Blog Insights
Transylvania, Hillary’s Typography & Book Covers…

"What We’re Talking About" is a blog series featuring the articles, websites, topics, and trends that the Forum One team has been chatting about.

This week, we watched along with everyone else as the UK voted to leave the European Union. The Transylvania Tourist Board must have been watching as well. They took advantage of the results, releasing this website asking entrepreneurs and visionaries to consider moving to Transylvania. It’s a simple—yet clever—site touting some convincing stats (e.g., best Internet speed in the EU?!), stunning landscapes, and assuring us there are very few vampires. With excellent timing, it’s an effective marketing campaign and a few of us are convinced. Want to pack up for a visit with us?

Since we’re smack in the middle of election season, we enjoyed this piece by Geoff Yost on the new typography that Hillary Clinton has started to use in her campaign. Political design is an interesting beast, it’s hard to get away from the typical “safe” red, white, and blue motifs. Even with those safe elements, it’s a challenge to make them look fresh and new (remember this …interesting take?). Hillary’s recently released “Stronger Together” slogan has a strong typographic resemblance to Obama-Biden 2012’s logo, and that’s likely not a coincidence. Obama had arguably the most well-designed campaign in recent history, so it’s not that surprising that she might be following in his footsteps. Whether it will it have the same effect is yet to be seen, but we’ll be keeping an eye on how the look of her campaign (as well as those of her opponents) evolves through November.

Every year, AIGA holds its “50 Books | 50 Covers” competition to find the year’s best book covers. Design Observer has the winners from last year, and the selections are a stunning combination of sleek typography and beautiful layout as always. Book covers are notoriously difficult to design. Covers are a small canvas to work with, and it can be difficult to grab attention while at the same time giving readers enough of a visual preview of what they’re getting into. It’s hard to pick a favorite from this group, but Gorse No. 3 & Gorse No. 4 certainly stand out to me. Take a look! It’s fun to judge these books by their covers, even if we probably shouldn’t!

And finally, please admire this beautiful 360° book featuring Mt. Fuji.

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