Have been a long time fan of IdN since I was a design junior so its been around for ages... always interesting and uses print techniques that you may not always see used in magazine publications these days. The branding issue is a good one - also features the new Melbourne identity and how its applied to just about everything Melbourne....

Daily Drop Cap is a project by Jessica Hische, a designer/illustrator living in Brooklyn.

The project started in September 2009 in which she illustrated a letter every day. These letterforms were shown in her recent solo exhibition at Lamington Drive in Melbourne, where I had the pleasure of smelling each individual letterpress print!

Check out her complete work at www.jhische.com

Font shops pick for 2010 - for my pick I think slab serifs are going to be in for the year, expect to see this more online and in print. Check out the complete list here.

I visit fontshop.com often as a source of inspiration when looking to create a new identity or refresh a corporate piece. Fonts are  a vital ingredient in the design world, so this 'best of' page from the fontshop blog is a great wrap up of the year. They also have a printed font book of all their available fonts - a must have for any serious designer.

Actionscript 3.0 didn't get a lot of support by those making the move from AS2. But Wonderwall's website has proven its sophistication. Wonderwall is an interior design firm established by Masamichi Katayama. Check out their site. It's fluid and... oh-so sexy! and definitely does justice to their work.

Typeradio is a Microfm broadcast, a MP3 internet radio stream and a podcast station. Typeradio have visited many design events around the world, to meet designers and to talk, and best of all, recorded to share with us!

Some of the designers/typographers are Rob Meek, Vince Frost, Martin Majoor and many many many more.

Enjoy.

The Melbourne Writers Festival starts today with a campaign that dramatises how various writing styles collide, from genre to genre. With great use of typography styles and fonts to suit each genre, combine with colours and sounds this is a simple piece of work with a high quality impact.

As well as being a neat freak, I also have a compulsion to be organised.

Searching the net this week I have found a great little application for all Mac users that will make those little day-to-day tasks easier to manage.

Anxiety (http://anxietyapp.com/) is a free application that adds a simple yet effective check box list to the toolbar of OSX. Items can be added and marked off in a matter of seconds, and the data can be synced with both iCal and Mail.

Give it a bash, you'll never forget anything again... Ever.

Designers tend to pride themselves on their ability to name a random font, but every now and then a font will come along that can stump even the best know-it-all.

Well fear no more, as myfonts.com has brought out an iPhone app that will save your reputation – WhatTheFont.

WhatTheFont allows you to take a photo of any font, whether it be in a magazine or a web graphic, upload the image to the MyFonts server and in seconds have the correct font identified.

Best of all, WhatTheFont is free. Give it a try, it could get you out of a typography emergency.

One of the handy built in features of OS X (Leopard) is Quick Look. It has built in plug-ins to view PDF files, images etc. without needing to open the application. That's fine if your only using the apps that Apple ships it with, or makes - but everything else needs a plug-in.

I was disappointed that such a neat feature couldn't be put to better use for times when you don't really want to open the inDesign file 5 versions back just to see which one had the blue cover, or the illustrator file that had the correct logo colours - even though the last person who used it may have named it incorrectly!

It is relatively cheap at $20 USD and can be a real time saver when it comes down to deadline. It has some neat features such as being able to view the preview with various colour backgrounds, shows the fonts and colours used in the document, along with creation/modification dates. You can also open the document directly from Quick Look.

You can edit settings so that preview uses the document header file included, or it can build its own, ignoring files over a certain size - if you had to wait that long you would just open the document!