SKAGGS

Frank Lloyd Wright’s last remaining hotel, The Park Hotel, is in desperate need of financial support. If you can, please support Wright on the Park.

A great post from the guys at Hoefler & Frere-Jones on one of my favorite characters in the Roman alphabet, ampersand. A good history of the character as well as several iterations of the character in more modern typefaces.

For those of you that are regular readers of our site you may have noticed that we’ve changed things a bit. Certain projects are nearly impossible to end as there are always details that can be further refined. Websites in particular need to be constantly updated and refined. This helps with your Google ranking and overall search engine optimization.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve heard is that there isn’t much of our work on our site. It’s sort of funny because our previous site had a ton of work on it and the comments then were that we had too much work! Our blog started as an experiment, really. We were interested in putting our thoughts out there, giving our clients and potential clients a better idea of who we are and what we do. This “small” experiment has grown like a wildfire. We’ve seen our hit rate go up, and inevitably, whenever we meet someone, the subject of our blog comes up. We’re proud of it and hope that you all continue to enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy creating it.
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About 2 years ago, I added the title of this post to my email signature. I don’t recall having seen this before and it just seemed like a logical thing to do given the amount of emails I see printed out at meetings and being read by people on the subway as they head home from work. I’m also happy to see that this phrase, or variations of it, seem to be in the footer of nearly every email I receive these days. It shows that people are taking an interest in saving natural resources and I just hope everyone is heeding there own advice.

Now if we can just figure out a way to get people to stop including those ridiculous, paper and screen real estate wasting confidentiality notices! Do they really make a difference and does anyone really care?

Ever wonder what form of numerals (or figures) is correct for the situation at hand? This great tip from FontShop explains it all. Extended typefaces will typically include both oldstyle and lining forms and each of those can come in both tabular or proportional widths. Readability is key with all text but especially numerals when setting tabular data and therefore selecting the correction option is important. So, next time you’re wondering about which style is right for the task at hand, you’ll now have the answer.

A very interesting (and clever) idea is on how to make a simple change to plastic water bottles which would allow them to easily be filled with a material and turned into an instant building material. The Van Alen Institute in NYC is sponsoring the exhibition UNITED_BOTTLE Participate! which will run from March 28th through April 25, 2008.

Hebel and Stollmann’s project, UNITED_BOTTLE, proposes a new form of plastic bottle designed to function as instant building material. The project’s working hypothesis is that design should think beyond the product and consider the waste for future use. The intersection of local and global distribution and recycling circuits forms the basis of UNITED_BOTTLE – the form of newly designed PET/PP bottles can efficiently fit into standardized shipping boxes, and can be filled with found materials to be used as prefabricated building units for the construction of both temporary and permanent structures.

Water bottles have become quite the thing around SKAGGS lately. Stay tuned and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

You can only imagine my joy when I saw this article in Business Week. I still remember the day I got my first LEGO’s. It was a simple LEGO set of a house with a working garage door, operable doors and window, a nice red slate roof and a cool little car for the garage complete with the LEGO man. I still have that set, however, its now mixed in with the other 100 or so sets of LEGO’s I acquired as child. Minus the ones that were sucked up by the vacuum cleaner or got lost around the house I grew up in, I still have all my LEGO’s and attribute my interest in design and to study architecture to the colorful little blocks.
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One of the great things about doing what we do is the ring side seat we get watching our client’s companies grow and succeed. The Valley Produce Company is just one of many and today was a great day for Chef Chris Smith. Now known as the Chivalrous Chef, Chris was a guest on Good Day New York, WNYW Fox 5’s morning show.

We began working with Chris many years ago, updating the Valley Produce Company identity and designing new packaging for the small line of products he had back then. Today, VPC has grown and VPC’s products can be found around the globe!

Way to go, Chris!

An interesting article that Joe found today in the Boston Globe. The comments given about each logo are both excellent and insightful. The beginning of the article sums it all up perfectly:

Typography can subtly or boldly define a company, product, or person. Whether it is Best Buy’s big, bold, screaming signs or the sweet, elegant script on a wine label, the type talks to us, the reader. The logos of the presidential candidates are no exception.

(Oh and there is really is no preference as to why the logos are ordered the way they are )

 
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”