Another fantastic video using type is the Uruguayan band Cuarteto de Nos. I have no idea what the song is about but I don’t really care, it’s fun and beautiful to look at.

For more examples of Type in Motion check out Smashing Magazine.

He went through his book "Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far" telling us of his process. The book is beautiful, inside and out:

The book design reminds me of Chip Kidd’s follow up book to The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners:

Both designers use type that is hand drawn or drawn from the materials around them. The type becomes the image.

Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear, Saul Ferris’s book jacket for "Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan"

Also in common is their great one liners:

Chip Kidd: "Good is Dead" "Do you see?"

Stefan Sagmeister: "Trying to look good limits my life."

Check out Chip Kidd’s website "Good is Dead" and Stefan Sagmeister website for "Things I’ve learned in life so far".

A new exhibition at Emily Carr exemplifies those advantages. “The Spirit of Place” opening reception took place Thursday night with the unveiling of 75 images created by young artists from across the province. The students, who range from ages 6-16, worked under the tutelage of alumni from the Granville Island-based school.

“The young artists were initially hesitant to voice their ideas, but confidence quickly grew as we discussed how they might engage with the materials supplied. We exchanged ideas about the meaning of sustainability, and what Vancouver means to them,” says Leah van der Voort MacFarlane, one of the 15 mentors. “To work with professional-quality materials in a ‘real’ studio made the experience a great one for all of us.”

The artwork evokes culture, sport and sustainability in B.C., and was made possible because of sponsorship from Emily Carr, Arts Umbrella, Save the Children Canada and the Cultural Olympiad.

Pica Interactive was honored to create the website, logo and exhibit design for “The Spirit of Place” project. The exhibition, which debuted as part of the Winterrpution festivities, can be seen at Emily Carr through March 8.

The artwork can also be seen on the website SpiritofPlace.eciad.ca

Chiliwack "pod" with Samantha Pedersen (centre) pose in front of her painting

Arts Umbrella Choir perform on opening night

*photography by Julia Pelish Photography

*article written by Adrian Brijbassi

How cool is that? The only complaints I have (if you want to call them complaints) are; I wish it had more levels because I wanted to keep playing, and it only works on a PC

I think it will be a lot of fun playing this with my 5 year old niece – maybe she can teach me a few things

You can download Crayon Physics here.

For example, District Thin is a beautiful san serif font, especially if you are looking for that nice clean thin look. See it compared to Helvetica, Frutiger or Univers:

Or Canonica instead of “Times New Roman”, and if you are looking for a font with less x-height and narrower then Century Gothic, try Geosans Light.

Check out the Smashing Magazine website to see more of this collection.

What are microformats?
According to microformats.org they are “designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards”.

So what does that really mean?
Microformats are embedded in web pages using bits of xhtml to represent things like people, tags or events. Microformats support feeds and APIs for your website in the fastest and simplest way. And they also help provide a way to publish reliable information on the Web.

So what do these bits of code look like?
Technorati uses the RelTag to tag it’s blogs RSS feeds, the code looks something like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

You can find out more about Technorati tags here.

So what does this have to do with Social Networking?
Meet XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) the microformat that puts the ‘human face’ on linking. Huh? Ok, let’s say I’m friends with KB and I also worked with her, my link to her would read like this:

<a href="http://kgbfiles.blogspot.com/" rel="friend co-worker">KB</a>

Now she could also link to me the same way then others can see how we are connected, make sense? Here are other tags that can be used:

acquaintance: Someone who you have exchanged greetings with
contact: Someone you know how to get in touch with
met: Someone who you have actually met in person
colleague: Someone in the same field of work/study
muse: Someone who brings you inspiration
sweetheart: Someone close to you
crush: Someone you have a crush on

So why do people do it?
I think the point of XFN is help connect your contacts across multiple networks. Doesn’t it drive you crazy every time you join a new network and you have to fill out your profile and then invite all your friends to join? XFN makes it easy by making your information portable. Plaxo says it best, “we believe strongly that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their profiles and friends list. No service you use should claim your data as their own and keep it trapped in their “walled garden”.” Nicely put. Although not all Social Networks are XFN friendly it is predicted to become the norm of the semantic web and not just for Geeks.

If you want more information on XFN check out these sites and articles:
Xhtml friendly network
XFN, relationship minefield
XFN for n00bs
Building a open Social Graph

Mashups are web sites that use third party APIs, like those mentioned above,  to create new content and functionality by mashing together data and functionality from different vendors.  Although many of the currently popular mashups involve leveraging the Google Maps API, it is by no means the only style of mashup. With so many web services offering APIs the creative possibilities are endless. A search for mashups will provide many examples of what’s possible.

Although it’s true most of these APIs requires a fair amount of development experience to use effectively, there are a number of tools available to help the novice developer and even the non developer create some pretty cool mashups.

