Emanuele Abrate illustrates the typefaces used in some of the most famous brands.
Logofonts, by Emanuele Abrate
Twitter Photo Filters
A day after confirming it had lost the ability to display Instagram images, Twitter has rolled out its own library of retro filters for its Android and iPhone apps.
The eight filters are the usual suspects we’ve come to expect from mobile photo apps, including desaturated, black and white and high contrast. There are auto-adjust and cropping options, as well as a helpful grid view that lets you see what each filter will look like at once.
“The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet,” said Twitter senior designer Coleen Baik in a blog post announcing the new features. She emphasized that images are important to Twitter users, and called photos “one of the most compelling forms of self-expression.”
The new filters were designed especially for Twitter by photo-editing service Aviary, which also handles edits for various partners such as Flickr and Twitpic. What the effects lack in originality, they will no doubt make up for in popularity. Filters are an easy alternative to tinkering with an image in a photo editor, and their retro aesthetic has helped Instagram get more than 150 million users.
I Will No Longer Be Tweeting on LinkedIn (And Neither Will Most People)
In this day and age, this sort of behavior, unfortunately, is unacceptable. It’s a shame, too, as I’ve heard a number of members of my LinkedIn network appreciated tweets in their news feed. But if LinkedIn can’t play nice with the big guys and come up with a more satisfying arrangement, I doubt most people will lose sleep over their tweets being absent from the profile of a social networking site that doesn’t even make the top three. Read more
era404.com Reboot
I always say that the cobbler’s kids have the oldest shoes. The last relaunch of era404.com had been in 2005, before the widespread use of iOS devices (which don’t support Adobe Flash) and the release of browsers capable of supporting HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery.
For the last few years, as all designers seem to do, I kept saying “God, I really need to update our site.” As my brother Chris always says, “the second worst problem in the world is having too much work, but it’s far better than the alternative.” era404 has been fortunate in that we’ve never found ourselves with too much idle time on our hands. That said, we’ve been seriously lacking in the capacity to explore new business development and professional upkeep and maintenance on our public image. Until now. Read more
Everything Ages Fast
What if some of the most famous online services were launched in 1959? That’s what Sao Paulo ad agency Moma imagined when the released this 3 part series of fake vintage ads for Facebook, YouTube and Skype. The “Everything Ages Fast” ad campaign is Mad Men era imagery that would look perfect in vintage copies of Esquire.
tr.im returns
I was sad to see that tr.im was shut down, quite unprofessionally, back in early August. And since then, the world moved on without them and everyone forgot they ever existed in the first place. In fact, if it wasn’t for a random twitter post by them yesterday, I would’ve never learned that they apologized:
Everyone involved at Nambu would like to apologize again for the hastiness in which we acted last Sunday, announcing the shutdown of tr.im by the end of the year.
…they regrouped, and are now transitioning to being open source and community-owned.
…and you have Eric Woodward‘s personal guarantee that he’ll take care of shortfalls in funding to ensure that tr.im never goes offline again.
Lettercase
In light of the creation of [d]online, the font, and my recent post about The League of Moveable Type (to which [d]online was submitted), I did some poking around and found their new Social Font Manager, the Lettercase Application. Apparently, this application will enable like-minded typographers to collaboratively build typefaces. And, to this typophile and amateur typographer, with marginal ligature skills and a lack of patience for kerning, this is wonderful news.