Toy Stories by Aled Lewis

A playful series of animal toy stories by Aled Lewis.

Beautiful Embossing

A thank you card done for 344design with custom lettering by Doyald Young and printed by The Ligature printshop.

A beautiful and elegant display of blind embossing presented through the FPO for print only blog.

Learning to Fail

2011/01 Milton Glaser from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

NY Creative Morning w/ Milton Glaser

What can be said about Milton Glaser? He is one of the most insightful and honest speakers I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. In his most recent talk at the SVA Theater for the NY Creative Mornings he spoke upon the importance of failure and how failure is what feeds or imagination and is the driving force to are furthered development as a designer.

Within the design world there is this notion that we can not fail. To fail is to be unsuccessful and is the proverbial gravestone to our career. But Milton tosses aside this notion, and reminds us of our rejected bodies of work. The collection of proposals that were turned down by clients, that to us illustrate our most imaginative and transgressive work.

Milton reminded us all that in order to better understand what we do, we must fail time and time again as artists. Just as a chef cooks the same dish over and over until it is perfect, we must fail over and over again until we have perfected another aspect of our craft.

We must learn to fail before we can succeed.

Digital Type Meet Physical Space

The Danish type designers e-Types have opened a "brick and mortar" shop in Copenhagen, Denmark where they are selling their digital fonts within a physical space. Along with posters, t-shirts, and other type decorated accessories, the danish foundry is selling their font families on preloaded usb sticks.

From the idealistic aesthetic standpoint of a typophile the store is a beautiful and playful idea. Yet I can not help but notice the environmental and fiscal short comings, which drain the idea of any rationality. The waste created by the usb sticks, as well as the material that was consumed in the creation of the store itself seems unnecessary for a store that is selling digital based typefaces. Is not the beauty of web-based stores, the ability for them to cut down on physical waste?

The store also seems to reach only a very niche market, which in turn does not scream huge profit margins. Yet, e-Type only plans to keep the store open for the course of one year and I can't argue with my internal urge to take an impromptu trip to Denmark.