deebeedee

Emigre has just published its last issue. As a graphic design student in the mid ’90s, I would pour over the magazine’s pages to seek creative inspiration. The experimental design magazine featured the fonts and layouts designed by the husband and wife team of Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko. Here’s in-depth coverage of the Berkeley-based company’s history. According to the e-mail announcement I received today, only the magazine will be discontinued.* Emigre the company “will happily continue on. (They) have much work left to do.”

*Back issues are sold here.

Designer Lucille Tenazas tells us how she handles typography in the latest issue of Adobe Proxy. Download the PDF mag here (8.3 MB).

Tenazas’ cover design for the 1994 book The Body, as some of you may recall, was blatantly ripped off by the guys who did the movie poster for the Razzie Award-winning flick Showgirls.

Update: According to this, the photograph used in the book cover was by Tono Stano, and MGM acquired licensing to use the image (albeit an altered one). It’s clear though that the main inspiration was Tenazas’ cover design because her cropping of the picture was copied to a tee. The original photo includes the woman’s entire head.

Yesterday I received this huge box from Package Design Magazine labeled The Package Designer’s Toolbox. It contained numerous cleverly designed packaging such as CD jackets, box template cut-outs, cosmetic containers, beer cans, water bottles, etc. As a designer, I’d be normally delighted in receiving freebies like these. They serve as wonderful items of inspiration when creativity runs dry. As I sat there examining the items, however, all I wanted to do was to identify them by recyclable material category and get them sorted for the next trash pick-up. Sad to say, these carefully crafted and well-thought out pieces have been reduced to garbage. My domestication transformation must be complete.

Adobe debuts this month Proxy, a quarterly PDF magazine created to help designers “get in touch with and be inspired by peers and experts in the design community.” Adobe’s original foray into magazine publishing was its printed run of Adobe Magazine from 1995 to 2000. An archive of the PDF versions can be found here. In 2002, Adobe’s Pacific division began publishing an online magazine of the same name. Archives are here.

Jeffrey Zeldman today discusses the use of Clarendon in his work. I correctly observed his use of the ubiquitous typeface in the redesign of Zeldman.com but I totally missed the initial implementation of it in the redesign of Happy Cog. I guess I haven’t really followed Zeldman’s body of work closely until recently, when I started subscribing to his sites’ RSS feeds using Net News Wire.

I bought Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards sometime last year but I am now just reading it. It’s a book that pushes for the building of forward-compatible sites by advocating web standards such as XHTML, CSS, XML, ECMAScript and the DOM. I’m glad to say that I’ve been coding in XHTML for a while now. Thanks to my faithful reading a few years back of the now-defunct Web Techniques magazine (which became New Architect), I was convinced early on of XHTML’s benefits and was taken by its easy implementation. I’ve also been using CSS stylesheets in lieu of the <font> tag and other deprecated formatting tags. But one thing that I have not gotten myself to do is to use CSS2, or layer positioning. I’m still a holdout for tables, even sometimes for ones with a smattering of one-pixel gifs to hold them up (yeah, I know, kill me now). My last foray into CSS2 experimentation was frustrated by a yet fully web standards-compliant IE 5 for the Mac and the equally-wanting Netscape 6.0.

I remember promising in 2003 to serve up a new version of DeeBeeDee before the year was over, but alas, it has not happened. But thanks to Zeldman’s book, I’m convinced now is the time to finally take the plunge into CSS positioning. It’s also time to finally get rid of this awfully dark and archaic-looking site. My transition from a Pirouz/Siegel design disciple to a Zeldman zombie is underway.