mfd | michael forbis design

Kick that holiday cheer with the undead.

I love zom­bie movies, or in some cases I take it that true hor­ror buffs wouldn’t con­sider some of them zom­bie films, but more of an epi­demic or ill­ness rather than being (un)dead. Nonethe­less, the films have just the right amount of gore, action and humor to keep me hooked. Even that whiny, mostly bor­ing show on AMC keeps me com­ing back every week. With every new movie comes a new poster. They are usu­ally way over the top and awe­some. Here is a col­lec­tion I put together with the help of Rick Poyner’s arti­cle on Design Observer called “How We Learned to Live with Zom­bies.” Read it here.

Happy 50th, Museum of Modern Art Oxford

In honor of their upcom­ing 50th anniver­sary, the Mod­ern Art Oxford is dis­play­ing 50 exhi­bi­tion posters from their archive to the pub­lic. Stuff like this makes me really appre­ci­ate the sim­plis­tic design sen­si­bil­i­ties of so many design­ers from the UK.

Check out the col­lec­tion here. Idea for this post found here.

Internation Year of Chemistry Posters by Simon Page

Simon C Page is back with another series of prints ded­i­cated to a field of sci­ence. As usual, they are fan­tas­tic. Great col­ors, great type, great min­i­mal­ism. View them all here.

See his other set of posters devoted to astron­omy, here.

Brilliant Yaris Campaign

Yaris, it’s a CAR! is the bril­liant new cam­paign star­ring Michael Showal­ter, doing what he does best: wear a suit and say funny things. This is a light­hearted, state-the-obvious cam­paign that really works. No per­for­mance shots on a Euro­pean road, no generic voice over. Just a very sar­cas­tic and hilar­i­ous idea. Check it out here.

M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

So, it’s been a while since I have been active on here and made a post. I blame work and wed­ding plan­ning. How­ever, when it comes to my igno­rance of cur­rent events, NPR favorites, new music and most work con­ver­sa­tions direct towards me, I blame M83’s new album Hurry Up, We’re Dream­ing.

On the upside, this album has con­vinced me to tie up the ol’ run­ning shoes and hit the streets. The vari­ety of upbeat, ener­getic songs full of intense vocals and the slower, more atmos­pheric tracks makes for a great run­ning com­pan­ion. If you haven’t heard it, lis­ten to it. If you have, you should prob­a­bly lis­ten to it again. I mean, who knew I could be obsessed with a track titled Intro?

The Work of Jonas Eriksson

Swedish designer/developer Jonas Eriksson’s work is amaz­ing. I first stum­bled on his work when scour­ing dribb­ble for some UI design inspi­ra­tion. There I found the most amaz­ing almost-iPad app called 76 Syn­the­sizer. This piece, for me, proves his bril­liance with­out hav­ing to take a look at any­thing else he has done. The amount of detail and thought that went into this is unbe­liev­able. This atten­tion to detail is what I strive for when design­ing apps for the indus­try I work for. It makes for a much more pleas­ant expe­ri­ence. I am not quite sure how I would use or nav­i­gate the syn­the­sizer app, most likely because I never under­stood those things, but I hope to be able to down­load it someday.

His web­site claims that he only has six years of expe­ri­ence under his belt. Within those six years Jonas has accu­mu­lated quite the port­fo­lio and client-base. The port­fo­lio is full of amaz­ing UI, web and CG illus­tra­tion design all for some big name folks.

Do your­self a favor and take a look.

IBM Smarter Planet

Being a huge fan of Herb Lubalin and pretty much every­thing that came out of that man’s brain, I love these posters that intel­li­gently incor­po­rate his ITC Lubalin Graph type­face. To me, this type­face speaks to all things techy with a dab of play­ful­ness. It is super friendly and pre­cise, which is why I love it. Used as the dis­play face, it holds up well with the bold stature of the IBM logo. It is also always great when used in a multi-line head­line and on highly-conceptual min­i­mal poster. Check out more at Ogilvy.com.

Images via Fonts In Use

Great collection of retro logos

Check out this incred­i­ble and inspir­ing Flickr col­lec­tion of retro logos, fit­tingly named Retro Logo Good­ness.

Music for Working — Mogwai

Work has been crazy for me these last few months, which is great not only for the bet­ter­ment of my skills, but also for my need to catch up on the music that has been released lately. I find instru­men­tal music to be best when I work because a lot of the things I have been design­ing deal with large amounts of num­bers and infor­ma­tion orga­ni­za­tion. Hav­ing words the pay atten­tion to just doesn’t work as well as sim­ple melodies and har­monies. There are draw­backs to this. Some music is way too slow and/or bor­ing, mak­ing an extra cou­ple cups of cof­fee necessary.

My solu­tions for the past week has been Mog­wai — Hard­core Will Never Die, But You Will. If you haven’t checked it out I sug­gest you do. It has great melodies as well as heav­ier sound to keep your alert­ness high.

Feltron 2010 Annual Report

The mas­ter of info­graph­ics has struck again. Nicholas Fel­ton has released his Fel­tron 2010 Annual Report. As usual, the annual report is packed with great typog­ra­phy, flaw­less lay­outs and killer charts, graphs and what-have-yous. This issue stuck out to me more than the pre­vi­ous years, so much so that I felt com­pelled to pre-order it. Work­ing in the UI/inforgraphic field myself, this will serve as an invalu­able source of inspi­ra­tion for quite some time. This report doc­u­ments the life of his father to an impres­sive extent.