This Clipper tea package design fills what could have been negative space with type. Clipper Tea sells organic, fair-trade, classic, and specialty teas. I found these as Marshall's but I bet you can find them at your local grocer. I also hear Clipper sells hot cocoa and coffees, I wonder what that package design looks like?
Spring is just around the corner and what better way to get excited about warm weather than with cold drinks. This beauty of package design is Grady's Cold Brew New Orleans-Style iced coffee concentrate. It's brewed and bottled by hand in Brooklyn NY and has a label that reflexes in city roots. The typography is stealing the show and the bottle design, which I hope is glass, looks like it is a medicine bottle; it makes me think about when drinks like root beer were considered to having healing qualities. But as for flavor here is the description Grady's has described their process for this delicious brew, "Each batch is made by steeping a special blend of freshly roasted
coffee and chicory in water overnight, then removing the grounds using a
two-step filtration process. What’s left? A bold, velvety-smooth liquid
concentrate that can be mixed with milk or water—served over ice or
steaming hot." I know what I will be picking up the next time I'm in Brooklyn. Looks like a conversation starter as well as a fancy cocktail ingredient.
This sounds like a very cool book, if you like fonts and type, and British humor. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield comically writes about favorite fonts informing you about their history, popular uses and abuses. If you want to get an idea of the tone of this book it goes something like this "well, I am apparently the last person on earth to know that Eric Gill had sex with dogs and wrote about it, and may have committed incest"; which was loosely paraphrased by Emily Pacey writing for Design Week, a weekly design magazine based out of London. Look for this interesting display of font history and cheeky humor coming (hopefully) late October. Book cover designed in-house at Profile by art director Peter Dyer. Sign up on Amazon.com to get an email when it comes out.
The book starts in 1961 with the main character, nicknamed Happy, applying for a job following the footsteps of a favorite professor at an advertising agency in New Haven, CT. While the story weaves around humorous office characters, nicknames and drama it also falls deep into a mysterious suicide of, Himillsy, a college girlfriend of Happy's. Happy starts piecing together Himillsy's reasons for death and fails prey to the same doleful emotions caused by their involvements in a psychological "obedience experiment".
Although the book was a bit dark, it did have some great elements. My favorites were his emotion/expression typography studies, and his mid-story italicized thoughts of wit and irony. Basically what this book studied was how psychology and design work together or against each other. What I have also learned from this book, from both Chip Kidd and Stanley Milgram, the "obedience experiment" scientist, is to think before I follow, that things aren't what they seem and to think twice before participating in medical studies. Either way, I think it's a good book to get under your skin.
One of my first "designer" mustache sightings was on my favorite interior design blog Design*Sponge. It was for a glass that had an etched mustache on it, so when you drank from it you would be perceived to have a mustache on your face. Since then mustaches have been popping up in many places, other than the face.
Such as, in today's Print Magazine twitter post, announcing a new mustache typeface called "A Field guide to Typestaches", from Mr. Tor Weeks and Tom Foolery Tag Team. (See the full font here.) This type is just darn right adorable. Get the poster at Old Tom Foolery, before they sell out.
Pop's Stache Beverage Tag, from Shane Blomberg
Other adorable mustache find was found on Kickstarter, a web donation type of site where you launch a project you need money for and people will contribute, providing you reciprocate creative "exchanges" for their cash. Shane Blomberg's project, Pop's Stache, is for mustache beverage tags. His project is to create a package of eight different mustache styles, they are designed to ring around the top neck of your desired beverage bottle. Very cool idea!
by Simon Garfield comically writes about favorite fonts informing you about their history, popular uses and abuses. If you want to get an idea of the tone of this book it goes something like this "well, I am apparently the last person on earth to know that Eric Gill had sex with dogs and wrote about it, and may have committed incest"; which was loosely paraphrased by Book cover designed in-house at Profile by art director Peter Dyer. Sign up on Amazon.com to get an email when it comes out. 
creative "exchanges" for their cash. 