What The Font!

Recently I have spend a lot of time looking at awesome typography artwork and tried to find out the basics of typography and tried to familiarize myself to fonts. In this process I found out the reason why Helvetica is the best font when it comes to designer and why designers hate Comic sans. What I have learned is that every font, serif or sans serif signifies something.... a certain mood and typography is a different ball game all together. The basics of typography are very interesting ... technical stuff like apex, baseline beak, axis etc which freaks me out. While trying to figure out more about type faces, fonts and typography, I fount an amazing creative which is a Periodic Table of font and Hell Yeah that helps......  these are Must have fonts with Helvetica ruling the chart.

So crux of the matter, I started paying a little more attention towards type faces and fonts. As a result, I have started noticing banner of famous brands to find out the fonts they have used (which is kind of crazy coz in a middle of conversation, I go "Hey they have used 'Century Gothic' "or "Wow nice use of 'American Typewriter' " and rest of people go "What??" ).

Like recently while roaming around in DLF Promenade  (Vasant Kunj) I figured out that the banners on the lift's exterior has used Font called 'Dax'.

Recently I downloaded a bunch of  free handwritten fonts for some projects and used them.....  while playing around, I found a free font called Hands of Sean and used it for a website page for Let's Design Season 4, Cotton Council International's initiative for fashion designers, and thts not all, I felled in love with that font and used it more then twice like for my cover photo for Facebook timeline along wid Klavika (Facebook font)..

My Timeline Cover photo

My creative for Cotton Council International's event Let's Design 4 website. 

The thing that was interesting is that few days later, I found two advertisements on air on TV which were using the same font as their branding like Expedia.co.in  and Lay's new campaign's caption "Pal banaye magical", as well as in intro of a bollywood movie "Ek main aur ekk tu"







    
       

Tumblr Makeover

Recently a very famous social media/blogging site Tumblr went through a make over.

Tumblr as most of people might not know is a very vast and useful social media platform especially for artists(CGI, Concept, Painters etc.). This platform is time like a tumbler (just like its name) where you can share your own art pieces, thoughts videos and reblog other artist's work as well.... its like a bucket where you take whatever you like and put it into one place... your archive. I have been a member of Tumblr  for more then a year and I have found a lot of motivational stuff to keep my creative juices flowing.

So now Tumblr went through a little makeover, their interface was already simple and very user friendly but now its even more simple and elegant.

                   

Now they have this unique way to attracting eye by having a great artwork of any artist at welcome page along with Tags category and suggestions for some interesting people to follow. Interestingly they have shifted the Log in & Sign up buttons on the top right corner of the screen which was earlier in the bottom middle  part of the screen with few slides screen shots of the layout.

When it started it used to look something like this.

     

and later on  before the latest makeover its used to look like this                                                                   

When you click on 'Log in', it takes you the log in menu like in image below.. earlier it was right underneath the slides.  

Earlier it used to look like this . Courtesy: Mashable who covered their previous makeover in year 2008

Then comes the Dashboard, dashboard is still the same except the dashboard icon bar,

 

which was previous like this :

People are still missing the previous layout but very soon will move on and will get used to.

If you are not a member of Tumblr, then you should register ASAP... its awesome. 

But statutory warning: ITS  HIGHLY ADDICTIVE!

Facebook Timeline...... the much awaited moment

So it has been quite sometime that facebook has implemented the timeline for all the users and have received mixed reviews but like always, every change that facebook brought like layout change in 2007, incorporating chat, pages or much criticized and irritating sideline ticker is not accepted first but later on people get used to of it (as if facebook gives you a choice  :P ) unlike Google, who whenever makes a drastic change in layout gives you a button blinking at the bottom which says "Dont like this change?? change to the previous look", thats why people dont stick to google's social media platforms like Buzz, Google+ or wave. I enabled my timeline on sept 26th 2011 and found it very interesting... the new timeline gives you alot of room for creativity when it comes to cover photos and profile pic.. (which has been already spilled around by alot of people who made extra ordinarily mind boggling cover photos which can be seen in my previous blogpost).

Today or should i say tonight 1st March 2012 midnight, Facebook implemented much anticipated Timeline format for brand pages (which is available for preview and will be implemented fully by 30th March) which not only creates a new dimension  but also opens alot more opportunities when it comes to brand pages, something which was already seen  with a sample mock up brand page created by Ryan Keneedy for Coca-cola, Mercedes benz, Red bull etc. It was already expected to be implemented soon for pages as the same format was implemented for facebook groups on 22nd Feb 2012.

The few pages which became public with this new format were Windows facebook page , The Olympics Official page , Jive Time Records Facebook page etc. There are few examples of new timeline pages which were implemented on AllFacebook.com's FB page, Life Hacker's FB page and a page i created few ages ago for a game i was totally hooked on to (Marvel Ultimate Alliance). 

   

                                       

Right now the problem faced is that all the dimensions of the previous facebook format changes and it is a major setback for apps which were strictly limited in terms of dimension for facebook (which was previously 520px into extended upto any) and the iframe HTML apps which used to land non fans to landing tabs asking or i should rather say forcing and luring then to "Like" the pages are not working as they were supposed to work. Right now its still open to changes from Facebook's end and it will be fully functional from 30th March.... so now its all up for developers and designers to test their skills.

Few more thing were pointed out by this blog i read which points out pros and cons of new timeline andn suggests 'NOT TO ENABLE TIMELINE ON FACEBOOK PAGES NOW'!