No, you’re not dreaming… Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of the Helvetica typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica Film | Helvetica Font

Imagine a course that "just" got employees to get the quiet people talking at the right time. (And I mean really applying the skill on a near daily business. Imagine that an employee is increasingly uncomfortable in a conversation until everyone has chimed in.) I would imagine that students would hate the program. ("Oh, it's so obvious. I already know I should do it, even if I don't." "I

The Federation of American Scientists wrote a paper on Harnessing the power of video games for learning. It is available here: http://fas.org/gamesummit/ Predictably, it is filled with stirring quotes of intellectual criticisms of the current system, detailed modeling of the problems, and vague inspirational quotes of the future opportunity, all by comfortable people. Blah, blah, blah. My first

You and your family are boarding an airplane, and are about to fly across country. How would you want that pilot to have learned how to fly? P.S. It is stormy. Your daughter is going in for an operation. How would you want that doctor to have learned how to operate? You are the defendent a big intellectual property lawsuit. How do you want your lawyer to have learned her craft? Now, is it fair

Between Web 2.0 (including Blogs), Computer Games and Simulations, Digital Cameras, Podcasts, Widgets and other Ubiquitous/Ambient Information, and Cell Phones (just to name a few), it is hard to argue that we are all not in the midst of a New Knowledge Order. The upcoming winter holidays gives some of us an opportunity to spend hours of low-tension time to experiment. My question to you is, how

With the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Vista, it’s exciting for all font lovers to know there’s a bunch of new fonts that will be bundled with the software.The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to [...]

I came upon an interesting term -- Convergence Journalism: from the convergence of technologies that has taken place with digitization, to economic convergence in media ownership, through to the journalistic convergence that is seeing both a combination of media forms into one 'multimedia' form, and a multiplication of delivery systems. Wondering if the learning profession has such a term, I

So for those of you who wonder what that font is, here’s the answer….. It’s called Catull, and you can purchase it here: Catull Font

Legendary designer Adrian Frutiger has received the prestigious 2006 Typography Award from The Society for Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). The award, presented by Allan Haley, Chairman of the Board of Directors at SOTA, recognizes Frutiger’s artistic contribution in designing many of the best-known typefaces of the 20th century. These include OCR-B, the eponymous Frutiger and Univers. [...]

"What? You go to Manhattan every day? Ayyayayay!" my New Jersey taxi driver shakes his head in total disbelief. "You sure you want to commute every day from New Jersey?" My Madison Avenue project manager asks with something bordering on pity. It’s not an emotional divide that one crosses so nonchalantly every day, you see. It takes a special kind of madness and loser-ishness to choose to go back to NJ after seeing the splendor of Upper East Side everyday. I do it because I like being part of the commuters’ sub-culture. It’s like a covenant, with arcane rituals, rigid rules, and unspoken demands for conformity. You pick up the rules by subconscious osmosis—within 24 hours, you know which part of the train you should get in to get down at the most convenient spot at the destination; you pick up that the correct etiquette of traveling in jam packed trains is not to make physical or eye-contact as much as possible; you understand that on the narrow escalator, the right lane is slow and left lane is fast; and you know how to pace yourself so that you don’t run over people or get run over by them. I also like the drama with which I get delivered into Manhattan. First, the train that has been chugging happily along the tired and slightly depressing suburbs of NJ suddenly gets into a long, dark, and mysterious tunnel. It is so long and deep that your ears pop due to the pressure difference. Then you are thrown into the utterly chaotic, bewildering, and labyrinthine maze of the NY Penn Station. There, you are borne by the jostling crowd, attacked by competing aromas from different eating joints, startled by the sporadic announcements interspersed with (for some really strange reason) classical instrumental music, and made to climb up/down at least 100 steps (I counted) before finding yourself on the street or on a subway platform. Then of course there is the quintessential NY experience of subway travel. Filled with the regulation junkies, musicians, sharply dressed professionals, individuals talking to themselves, school kids and tourists, it’s a melting point of everything that you have read and heard about New York. Finally, I just love the way Manhattan bursts on me as a revelation and a reward after almost 90 minutes of commute. As I walk past the decrepit panhandler, past the old newspaper vendor, past the hot dog cart, past the shop specializing in nylons, and on to Madison Avenue, I always feel like a million dollars. Because as my friend succinctly puts it, "It doesn’t get bigger than this, baby!" At least not in the Milky Way. (Priya Thiagarajan is Deputy Head - Instructional Design, Products & Skills Training Practice at TIS, and a recently besotted NY fan)

I’ve added 7 new fonts. Check them out!

