I was a complete stranger to this magazine and I had never before heard about glitch art (although I was always curious as to how he designed the With Teeth and The Social Network record sleeves) but it seemed good enough for a one-year subscription. No regrets there, every page in this magazine is jam-packed with enormously inspiring images and there’s not even a single advert as well. Apparently, I’ve missed out on quite a bit, but luckily they are available for back orders so these are the ones I have picked up. Looking forward…

IdN: v17n6 – The Minimalism Issue

IdN: v17n2 – The Retro Graphics Issue

IdN: v16n3 – The Typography Issue

IdN: v15n5 – The Geometric Issue

IdN: v15n4 – The Infographics Issue

Time to go to bed.

What Peter Saville did on Unknown Pleasures is briliant!

But maybe I’m speaking too soon, as when I started writing scripts for Scriptographer, the first thing I did was a complete ripoff of Jürg Lehni‘s Faust.

I called my script Saville Raster… So, I guess I’m as guilty as everyone else!
And if that wasn’t enough. Peter Crnokrak made a nice poster showing the huge number of covers of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart which was featured in the book Data Flow that I recently bought.

That, and Similar Diversity, a project by Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller also featured in the book caught my eye as I really liked the arcs – or, rather, lines in hyperbolic geometry.

After a quick look at Wolfram MathWorld on how to calculate the Poincaré Hyperbolic Disk a new idea spawned in my mind.

Fortunately it’s easier to calculate the arcs when dealing with vectors instead of coordinates as they can be created using its length and angle.

My intended project, although it’s a few months off in the future, will rely heavily on these arcs to create some interesting (at least in my mind) infographics.

And as for the music? Well, there are other bands…

It has finally arrived, Designing Type by Karen Cheng. Apparently, this book is very hard to get hold of. It was sold out at Amazon so I ordered it from Barnes & Noble, got my ‘Your Order Was Shipped’-email and waited 10 days, only to get another mail saying that my order was canceled and my money would be refunded. That was it, no further info on why my book was returned to sender. After sending an angry mail demanding an explanation they claimed my address was somehow “undeliverable for an unknown reason”. Luckily, meantime, Amazon had gotten six more copies of the book in stock so I ordered it straight away. It took four days. Express delivery, totally worth it!

If the reviews I’ve read are to be trusted this is probably The Book of type design and no other book is even close to be as thorough. I have not yet had the time to sit down and read the whole thing but my first impression is that it is so full of information and minute details that it is almost overwhelming!

A good and very comprehensive review of the book from The Designers Review of Books can be found here.

Best thing to do (for me anyway) is to do nothing at all, or at least something entirely different for a while, being certain that it will come to me one day.

This seems to be a well working strategy for me as I get really bored of my ordinary full time work very quickly which, in turn, sparks a inspiration surge. Boredom is, if not the mother, the midwife of invention/creativity. As it happened I browsed some Flickr galleries and noticed a guy producing very similar stuff as I have explored. A quick search with Google on the topic of beautiful geometry came up with this site.

This fueled a new creative flow (it didn’t hurt with a weekend trip to Berlin either) and now I have at least half a dozen ideas I’d like to try out. Many of them revolves around ciphers and different ways to translate text to symbols or colors as well as barcodes.