If you have some development experience take a look at the Google Mashup Editor. If you’re not a developer you can still create some very cool mashups with Pipes from Yahoo. It’s fast, easy and quite a lot of fun. If nothing else, you’re sure to find some inspiration from some of the example mashups being created.

Here’s an interesting mashup created with Yahoo Pipes that helps you find an Apartment Near Something.

But don’t get caught in the rut of thinking mashups are only about mashing content to build new applications. Sometimes a mashup is simply mashing content to produce new content like this classic video mashup.

Great, Google builds wonderful web apps. How does that help me with my next web app project? Well it turns out Google wants us to leverage their hard work by letting us build web on top of their technology. And it’s free! (did you hear that Microsoft?).

An API (Application Programming Interface)  allows other developers to integrate with and leverage that application’s functionality for use in their own application.  As a web developer I can use the Google APIs to build web sites with incredible functionality on a limited budget.

Imagine I’m building a website that includes event listings. The owner of the site needs to update these events so typically a content management tool is created to allow them to add, update and remove events. This may sound trivial but if you’re a developer you already know this can turn into a serious amount of time, especially when you start to consider all the additional little features like notifying stakeholders that an event has changed, or converting times into the users local time zone. Instead I can uses the Google Calendar API to do much of the heavy lifting. I create and manage events using the Google Calendar Application and then retrieve the information for display on my site using the Google Calendar API. My event content management tool is provided entirely by Google Calendar. Not only do I not have build an event management tool, I’m almost certainly getting far more functionality than I could hope to provide on a reasonable budget.

Although Google isn’t the only web company providing APIs (in fact most of the well known, progressive web companies are doing it), the amount of intellectual property Google is giving to the web development community is incredible.   So if you’re developing new websites or web applications be sure to check out the free functionality provided by the Google APIs. Not only can it make you look good, but it may save you a bundle in development time.

I decided to go on Marketplace to check out people looking for work. I found one ad for babysitting – only she can’t spell babysitting. Everyone makes spelling mistakes though; I’m one of the worst ones. I went on to her profile to see what kind of person would want to look after kids. Under her causes there was ‘legalize it!’ (Marijuana) and ’stop child abuse’. There is so much you can learn from her profile – more then if you decided to interview her. Education-Portal.com wrote, "Out of the employers surveyed, one in ten said they planned to review social networking site profiles prior to making a hiring decision. More than 60 percent said the information they see on these profiles will influence what they think about the job candidate, and more importantly, who gets hired and who doesn’t. The other 40 percent are undecided as to whether or not the images and text seen on such sites should factor into a hiring decision."

Web Worker Daily states in their article "12 Ways to use Facebook Professionally" that your profile is very much like personalizing your desk space at work – drawings from your kids, a picture of your partner, or a book you are currently reading. Web Worker Daily warns though "Only display on your profile what you’d put on your desk. Just because Steve owns a picture his buddy took of him getting sick after an all-night party doesn’t mean he’s going to frame it and put it out for his co-workers to admire. Don’t add anything to your profile that you wouldn’t display for your supervisors, co-workers and clients to see as they’re walking by your work environment."

It just like that girl who is advertising to babysit, I’m sure she is fully capable but is that "legalize it" going to deter potential clients or maybe attract them? Ms. Li said in a recent Globe and Mail article "If I know something about the person selling and if that person is in my network, I have a bit more confidence in working with that person," She also suggests that "placing advertisements through Marketplace is more effective than other online ad networks such as Craigslist and Google Adwords, because of the personal touch it provides."

Yes, it does provide a personal touch but I think for now I’ll keep my high school pictures and my profile separate from my work.

Related Articles:

Job candidates getting tripped up by Facebook

Facebook WILL BE for business

In May I wrote a post about the documentary film Helvetica by Gary Hustwit, and last night I finally was able to see it. I had great expectations, not because it was a film on Helvetica, but because it was a film on type. I wasn’t disappointed. Gary Hustwit did a great job of portraying the love/hate relationship people have with the font as well as giving some history of type in graphic design. The film was filled with some great one liners like this one:

“I’m a typomaniac…an incurable but modern disease” – Erik Spiekerman.

That brought some great laughs from the audience (I’m sure) filled with mostly graphic designers. Regardless of whether you are a graphic designer, everyone is becoming aware of the fonts around them. I get crafted emails in Comic Sans, Garamond or Courier, the font that they think represents them. Neville Brody talks about the use of type in advertising the same way, “…the way the message is dressed is going to define our reaction to that message…if the message is written in Helvetica – (you know) it is going to be clean, that you are going to fit in – you’re not going to standout…”

Douglas Coupland made a joke after the film that he associates Helvetica with over the counter drugs since his father was a physician and received samples from all the pharmaceutical companies – all labels written in Helvetica. In the film, designer Paula Scher associates it to the Vietnam War and jokingly says it started the Iraqi War. Love it or hate it Helvetica is all around us and as Rick Poynor says in the film “…that’s type…casting it’s secret spell”.

Official Website, Helvetic, A documentary film by Gary Hustwit