Doyald Young: The Self-Made Typography Icon in His Own Words

From high school dropout to design legend, or what the Oxford English Dictionary has to do with iconic logos.

Last fall, mere months before iconic typeface and logotype designer Doyald Young passed away, Lynda.com produced a wonderful short documentary about him, in which Young tells his incredible rags-to-proverbial-riches story and reveals the principles behind his timeless, unique letterforms and logos. Besides being a design legend, he was also an epitome of the intellectual ideal of curiosity as powerful tool of creative growth.

I did not finish high school, I didn’t even complete the tenth grade, and throughout my whole life, I’ve read extensively — it’s how I’ve educated myself.”

I think the reason that I have been attracted to lettering and typography is because, in one sense, so little of it has changed — the letters that we look at today are the same letters that we looked at 500 years ago. And I sort of like the stability of it and I think it all goes back to the fact that my dad moved us around all the time, my whole childhood was in a state of flux. So I look for stability, and typography gives me that stability.”

Nearly two decades after its original publication, Young’s Logotypes & Letterforms: Handlettered Logotypes and Typographic Considerations remains a timeless classic and a fine addition to the 10 essential books on typography — a big thanks to reader Donald Lais for the great call.

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Lewis Mumford on the City: Rare Footage from 1963

What Dutch highways have to do with Canadian documentaries and the psychology of protests.

Last week, we explored 7 essential books about cities, perhaps the most influential of which was the 1961 volume The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by prolific author, philosopher and urbanism icon Lewis Mumford. In 1963, the National Film Board of Canada produced six 27-minute documentaries for a series entitled Mumford On The City. In this rare surviving footage of the series’ closing titles, Mumford articulates the ideology of urbanism long before it reached its contemporary tipping point and presages essential issues we grapple with today as we try to understand and optimize our cities, from transportation to communication to violent protest.

The city multiplies man’s power to think, to remember, to educate, to communicate, and so to make possible associations which bridge and bypass nations, cultures. This mixture, this cosmopolitanism, is the chief source of the city’s vitality. And we must enlarge and enrich it as we move towards a new urban form.”

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Video Portraits of Resilience from Sri Lanka

Three beautiful short films about ingenuity in the face of scarcity and hardship.

In the 1990s, the Sri Lankan government’s embargoes on fuel, medicines and food items in the north and east of Sri Lanka in an effort to frustrate the operations of a potent separatist militant group known as the Tamil Tigers reached their peak. In the face of dearth and hardship, the locals resorted to increasingly inventive ways of making do. From narrative multimedia journalist Kannan Arunasalam comes a beautiful and poignant series of video portraits of resilience, expression and survival, capturing the stories of the people of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and their remarkable ingenuity — a taxi drivers taking the sick to the hospital with no fuel, a lepers community persevering despite despair and isolation, a newspaper publishing without newsprint.

Watch all three of the terrific films below:

Paper brings to mind the world’s last 3 hand-written newspapers.

The project was supported by Sri Lankan citizen journalism platform GroundViews and captures the sort of next-gen storytelling we’ve previously seen News21 aspire to.

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Mod Odyssey: How The Beatles Revolutionized Animation in 1968

From Homer to John Lennon, or what the “psychedelic 60s” can teach us about creativity in animation.

Animated music videos are about as common today as photos of cats on the internet and, tragically often, not that much more original. But there was a time when they were a pinnacle of creative innovation, breaking entirely new ground. Earlier this year, we looked at the work of 5 early animation pioneers who changed the course of animated storytelling, and today we turn to the intersection of film and music with Mod Odyssey, a fascinating featurette on the making of The Beatles’ groundbreaking 1968 animated feature film, Yellow Submarine. More than a decade before Pixar, the film was not only a technical feat of animation execution but also a seminal work in bringing more attention to animation as a serious art form, both for audiences and for creators.

For the first time in screen history, extremely real and enormously famous people were going to be animated into a feature film.”

‘Yellow Submarine’ breaks new ground in the art of animation. Just as Swift and Carroll changed the history of literature, as Chagall and Picasso brought new life to art, The Beatles are revitalizing the art of animation. It’s a truly mod world, where medium and message meld — the new art of the psychedelic 60s.”

For more on animating Lennon, don’t forget the excellent and timeless I Met The Walrus, recorded the year after Yellow Submarine and animated 39 years later.

via Dangerous Minds

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