Vootie's blog

That's the name of a site that Neenah Paper has devoted to the ancient practice of engraved printing, with a focus on its CRANE Papers line. It turns out that CRANE has been around since 1873 and is still employed for a wide variety of engraved work, despite its concession to modernity by shifting to 100% tree-free stock. While the site's history of CRANE is interesting enough, the standout is a gallery of user-submitted engraved work, some examples of which are shown below.

If you've been pondering the purchase of a 27-inch high-resolution monitor but can't quite bring yourself to shell out the funds such displays typically command, I have good news for you. A newcomer to the display market, Nixeus, is offering its 27-inch S-IPS monitor, which supports resolutions up to 2560x1440 in portrait or landscape mode, for an introductory price of $427. Ship date is set for August 18, with pre-ordering possible now on Amazon or CompuPlus.

It would seem that it is for French design student René Mambembé, who created a series of posters on the theme of superheros and famous characters, each using a letter from Helvetica. The illustrations from the Helvetica, My Hero collection have a minimalist style in keeping with the typeface, some of which can be purchased as prints. I've included a few favorites, below.

As devices become ever-more controllable via touch, we're starting to see an increasing number of innovative input devices. The latest in this lineage is Jot Touch, a precision stylus from adonit that is the first to offer pressure sensitivity. The pen has a transparent disk on its tip that mimics the touch of a finger, while adding the benefit of not hiding what is being touched. Also of note are several shortcut buttons, Bluetooth connectivity and USB recharging. All very nifty but it's the pressure sensitivity that sets this stylus apart. Of course, apps have to support this functionality but with Procreate, Sketchbook Pro, ArtRage, DeepSketch and Animation Desk on the list (hello, Adobe!), there's something for everyone. The price? A non-trivial $99.99.

Adobe has played a major role in the acceptance of digital design and publishing, thanks to the creation of its PostScript page description language, as well as developing layout and illustration applications that provide professional-quality typographic controls. It's almost forgotten now but Adobe was also one of the first firms to build a library of irreproachable digital fonts. It was also implicated in the development of font formats, such as OpenType. While Adobe's typographic leadership has dwindled in recent years, the flame seems to still be flickering, as evidenced by the release of Source Sans Pro, the firm's first open source font. Created initially for use in the interfaces of Adobe's open source apps, the font takes inspiration from News Gothic and Franklin Gothic, and thus is also suitable for headlines and body copy in printed work and for the screen. Provided in six weights, more information and the download link is available on the Adobe site. It's also available as a web font from Typekit, WebInk, and Google Web Fonts.

The recent Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase at the 2012 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity opened with an impressive live light show. Dubbed Meet Your Creator, it featured the technical prowess of KMel Robotics and the creativity of the wonderfully named Marshmallow Laser Feast.

Movies remain simply a series of still images strung together to create the illusion of motion. However, this is typically employed to generate the sense of having captured something in time that could have also been seen by the viewer. Very different is another old approach to capturing the world, albeit in a specialized way. I'm speaking here of timelapse photography, in which each spot in the sequence is separated from the others by a significant amount of time. French photographer Mayeul Akpovi is one of the few to specialize in this, with his site providing several nifty examples. My favorite is Paris in Motion, in which the camera is often moved slightly between shots.

The cross-platform OpenType font format was seen as way out of the interminable font battles of the 90s, when TrueType and PostScript struggled to win the hearts and mind of designers. While it has succeeded in that regard, one of the more unexpected outcomes of the adoption of OpenType has been an exploration of the format's creative potential. It has taken some years for this to evolve to full fruition but the recent release of Aerotype's Keepsake script face is a reminder of just how far we have come.

Fonts In Use was launched as a blog in 2010 with the goal of documenting the typefaces employed in well-designed work. This was a great idea, since we've all wondered at some time what type was used in a particular piece. By identifying these, the site provided examples of how to effectively use typefaces. After posting 70 of these, all categorized by typeface, format and industry, founders Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles and Nick Sherman have now opened the site up to outside contributions.

Google's Project Glass has given a massive boost to interest in augmented reality systems. While Google's approach rests on its Google Glass head-mounted display unit, more common are systems employing current cell phones. One of the more promising is Aurasma, described ambitiously as "the world's first visual browser." The firm recently showed off its capabilities in a TED talk. Impressive stuff but will such systems really ever be anything beyond another way for advertisers, and even less benevolent entities, to track and manipulate us?