Oxford signs

Today I went to Oxford, the Ashmoleon museum and for some (unsuccessful) shopping - Oxford does not have a H&M! I enjoyed the Japanese/Chinese bits of the museum most. But they also had an interesting temporary exhibition of modern, but traditional looking, black and white prints (which I'll blog about soon).

All the street signs in Oxford seem to be like this, I love them.

And some others:

I like this typeface for Jamie Oliver's restaurant.

This sign was moved from its original location but put
next to the county hall building, to keep it.

Some very nice lettering

Sometimes "hand rendered lettering" can look overused but I really like these, by Chris Piascik, which I found here.

Yeah, he is pretty good.

Setlist.fm

Just discovered this website, whilst looking for Frank Turner's setlist from last night, where people post the setlists from any gigs all over the world.

"Setlist.fm is a wiki-like service to collect and share setlists. Search, add and edit setlists embed them into your website and get personal tour and song statistics. All for free!"

Here's Frank's setlist:

Edit this setlist | More Frank Turner setlists

Frank Turner at the Roundhouse

So, I went to see Frank Turner last night, at the Roundhouse. I've been listening to him since his first album was out, which last.fm tells me was in 2007 - so three years. But it wasn't until December last year when I'd been listening to Poetry of the Deed (his third album), non-stop, that I saw he was touring and decided to get tickets, luckily the tour was during my Easter holidays.

I'm going to point out now that this is by no means going to be a good gig review or anything, I don't have a set list (although I may now scour the web for one) and I can't remember all of the details. But I enjoyed myself very much and I think that last night was quite possibly one of the best live performances I've ever seen.

Supports
One of the supports was the brilliant American folk/country (and ex-punk) Chuck Ragan, who I was well aware of before and so was even happier to find he was supporting. Frank has played with him in the US (and The Gaslight Anthem!) so they're friends. The first support was a band called Crazy Arm who I thought were pretty good too. I'm definitely going to listen to them again.

Crazy Arm

The chap in the middle left is Chuck Ragan, coming on stage to do a song
with Crazy Arm at the end of their set. I love how all the bands were

friends with one another. Frank comes on with Chuck later on!

Chuck Ragan

And here's Frank!

Frank Turner

And so on and so forth, there's a lot of samey photographs. I took a lot.

But I'm well aware none of them are particularly good, I just wanted to record

the moment a little.

This is the "real Dan" from Dan's Song.

The heads (at the front) have gone!

Yes, you are amazing Frank.
He played well over 20 songs, non-stop, barely stopping for abreak,
and then came back with Chuck and co.

And sporting a I am the real Frank Turner t-shirt.

Frank loved the gig so much that he even came back for a second encore!

oh, ahem, shirtless.

It was his largest ever headline tour, so far. Plus, last night, in London, was the last night of the tour – so that's always special. And he made sure we knew it. I'm sure we got more songs than any of the previous dates on the tour would have, including many of my favourites.

Frank was just overall brilliant. Best birthday gig (three days early) I could have asked for.

New design for Creative Review

I'm tempted to buy the latest edition of Creative Review as it has had a re-design. "with a new size, new paper, new typography and, yes, a new logo". Also, the cover illustration is by Anthony Burrill, whose work I like. Not certain I like the typography for the logo, but we'll see...

I don't buy the magazine, or any design magazines really, that often. Mainly because a) they're expensive b) I read the blogs and bits online, and c) we have them all in a journals room at university.  However, there's nothing like having your own copies of the magazines to flick through.

"We knew that we needed to make the printed magazine even more distinct from the website. It had to be more tactile, more of a joy to handle, better quality. But finding the resources to do that is not easy in the face of a recession that has affected advertising, and therefore paginations and revenues, so badly.

We discovered that changes to the Royal Mail’s pricing structure meant that, by reducing the size of the magazine slightly to 250mm square we could save money. Which is all fine but not worth doing if the smaller format doesn’t feel right. So we had some old copies of the magazine cut down to the new size and found that it really worked. It felt good in the hand.

Then, we thought, what if we took the money that we would save from the size reduction and put it (and more) into the paper stocks. So instead of 90 gsm, the text pages are now on 135 gsm with Crit on 115 gsm uncoated. Instead of 250gsm, the coverstoack is now 300gsm. The thickest, best paper CR has never been on. Despite the mail cost saving, we are now spending more money per month on the production of the magazine, but we believe that our readers will appreciate the result – the pictures here don't do it justice. You have to pick up a copy to really appreciate what a difference the new paper makes."

And so, I think I have been persuaded to go out and buy a copy.
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/march/cr-april-redesign

Penguin keys

http://graphiceverywhere.tumblr.com/

Tofu brains

I'm eating tofu tonight.

The hitchhiker's guide

Brilliant. That is all.

Actually, this is where Steve Jobs got the idea for the iPad I reckon.
And whoever invented those ereaders. I mean in terms of Douglas Adam's
original Guide in the book, which is animated like I'd imgine, in the film.
http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/03/hitchhikers-guide-amazon-kindle.php