09 July 2008

» NY Times finds great design at London student shows

Emma Weber at the London College of Communication has

made an ethical labeling project combining a bar code sticker that consumers at the supermarket can read with their cellphone cameras, an Ethical Facts Web site and a ratings system which measures, from zero to nine, how the people who made the product are treated, how the product affects the environment and how harmlessly it can be dumped or recycled. The result is a combined “ethiscore”; the pomegranate smoothie in Emma’s example got a ethiscore of 24 out of a possible 27 — a rating likely to impart a righteous glow to consumer and producer alike.

At the Royal College of Art, Valerio Di Lucente, Hugo Timm, Filip Tydén and Erwan Lhussier have re-imagined that pariah of fonts, Microsoft’s Comic Sans, with Serious Sans.

Struggling to understand what could possibly be good about Comic Sans (Serious Sans’ designers) found that the doggedly goofy font’s irregular forms made it one of the easiest typefaces for dyslexics to read. The designers also liked how it undermined the authority — and changed the meaning — of texts set in it.