Based in San Francisco, The Letterform Archive is a nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and community. Their website has a lot of great news and blog content so even if you can visit the archive in person you can experience some of their fantastic collection.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, German illustrator Christoph Niemann talks really well about his creative process and he does so again in this great three minute film:
Brooklyn-based motion graphic studio CHIPS produced this lovely series of intro animations for the Amazon Prime comedy Mozart in the Jungle. The bold geometric imagery is inspired by classic album artwork from the 1950s and 1960s (more info on the project here). Teddy Banks, the founder of CHIPS, was interviewed recently about his film title work on Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand’s The Design of Business, The Business of Design podcast which you can listen to here.
HunterGatherer is a New York-based design studio founded by Todd St. John. They specialise in telling stories through illustration and animation and their work often involves model making. Here’s a few of my favourite pieces (but you can watch loads more here: http://huntergatherer.net/work/video/
What else can I say, but I am a huge fan of the work of Studio Monkier. They are an interactive design studio based in Amsterdam who research the “social effects of technology”. I like pretty much all of their work and fully endorse their Thursday Workshops idea as I believe we should all play more often – I’ll let them explain in their own words:
“Every other Thursday we take our time to develop ideas and experiment with different media, materials and technologies. We play with instructions, taking turns, participation and interaction. The results of the Thursday Afternoons Workshops are actively published on thursdays.studiomoniker.com“
A personal favourite Monkier project is Your Line Or Mine – a crowdsourced, instruction-based, collaborative animation. The project is explained beautiful in this film:
Newspaper Club are a Glasgow-based printer who as their name suggests specialise in printing newspapers. They offer a great service printing newspapers both digitally and by the traditional web-offset printing process. They are used by a wide range of people from big businesses to independent artists and students too. They also have a great blog section on their site where they frequently post up interviews with creative people who’ve made interesting newspapers with them. Take a look here: www.newspaperclub.com/blog
Graphic Design journal, Eye Magazine, have published a feature on how The Guardian collaborate closely with illustrators to create the stunning large format images for to accompany their Long Read essays. Read the full article here: eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-long-look
I am very impressed by Typography Insights – an app created by Dong Yoon Park while he was studying an MFA in design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. The app is a fantastic tool for learning the intricacies of typography in a really accessible ways. I’d highly recommend it.
I’m a big fan of the work of illustrator Christoph Niemann. I first encountered his work when I downloaded his Petting Zoo iPad app for my son. He has a playful sense of humour and wonderful way of viewing the world. He also talks about his creative process extremely well. I’d encourage everyone to watch his episode of the fantastic Netflix series Abstract if they can. Below is a 20 minute presentation Niemann gave for Adobe’s 99u Conference on How to Overcome the 3 Fears Every Creative Faces.
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