MIT recently launched a tech investment initiative called The Engine. I’m really digging this site, from the concept itself, to the URL, to the Swiss typography, to the subtle background animations, to the background graphics/illustrations when you hover over an investment area. Someone in a Designer News thread pointed out that the illustrator is Vasjen Katro whose Instagram account is wonderful.
Designers coming out of art schools like ECAL, Gerrit Reitveld, etc. in the mid-2000s start bringing some of their experimental work into the small print magazine movement (mostly in Europe at this point) after print starts getting less scrutinised in favor of digital. See: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-new-ugly/
Hits NYC from Europe (to be fair people in scenes like RISD were always woke) when guys in publishing like Richard Turley bring the aesthetic into the mainstream on publications on Bloomberg Businessweek
More traditional (not product focused) design agencies/studios bring the aesthetic to the web after the fall of skeumorphism and the rise of web type
SF Tech bros who hang out on Dribbble finally take notice when these sites get posted on SiteInspire, steal the term "brutalism" to describe it since it doesn't look like a stripe landing page.
‘Brutalism' becomes a catch-all term for any website that contains an aesthetic nod to a design movement that didn't happen on Dribbble
Myself and others find this amusing and post snarky/snob-ish finger-wagging comments on DN
While, yes, snarky, I do appreciate the brief history. The first I saw this style was in 2004 from David Reinfurt (whose work I mentioned in an earlier post.) of O-R-G and later Dexter Sinister. He designed the book for an exhibition within the Eero Saarinen-designed Terminal 5 at JFK. I designed and built the exhibition’s website, which is still online 13 years later, though it does require Flash. So it goes…
In 2004, I thought nothing of adding auto-playing audio to a website and so sprinkled sound snippets of airplanes idling and taking off, and a short tribute to Brian Eno at the end of the loop.
The Letterform Archive collects inspirational analog artifacts to digitize in high fidelity, for all who love letters. Includes a very impressive collection of WA Dwiggins specimens.
On redesigning e-readers or how we read digital text. Of note:
"Show me the overlap of 10,000 readers' highlighted passages in a digital book. This is our ‘Cliff Notes.’ We don’t need Derek Sivers' brilliant summaries[14] anymore (sorry Derek!) — we’re collectively summarizing for each other as we read and mark our digital copies.
Show me a heat map of passages — ‘hottest’ to ‘coldest’. Which chapters in this Obama biography should I absolutely not miss?(Fig 7)
Let Stefan Sagmeister publicly share the passages he’s highlighted in the new Murakami Haruki novel. This is something I want to see. And I bet you do, too.
When I’m considering buying a book, show me how far the average reader gets. Do most readers get through the whole novel or give up halfway? How many notes do they take? How many passages do they highlight?"
I recently submitted a re-design for Oak Knoll's Antiquarian Catalogue. Oak Knoll is "the world's largest inventory of books about books and bibliography," with a hefty share of titles concerning typography and book design.
I used Robert Slimbach's Minion Pro Condensed with its
proportional ("Old Style") figures, widely spaced small caps for book titles, and a very readable italic for book descriptions:
On an unseasonably warm lunchbreak, I strolled to the New York Public Library to see the Lenox Gutenberg Bible that they have on display through August 2006. It sits in a glass case opened to the first page of Luke. I was struck first by the beautiful proportions of the page, according to Pablo Rosell-González [PDF] in:
Ternary canon: 2:3 page proportions where the height of the typographic box
is equal to the width of the page, the left margin is half the right margin
and the top margin is half the bottom margin.
The British Library has digitized versions of both copies of their Gutenbergs---one printed on paper, one on vellum. This is the British Library's vellum version of the page that is open at the NYPL. The large initial illuminated letters look quite different in the NYPL copy, with the "Q" filled in with a pleasing upwards-moving pattern and red-inked designs spilling out into the margin.
