Mint

Last week at work, we had a meeting to share the images that are currently inspiring our work. This time we were focusing on typography. The goal in these meetings is to stretch ourselves and each other creatively – and of course, it’s always fun to see what other people find. I keep an Inspiration folder on my desktop, so I grabbed a few of those images and printed them out. I also grabbed the latest issue of Communications Arts (Design Annual 49) and flagged some things in there.

The top spread and the image above (a close-up of the same spread) feature Chen Design Associates. Chen is one of my favorites when I’m looking for inspiration because their print work is really cool. Their clients aren’t pinching pennies when it comes to high end printing techniques, and I love the closeups of deep indentations and metallic inks…. yum.

This is a print out of some things in my desktop folder. They are designs by Designwerkhaus and Pentagram.

I love this one by Mono for the combination of vintage materials overlaid with large type. Always a winner in my book! It’s interesting conceptually too, because the project was for the Science Channel and encourages people to “question even previously accepted principles.” Screen printing on vintage textbooks is a cool way to send that message. Here’s an image pulled from their website since I like the project so much:

I liked the above image (Soapbox Design) for the gutsy way they broke up the titles “Yahoo” and “Fatal Blow,” along with handmade looking illustration. It’s often hard to present typographic ideas like this to our more conservative clients, but this image makes me remember that the client will never go for it if you don’t even try!

This last one is one of Brendan’s inspirations. We’ve been thinking about large scale typography as an art form and this was good for brainstorming. Via Print Magazine Regional Design Annual ’08, project by Gluekit.

See larger versions of these photos on Mint’s Flickr account!