew Carter
He told us all about the movement from photo, to digital, to desktop, screen, and finally web type and the implications of this progression on his designs. Unlike today, where seemingly anyone can at least have a go at designing type, back in Carter’s early days he was up against numerous constraints – his Bell Centennial typeface was designed with ‘cut out’ corners, to allow for ink-spread and tiny size. This is very unlike today where almost anything goes!
If you’d like to see Matthew Carter’s ‘My Life in Typography’ for yourself take a look here.
Exploring Material Design
For his good stuff, Lewis taught us all about Google and their Material Design by showing us through their comprehensive style guide… but what is Material Design, you ask? Well:
“It’s a visual language for our users that synthesises the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.”
Material Design is “a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes. Mobile precepts are fundamental, but touch, voice, mouse, and keyboard are all first-class input methods.” This makes it all the more interesting, especially given the importance of mobile for all our web design work.
We explored the guide, available here to browse through, and chatted about how this is relevant to our day-to-day design activities – and everyone was impressed with Google’s attention to detail, right down to the last pixel of their design.
10 Myths of Digital Design
We’re immersed in design every day, so for Ali’s good stuff, she got us looking from a different perspective… we looked at the Top 10 Myths of Digital Design, from agency Branded 3, to see if we were falling into any designer-traps.
We were faced with some interesting facts – that often, website users don’t bother looking at your shiny headline-carousel, that the ‘fold’ no longer exists, and that Comic Sans isn’t always evil. All of them were worth some thought, and many of them got us thinking about how we approach our day-to-day projects.
“We love Origami”
Sophie got us thinking outside the box with some Origami. She wowed us with these stunning Origami kiosks, this elegant design solution to opening a door, and we watched a professional Origami master at work making a life-sized elephant out of paper. This showed us just what was possible with a good bit of design thinking.
And, of course, we had a go ourselves… while we weren’t quite at professional standard, after following this video (with a bit of rewinding) we managed to make a small herd of jumping frogs.
“Ribbet!”
We’ll be taking a look at even more good stuff soon, so keep an eye out to find out what we’ve been up to.
