When I first moved to the city I started noticing stickers that said “you are beautiful”. I finally decided to look them up after seeing one while in a particularly bad mood. I was pretty impressed by what I found. The stickers are just one part of a slew of projects that revolve around the simple phrase “you are beautiful”. The one project that interest me the most was a conversation that took place through the placing of plastic cups in a fence. Their statement of intent says they are trying to create “moments of positive self realization”, and in our current apathetic surroundings this idea seemed surprisingly unselfish, and well, just nice. It allows the designers to indulge themselves, but in the end, it is a good thing.

On Wooster Collective I just saw a video that I have been trying to find for several months. I first watched it back in the summer, but could never remember who did it or what it was called. It’s a black-and-white short made by Studio Smack, a Dutch design group that has created some interesting animations. Their description of the project . . .

“Kapitaal (Capital) is a typo-animation about legible signs in a city, it’s an impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that we are harassed by every day. The amount is so big that it’s commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.”

Check out the Studio Smack website for a high-res version of the video, as well as their other work. There is a youtube link of Kapitaal after the jump.

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I just discovered a wonderful, catchy stop-motion video dedicated to one of my favorite typefaces, Akzidenz Grotesk. The link comes from Type for you, where they have an excellent post on the history of the typeface along with plenty of relevant AG links.

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