Hamza El-Falah

  1. Refining Simplicity

    Jared Lewandowski explores something that’s become very popular in design — simplicity. In the words of John Maeda, “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”

    Keeping it simple is not only a great way to ensure that you and those using your product don’t go crazy, it also inspires confidence in the user and shows that you trust them to make the obvious decisions.

  2. The Forty Story

    Pentagram constructed a narrative based around a boy born on the day Pentagram opened, and how his life has paralleled forty years of Pentagram design. It’s a really engaging way to showcase an amazing portfolio.

  3. Painting Coconuts: The Quattro Experience

    The Audi quattro Experience is a one-of-a-kind interactive installation that features a 20-foot by 7-foot, handcrafted raceway built by custom slot track builder David Beattie of Slot Mods USA. The scale model Audi A4 slot cars were made from scratch with in-car cameras that allow racers a first-person look as they zip around the track, through the world’s first iPad-enabled controllers. Here’s a behind-the-wheel look at how David and his team raced to get this project finished.

    Maybe I’m a little biased as an Audi owner, but this is really awesome. 

  4. The Market Wants Apple to Unveil a Time Machine

    Dan Pelotta at the Harvard Business Review:

    The critics that are screaming right now are intellectually lazy. They’re throwing temper tantrums instead of looking at the big picture. Like two-year-olds, they don’t really know what they want. And they’re not happy when they get it, anyway. Apple could unveil a new car and they’d say Apple’s days are over because it’s just bet its future on an industry it knows nothing about. Not unlike, say, Apple’s entrance into the mobile phone industry. I bet that if Apple did unveil a time machine, they’d claim it wasn’t fast enough.

    (Source: blogs.hbr.org)

  5. 1984

    This spot-on 1984 cover is a part of a recent series of George Orwell’s books being republished by Penguin. Designed by David Pearson. See other covers in the series.

  6. Instagram Update: 2012 Wrap-up Edition

    Seriously slacking on the updates, so here are some of my favorites from the end of 2012.

  7. 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

    From Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne, a book about 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. Maria Popova has a preview at The Atlantic.

    From how rub-on lettering democratized design by fueling the DIY movement and engaging people who knew nothing about typography to how the concept of the “teenager” was invented after World War II as a new market for advertisers, many of the ideas are mother-of-invention parables. Together, they converge into a cohesive meditation on the fundamental mechanism of graphic design — to draw a narrative with a point of view, and then construct that narrative through the design process and experience.

  8. DerbySF: Product Page

    Getting closer to a final design for the upcoming DerbySF site. See previous sneak peek.

  9. Creativity

    Just stumbled upon this gem: Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. You can easily replace “writing” with whatever creative task you do.

    Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

    For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

    How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

  10. Instagram Update: May 2012

    My cousin climbing trees Hunger Games style, the best mocha I’ve had in years, water ballons, a tuna melt, my wife’s eyeball, and my nephew. (Click to enlarge.)

  11. The Design of a Signage Typeface

    Ralf Herrmann, on the design of his signage typeface Wayfinding Sans Pro:

    So I set off, driving thousands of miles across Europe to explore the legibility of these signs and typefaces, first hand. Once I even ended up in a holding cell at the border crossing to Norway, because the customs officers just wouldn’t accept that someone would drive all over Europe simply to take photographs of traffic signs.

  12. What I’m Working On: Derby SF

    A peek at a project I’m working on right now. The legendary derby jacket is making a comeback.

  13. Typophile 5 Opening Credits

    A “visual typographic feast” indeed. The handcrafted opening titles to the 5th Typophile Film Festival.

  14. The Internet is a Customer Service Medium

    Paul Ford:

    “Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

  15. Avant Garde

    Promotional pieces for a documentary film about Herb Lubalin’s typeface Avant Garde. (Click to enlarge.)