.

“With a strong background in design and illustration, Anna Garforth’s nifty fingers can work moss into beautiful lettering, cookie dough into edible posters, and rubbish into typographic wonder…”

Thanks to designer friend Tiffany Turkington for this link.

Winnipeg, Canada

Much as I’m not big on formal events, I am looking forward to the gala black-tie dinner tonight at the Hotel Fort Garry on Broadway (which I’ll attend with Evelin and some colleagues from CIRCLE). This evening’s special honoree is our well-liked former provincial Premier, now Canada’s Ambassador to the USA in Washington, Gary Doer. This event is the 28th annual for the Concordia Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to preserving the high quality of health and wellness services provided by Concordia (Concordia Hospital, Concordia Place, Concordia Hip & Knee Institute, Concordia Wellness Projects and Concordia Village).

CIRCLE is a sponsor of the gala event, and we also designed the related graphics and collateral materials. We recently launched a new website for the Concordia Foundation, here.

Victoria, Canada

Life, Death and Graphic Design: The Critical Role of Information Design in Emergencies

Graphic design helps people make decisions. This is a given to designers. We don’t often think about how vital it becomes in an emergency situation. Visual information guides our thinking process, helps us assess personal risk and gain understanding so that we can make informed decisions—decisions which can have a profound impact on our lives. They can mean life or death.

Peggy Cady has written a compelling article that explores the vital importance of information design to the public and aid workers during the disasters in Japan. Access or download an online PDF of the article (4.5 MB, loaded with information graphics and numerous links) here.

Peggy Cady is a graphic designer in Victoria, BC. She is a former national president of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) and a GDC Fellow. Peggy would like this to be shared broadly—please feel free to re-post and distribute any way you wish…

Montreal, Canada

An online gallery showing the worldwide contributions to Mother Tongue (a project of INDIGO, the International Indigenous Design Network) is now available for online viewing, (sorry, links disabled).

Manchester, UK

Brendan Dawes is co-founder of Beep Industries and Executive Creative Director for magneticNorth, a digital design company. Since the early eighties, Brendan has explored the interplay of people, code, design, and art… the grabs shown above are a small sampling from his notes-on-design project.

Boston, Massachusetts

This year’s William A. Dwiggins lecture, “Graphic Guts,” will be presented by friend Luba Lukova at six this evening at the Boston Public Library, Rabb Lecture Hall (free admission, presented by the Society of Printers and the Boston Public Library).

Lukova’s distinctive art utilizes metaphors, symbols and economy of line and text to succinctly capture humanity’s elemental themes. She employs accessible metaphors in a concise and iconic way, sometimes using humor to present disturbing issues. Social justice and consciousness have long been part of Lukova’s vocabulary in creating public images that invite social responsibility… her new book, Graphic Guts will be published in June 2011.

More about Luba and her great work here.

Zeeland, Michigan

“Steve Frykholm’s design career at Herman Miller began with a large ear of sweet corn—a curiously appropriate symbol, its rows of kernels forming an orderly grid and its roots originating in the watery, agrarian landscape of Western Michigan. Soon after arriving at the Zeeland-based furniture manufacturer, in 1970, Frykholm was asked to design a poster for the company picnic, named the Sweet Corn Festival. “I said I’d take a crack at it,” he recalls.

Working with designer Phil Mitchell, Frykholm came up with a 29″ x 39″ screen print of a pair of teeth clamped around an ear of corn, printed Pop Art-style in high-gloss inks. Part of the impulse also came from muscle memory: “I had learned to screen print while in the Peace Corps teaching at a trade school for girls in Nigeria,” says Frykholm. The combination proved fruitful. Frykholm went on to design 20 picnic posters in the subsequent 20 years, several of which ended up in the permanent collection held at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Read the rest of the tribute to Steve Frykholm (on the occasion of his receiving the 2010 AIGA Medal last week) here.

Images: I’ve had a framed copy of the ‘sweet corn’ poster hanging in my home for 30 years; below, a composite of 20 Herman Miller Picnic posters, 1970–1989.

Ottawa, Canada

The Gibson font family is a humanist sans serif typeface designed by our colleague, the eminent Canadian type designer Rod McDonald. It honours John Gibson FGDC, Rod’s long-time friend and one of the original founders of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC).

As well as paying tribute to John Gibson’s productive life and love of the typographic arts, the Gibson family is intended to be a mainstay of the future of Canadian design education. The 8-font family is available at token pricing (only $48 for all eight weights!) to make it especially affordable for design students. For less than the price of a design textbook, a student can now have a sturdy and contemporary humanist sans serif family that fits pretty much any design application, and will remain useful long after academic studies and well into a professional career in design.

All the revenues from the sale of Gibson are being donated to the GDC, where they will be allocated to a variety of programs aiming to improve the creative arts and elevate design education in Canada. Read more about this special typeface launch here.

Each of the eight Gibson fonts comes with 370 characters and features extended Latin-based language support. The Gibson family ships in cross-platform OpenType format. Test or buy Gibson online here.

London, United Kingdom

This year, Amnesty International is celebrating half a century of active opposition to human rights abuses… “From community to community in every corner of the world, Amnesty International enables ‘ordinary’ concerned people to work together to protect other people in danger. Change begins each time a single, concerned person speaks out against wrongdoing.”

The Guardian‘s ‘Observer’ has just published a selection of the powerful posters used by Amnesty International over the past 50 years (see more here), including the selection above.

Canberra, Australia

Doug Jackson is an educator and security consultant with over 25 years of electronics and computing experience. Some years back, he designed the Word Clock as a project to help educate others about simple electronic design and construction, empowering them to “do the things they dream of.” Shown above are a few pics from Doug’s website where he generously offers various pre-constructed and tested clock modules as well as design files and manuals. Good on you, Doug!

Thanks to friend Bruce Hildebrand (who knows how much I like clocks) for providing me with the link to Word Clock.