Liquid Treat

The Sketchbook Project is back. For its fourth incarnation, the Atlanta-based Art House Co-op is building a publicly accessible library of sketchbooks. Participants are asked to donate their finished sketchbooks to the project, which will be exhibited in galleries around the country beginning in December. Anyone can participate. Just sign up to receive a bar-coded Moleskine, fill it with art, mail it back, and you’re guaranteed a place in the collection. Each participant will be randomly assigned one of about 30 themes for his or her sketchbook. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a permanent collection that will be browsable by theme, media, or location. The organizers anticipate opening the permanent sketchbook library location next year. Ready to sketch your way to immortality? Sign up by October 1 to participate.

What is the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet? What does it signify? The Art Directors Club challenged past winners of its Young Guns competition to answer these questions in the pages of a Moleskine notebook. The creative contest, known as The Undiscovered Letter, was developed to raise awareness of lettera27, a foundation that supports literacy and educational initiatives. The jury winnowed the entries to 27 finalists: inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edgardo Moreno played with out-of-context accent marks while Ivan Pols let nature take its course, sketching melted W’s and wind-ravaged, overgrown A’s. Vincent LaCava chose to personify the twenty-seventh letter, combining U and M to create “the hideous ‘UM’ letter,” the snarling baddie in an alphabet-themed video game of his own creation. “The word ‘um’ is used in the real world when no other word comes to mind,” noted LaCava. “In our game, UM is the illiterate villain, poised against knowledge, education, and progress.”

Whether you’re entering a competition, sketching for a library of the future, or just taking notes, Moleskine has made it easier than ever to customize its notebooks. The company has developed MSK, a range of free online content that offers printable templates for contacts, calendars, and original associations of images and text—all in sizes designed for pasting into Moleskine notebooks. It’s a handy way to create and insert ruled pages, ensure that you have blank pages on hand, or even transfer your blog from digital to analog format. Select the “Wizard” tab to print out any blog post in MSK format.

Our highly unscientific survey of designers’ summer reading revealed rave reviews for David Barringer’s There’s Nothing Funny About Design (Princeton Architectural Press). In his first collection of essays, the writer and self-taught graphic designer takes on topics ranging from Chip Kidd and blood-soaked DVD cover art to his father’s business card collection and why drug names overdose on the letter “X.” The take-home message: there’s a whole lot that’s funny about design, including Barringer’s update of the Kubler-Ross Model, “Nine Emotions of the Working Designer,” which comes in the section of the book devoted to the business of design. “I used it as a funny way to advise young designers today, but I let the form evolve into something stranger, part fiction, part philosophy, some of it contradictory, poetic, satirical,” he said. “You should laugh at some parts, shake your head at others, but at some point nod and think, ‘Yes. Exactly.’”

Missing that fresh Trapper Keeper and need an excuse to load up on new pens? Get in the back-to-school spirit by junking your standard-issue tape dispenser—that clunky black plastic thing—for a wooden one inspired by literature’s most famous whale. The Moby tape dispenser is the latest covetable creation from Jonas Damon, a creative director at Frog Design who has even found a way to improve upon the product design dogma of form following function. His pared-down version, “Form follows,” promotes the idea that “Form is content embodied.” In the case of Damon’s beech wood tape dispenser for Areaware, that content is the squarish face of a whale viewed in profile. Now available for pre-order, it’s sure to get you back in the swim of things.

Georgia and Verdana are getting a face lift. Commissioned by Microsoft in the mid-1990s as ideal for on-screen display, the typeface families were designed by Matthew Carter and hinted for screen legibility by Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation. Now Carter, Ascender, and Font Bureau are working with Microsoft on a project to expand and enhance Georgia and Verdana for new applications, both on the screen and on the page. Look for new weights and widths as well as extended character sets. “The new additions to the font families are a natural and timely progression,” notes Carter. “They offer a wider range of typographic versatility… while remaining consistent with the originals.” The first of the new fonts is expected to be released early next year.