Cristopher James

Monday, 25 May 2009

Album Cover of The Month (May)

Switchfoot - A Beautiful Letdown (2006)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-Letdown-US-Switchfoot/

Mk12 - Stranger Than Fiction

MK12 was founded in 2000 by four friends (Timmy Fisher, Ben Radatz, Matt Frac tion, and Jed Carter) who met at the Kansas City Art Insti tute. They pre vi ously worked with Quan tum of Solace direc tor Marc Forster, design ing open ing credit titles for the movies Stranger Than Fic tion (2006) and The Kite Runner (2007). Their help was enlisted by visual effects pro ducer Leslie McMinn. Although they are still pretty new in the motion pic ture busi ness, their ground break ing open ing credit titles for Stranger Than Fic tion pro pelled them into the spot lights. The sequence is a fas ci nat ing blend of live action and ani mated typog ra phy and infor ma tion graph ics mor ph ing across the screen. News Gothic works won der fully well in this context.

MK12 - James Bond Entrance

The type treatment in the title sequence for Quan tum of Solace is very inter est ing. Seemingly random sequences of ver ti cal strokes and cir cles appear and are sub se quently com pleted to form words and names. MK12 custom designed the type face which looks like a clas sic Helvetica-like grotesque. The type, cre ated from scratch, was mod elled around the per fectly cir cu lar O’s, which were orig i nally meant to sym bol ize bullet casings. The ani ma tion style incor po rates the clas sic trav el ling dot from the barrel sequence, which pre cedes the open ing titles in almost all of the Bond films. Also, by util is ing the spo radic blink ing of basic shapes, the font ani mates in tandem with the stac catos of the main title score and pays homage to the open ing titles from Dr. No (1962) and its designer, Mau rice Binder.
By Font Feed_