Director of Door 22 Emma thought it would be a good idea to run the London Marathon this year - utter madness!!

But there is a little consolation - to promote the fact we produced some mini cards from Moo and now we’ve appeared on the fabulous Moo blog! Thanks Moo.

The cards are a set featuring the different emotions and expressions that she’ll be going through on the day - probably! The cards also have the Justgiving URL on the back to remind people.

So if there are any generous sorts out there Emma is running for BAAF (British Association for Fostering and Adoption) and the Justgiving page is here.

There’s also a weekly training blog which you can see the training involved in this ‘marathon’ challenge’.

Whilst going through my recycling at the weekend I came across an old newspaper that was from the world cup rugby weekend last month and found this Waitrose ad. The only reason I stopped was that we did a very similar ad (and series of) for one of our clients The Little Beer Company which ran in the Spanish Daily Mail back at the end of 2006 up to March of this year. I’m not getting disgruntled, I just found it intriguing and quite interesting - the similarity in idea - especially as they were both concerning beer and just thought I should put it in the blog.

This site and online video Make My Logo Bigger Cream is really funny. Another one of those nod your head and laugh outloud moments - I warn you!

We got a rock anthem sent through a few month ago called ‘Make the Logo Big‘ linked here just in case it passed you by. The perfect combination, they should have used it as a background to the site.

This Carbon Calculator ‘Act On CO2′ site from DirectGov supported by Defra is beautifully designed and really fun to use. Have a go at working out your footprint - it’s quite an eye-opener!

I do love paper, and as a company we are making sure that we source and specify greener paper and especially paper that is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) accredited (refer to my previous blog entry for the definitions of recycled paper).
I have found a brilliant website called Lovely as a Tree which tells you everything you need to know to be a more environmentally aware graphic designer. Defines the myths of sustainability, different percentage scales of ‘recycled’, eg, post consumer waste. It has a great choosing paper facility which has the catagories for uncoated, matt, gloss and also rates each paper, explains exactly ‘how’ recyled it is through to who it is manufactured by and where to even if it has matching envelopes!!

Really nicely designed and good navigation and I use it pretty much all the time now when specifying paper.

Perfect present for the graphic designers in your life!
These extremely gorgeous mugs are made under licence from Pantone - so are official product. Available at quite a few places including these:

Drop!
London Graphics

I have only just picked myself up off of the floor and now my stomach muscles are in fatigue!

This list from Groy’s website 8 way’s to drive a graphic designer mad is oh so very very very true!

Thanks to The Escape for directing me to this gem.

All current and prospective clients of Door 22 please take special note!

I came across this very well researched and documented list of fonts.

80 Beautiful Typefaces for Professional Design from the peeps at Smashing Magazine. 80 gorgeous typefaces for professional design, based upon suggestions from designers and web-developers all over the world.

I’m personally not a fan of Warnock or Relato Sans but then it’s not ‘my’ list. Lovely list all the same.

Critbuns - patented foam cushion
The Ultimate Design Brief - Freelance Switch
Toms Shoes - shoes for tomorrow

No, it’s not a new single by Brian Adams!

Seasonal Fonts? or simply Font Trends? Design Observer has a interesting post about Summer Fonts it says:

So: why not summer fonts? I can’t think of a good reason why not. Like all things summer, a summer font need only follow a few simple rules. Be catchy. Be simple. Be happy. And be gone soon enough to belong to a single summer only.

Everyone’s heard of the Summer of Love. But I predict that this summer — in nerdy font circles at least — will be the Summer of Grouch. ITC Grouch, that is.

I personally think it’s not so much seasonal, as in personality, but more of a design trend. ITC Grouch and certainly in the UK, Clarendon is definitely in a revival phase and the chunky serif font is here for a while longer, popping up everywhere. I would have said that it was a bit more of a Winter font, but hey.