What's your type?

Japanese font makers Morisawa can spend up to four years and spend €800,000 on producing a typeface! They draw each character by hand with a basic Japanese font set containing more than 23,000 characters! Many designers today (across all disciplines) conduct their work on computers - making Morisawa a refreshing example of how traditional methods are still being used and just how effective they are!

To see some of the finished typefaces visit their website

A weekend of activity

This weekend saw the Falmouth Oyster Festival come to end. The festival celebrates the not so humble oyster, the start of the dredging season and in particular, one of the last remaining traditional oyster fisheries, dredging by sail and hand punt. Oh and you can eat a load and listen to some sea shanties too.

It's also all change just outside our windows as winter is announced by the removal of yachts from the harbour onto dry land. Winter let off for one weekend at least as the October sun provided one last opportunity at some bass fishing... Lovely.

This year's top 5 picks from La Biennale di Venezia - Gendall gives you the rundown.

#5: Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Transsolar

At number 5 is a fascinating entry from Japanese studio Tetsuo Kondo Architects and environmental engineering firm Transsolar whereby a cloud has been suspended inside the exhibition space!

This installation perfectly adheres to this year's Biennale theme of 'People Meet in Architecture' and has a spiral walkway to guide visitors up through the layers to emerge above the cloud, before they descend back down through the vapour to the floor.

So how is this done? Three layers of air are pumped into the space: cold dry air at the bottom, hot humid air in the middle and hot dry air at the top (feels a bit like being in the Rainforest Biome at The Eden Project!).

If you would like to experience it for yourself the Biennale continues until 21st November...

Photograph: www.irishtimes.com


#4: 1000 Singapores - A Model of the Compact City

Singapore is capable of housing 6.5 million people. Singapore occupies only about 710 sq km.

Multiply that by 1000, and it is possible to fit the entire population of the world into a land area approximately twice that of Italy, equal to Texas, one-fifth of India, and one-tenth of China.

This exhibition is a portrait of the diversity of the living environment and the people who live in it. It exercises the idea that if 6.5 million people are able to live sustainably on 710 sq km, this can offer a powerful model for the compact city of the future.. Interesting thought.

Looking at the display of the exhibition itself - 1000 A5 photographs fill the walls either side of you, completely immersing you in the different character and qualities a compact city has. Interestingly, structural shots of buildings and landscapes are in black and white and any shots of people are in colour...


#3: What Architects Desire - Germany

 

A beautiful and intricate collection of 182 sketches using "desire" as the topic of a survey among architects ; answers are given through drawings.

Each drawing is unique and shows the different reactions they had to the notion of desire and longing.. a very contemplative involvement is created with the viewer - you may be there for hours trying to de-code what it is they actually desire...

You can buy the book displaying all drawings here!


#2: Made in Venice - England

Part of the British entry at the Biennale includes a new project by Wolfgang Scheppe drawing on both John Ruskin’s original notebooks and a series of historical photographs of Venice taken by local residents, Alvio and Gabriella Gavagnin.

John Ruskin's original venetian notebooks from 1849-50 are on display (7 of them) showing the most detailed drawings and notes on the buildings of the famous Italian city. These, juxtaposed with the photographs by local residents of the city, makes for an extremely interesting view!


#1: Your Split Second House, by Olafur Eliasson

This installation is one for the senses and comes in at number 1 for it's simplicity and mesmerising outcome.

In a nutshell, you walk into a dark room where three streams of water are twisting in the air, falling from the roof to the floor in an erratic motion.

There is strobe lighting to illuminate the room in tiny intervals, during which you catch glimpses of the water almost frozen in time. It all seems strange and dramatic at first as you are trying to figure out what it is you are actually seeing - which is probably part of the concept - making you investigate further!

Want to know even more? Click here for further info on the Biennale and this year's entries.

Photograph: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is soon to be released. Specifically, October for the EU, and November for the US.

For those that haven't checked out Windows Phone 7 already, it looks great. The apps are slick too (check out the foursquare video for example). It's all based on Window's new design paradigm, called "Metro". The WP7 homescreen presents you with a bunch of dynamic tiles as a starting point, allowing you to see everything that important to you at a glance.

Despite it's shiny new look and feel, whether it will be able to compete with the iPhone's massive following of users and developers has yet to be seen.

New flexible PWC brand by Wolff Olins...

With the rebrand of Accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Wolff Olins have created a flexible brand identity that adapts to it's application. The panes of colour scale to create endless varieties of brand expression. It's a lovely expressive brand scheme for the accountancy industry,  that's filled with sans serif fonts and generally a blue colour spectrum. It will no doubt 'inspire' many design schemes to come...