This is one of the best design-centric Q&As I’ve read in a long time. Oliver Reichenstein is extremely articulate, and his answers are packed with nuggets of wisdom and perspective about design.

It was tough to pick out just one quote, but this one stood out to me:

Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.

Anyone who has worked in design has, at some point, felt the pain of group-led design decisions. And though we all know it usually leads to a sub-par final product, but we don’t necessarily know why.

Bariol is a nice, rounded sans-serif font family with an interesting pricing structure. The regular weight can only be purchased with a tweet; the thin, light, and bold faces are pay-what-you-want. Paying with a tweet may seem like a deal, but I think that makes Bariol Regular the most expensive of them all.

(Via Brian Hoff.)

Oliver Reichenstein on the what and why of Information Architects’ new typeface, iABC, which they’re using on their site:

[S]creens are changing not just in size, but also in pixel density. In other words: we do not just need responsive layouts, we also need responsive typefaces. To test that assumption, iA has created its new website with responsive typography and a custom-built responsive typeface.

[…]

You can’t see responsive typography on one and the same device. And you can’t even see it comparing the devices if it’s done right. The idea of responsive typefaces is that the typeface always looks and feels the same.

The Boston Public Library has a Flickr set with 351 travel posters from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. And man are they fantastic. I especially love the Union Pacific Streamliner “City of Denver” poster, as well as all of the Austria travel posters.

But that’s not all. They’ve got a slew of other sets as well, such as this one of vintage labels from produce crates.

(Via TNW.)

I completely forgot about this post on Adobe’s Brand Experience Blog until Stephen Hackett linked to it this morning.

It takes well over a year to design, execute, deliver, and ensure the proper implementation of the roughly 5,000 or so assets it takes to get a CS release out the door (we’re already thinking about CS7). Along the away, there are innumerable institutional, technological, and political hurdles to overcome. It can be daunting, but we do everything we can to get it made with as few design compromises as possible.

Of all the screenshots, design concepts, and other graphics in this article it is this image of their splash screen less-versus-more continuum that grabs my attention. I consider the splash screen design that was used in CS3 and CS4 to be the best one — it was simple, basic, and minimalistic. And yet the Adobe designers consider that design to be far too simple, and they label the “sweet spot” to be mostly “more” with only a little bit of “less”.

Some people will think this is sacrilege, the rest of us will think it is awesome.

In a way, what makes this poster even cooler is the fact that Denver never did host the 1976 winter Olympics — they withdrew because hosting the Olympics costs a lot of money.

After Denver withdrew, Whistler, B.C. was offered the games but they declined. The International Olympic Committee then offered the games to Innsbruck, Austria and that’s where the games were held. Here’s one of the posters from the Innsbruck games.

Dieter Rams, in a speech which he delivered at Jack Lenor Larsen’s New York showroom in December of 1976:

Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

I am convinced that a well-thought-out design is decisive to the quality of a product. A poorly-designed product is not only uglier than a well-designed one but it is of less value and use. Worst of all it might be intrusive.

That was 36 years ago and it’s as relevant as if it had been delivered this morning.

(Via Oliver Reichenstein.)

Jonathan Ward, founder and lead designer of the drool-worthy Icon trucks, shares about the design decisions that go into creating the Icon Bronco. (Via Stephen Hackett.)

Gene Gable looks back at dry-transfer type and some of the Letraset catalogs of the early 1970s:

I was a freshman in college when I had my first confrontation with dry-transfer type. While every dry-transfer type encounter had a minimal likelihood of success, I somehow ended up with a decent-looking party invitation, which I remember distinctly was set in University Roman.

The Field Notes Dry Transfer “_______ Edition” were my favorite to date.

(Via Khoi Vinh.)

One of the hallmark features of InDesign CS6 is its adaptive design functionality and the introduction of alternate layouts within the same document, liquid layout rules, and the content collector tools. Here’s Jay J. Nelson’s review of these features for Macworld.

Though personally I think the the vast array of Batmobile designs are far cooler.

If you’ve got a new iPad, one of the first things you’re likely to notice is that graphics on the Web look fuzzy when next to crisply-rendered text.
Graphics could look blurred on the iPad 2 as well, but it was not nearly as contrasted as on the new iPad. I don’t think many people plan to go through their site and update all the pictures, screenshots, and etc. found in their past articles. But one simple thing that websites can do to improve their look on every iPad is to use SVGs or upscaled PNGs for their header and sidebar images.

For example: on Sean Sperte’s site, Geek & Mild, the ampersand logo is an SVG — and so it scales well and looks crisp on any screen.

Here on shawnblanc.net I upscaled the “shawnblanc” image. Meaning the source image is exactly three times larger than the size it’s displayed at (777×138 and 259×46 respectively). It looks nice and sharp on an iPad 3.

I think a good rule of thumb for what graphics you should bother updating or not is simply this: if you want people to read it, or if it’s a critical component of your site design, then update it to look crisp on a Retina display.