August Empress

Over the last few years there have been some incredible Pengiun classics cover redesigns by designers like Coralie Bickford-Smith (I particularly love her culinary themed book covers) and I was fascinated to read about a new Penguin Drop Caps collaboration between illustrator Jessica Hische and Paul Buckley. This will be a 26-book series of hardcover classics, each one feature a unique drop cap that Jessica is well known for through her project Daily Drop Cap. Judging by the first six covers, I would imagine that the whole set together will create a full rainbow of colour.

Four words. Four gorgeous large prints from Swedish designer Ylva Skarp.

I do love when great design features a hand drawn aesthetic, particularly to create gorgeous typography like the collection below. Enjoy!

Designed by Sarah Thorne for Topshop.

Designed by PTARMAK for Handsome Coffee. Photo by DJ Murdock.

Design by Pearlfisher for JME (Jamie Oliver).

Designed by Ali LaBelle for LaBelle Famille.

Designed by Ryan Feerer for Betty & June.

Designed by Brandever and Dana Tanamachi for Nagging Doubt.

Designed by Jillian Barthold for Chile Beach Jams.

Designed by Hardhat Design for Coffee Supreme.

Molly Jacques is a classically trained illustrator with a beautiful talent in lettering and calligraphy. I particularly love the lettering combined with letterpress, every piece of work has such a special quality to it and just looks amazing.

Check out Molly’s website and blog to see more of her work.

For a little while now webfonts have been increasing in popularity in web design, and thank goodness as there is only so much you can do with the same few websafe fonts we had been using. There are a few services around the web now that allow you to implement different fonts into your website, but the one I now use the most is Google Webfonts. It’s free and doesn’t require you to create an account, and super easy to implement into your html and css.

The collection of fonts offered by Google is continually growing, below I am sharing a few of my favourites that I love using in website and blog designs.

Font Selection: Josefin Slab, Yeseva One, Oswald, Old Standard TT, Amatic SC, Raleway , Muli

I love these products from The Joy of Ex Foundation, I think we can all relate to many of these. I’m particularly fond of ‘My book club only reads wine lables’ and ‘I can hear a chocolate foil from 100 yards’. Available from Not on the High Street.

Garret Steider created a whole alphabet with pieces of food and carving letters into food, which are available as art prints from Society 6. You can also check out more of Garret’s work on Flickr.

Branding 10,000 Lakes is a great little (or not so little) project by Nicole Meyer, who has undertaken the task of ridding the world of ugly lake logos, by rebranding 10,000 Minnesota lakes.