So you downloaded thousands of fonts, but you still don’t get that look you’re after. At some point, many designers decide to leave their mark in the world and make their own fonts.Here are some tutorials that you can follow to help in the process. Chank’s Font Making Tutorial | My First Font

You may have noticed some changes here at Learning Circuits Blog. I just wanted to take few moments to point out the enhancements, in case you missed one or two. Wider is Better Based on the fact that 96% of our readership is using screen resolutions of 1000 pixels wide or greater, we took the opportunity to widen LCB from the standard 680 pixels to 1000 pixels. This move allows for more

The Learning Circuits Blog’s question of the month for December 2006 was actually three questions (very soon they may well start sending questionnaires): What will you remember most about 2006? What are the biggest challenges for you/us as [we] head into 2007? What are your predictions for 2007? Some of us had expressed our individual views through our personal blogs, but we wanted to put up a TATA Interactive response. We decided to have a panel discussion to articulate our views. We approached the questions from various lenses - design and business, our company and the overall industry, e-learning organizations and client organizations. And here it is - a podcast of the panel discussion. Download the mp3 to listen to it in a player of your choice or simply use the player below. It’s a bit on the longer side (~32 minutes / 12.4 MB), but considering the informal nature of it, it has not been edited - so what you hear is everything that was said in the discussion. The panel comprised Albert Lewis, Head - Business Excellence & Technology Strategy; Geetha Krishnan, Corporate Mentor - Productization; Manisha Mohan, Head - Design & Innovation; Anand Subramanian, Head - Systems Design; and Anil Mammen, Head - Instructional Design. We would love to receive feedback from industry experts and client organizations on our perspectives and predictions.

Relax, relax. It's definitely open blog and you can look onto your neighbor's screen anytime you want. This month you get two chances to voice your opinion. What I've done is summarized all the answers provided to date by our participating bloggers to the "challenges" question and the "prediction" question. I grouped similar or related answers together to help narrow down the number of

You don’t often see CSS and typography used in the same sentence, and for good reason. Traditional typography is a very subtle and beautiful form of design, with thousands of variations and choices. Unfortunately, with CSS that’s not quite the case. Don’t lose hope just yet, though. CSS can do more than you might think. [...]

(MMORPG = Massively multi-player online role-playing game) Clark Aldrich got quite a reaction a while back when he posted Second Life is not a Teaching Tool to LCB. While I generally agreed with those who rose in opposition to his declaration, something still just didn't fit for me. Even when his call for evidence of learning in SL with his post Second Life Redux got a lot of responses,

There is only one training metric that matters: the person responsible for the training program gets promoted. Any other metric, be it smilesheets or increased organizational productivity, or stock price, is only ammunition. Now, clearly we need to tap into pure research. We need to pilot. But there are at least three reasons why this is the critical metric. 1. You can't do any good if you

I thought that in honor of the success of the Big Question series, I would introduce my other favorite question and answer series; the question of the year from the World Question Center. This series is populated by the members of the Edge Foundation: "The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual,philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as

One of the most popular font categories on this website is Graffiti Fonts, but what exactly is a graffiti? The word Graffiti is actually the plural of Graffito which means a drawing or inscription made on a wall or other surface, usually meant to be seen by the public. Other than simply showing off the [...]

A bitmap font is one that stores each glyph as an array of pixels (that is, a bitmap). It is less commonly known as a raster font. Bitmap fonts look best at their native pixel size. At non-native sizes, many text rendering systems perform nearest-neighbor resampling, introducing ugly jagged edges. More advanced systems perform anti-aliasing [...]

The more I study formal learning programs (I will leave the study of informal learning programs to Jay), the more I hit the same number. Of any class, real or virtual, lecture or simulation, self-paced or chaperoned, academic or corporate, about 20% of the students have mentally dropped out. This is not the period "fuzzing out" that we all experience. These people are gone. When asked a question

Out of 24 participating posts and nearly 40 comments on those posts, not a single person predicted that they would answer all 12 of The Big Questions in 2007 - how disappointing.Well your first chance to redeem yourself comes in the form of January’s The Big Question:What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?Please answer this question by posting to your own blog.(For further help in how to participate via blog posts, see the side bar.)Points to consider:Quality learning experiences involve having fun, better interactivity in e-Learning or interacting with fellow learners, possible use of games or simulations, richer blends, but designing and developing higher quality programs cost more and take longer.Rapid e-Learning often involves paring back training to the minimum amount and minimal treatment, quickly building those training elements, and providing the remainder of content as reference. This reduces time and cost and may improve scalability because the skills required for development can be easily spread.Most every learning project involves deciding what to treat in what way. So, what ends up on the design room floor by the time of implementation? What are the potential risks of these decisions? Has there been fat that could be cut without risking quality?Participating Blogs:Once you’ve posted your answer on your blog, please report your post using the form below. Your post will be automatically added to the list that will appear below the entry form.NOTE: If the forms do not appear below, please hit your browser’s refresh button. If the forms still do not appear, please use the Dear Blogmeister form which can be linked to from the top of the sidebar.The form for submitting posts regarding January's The Big Question has been closed. However, if you have a post in response and would like to have it added to the list below, contact the me using the Dear Blogmeister link at the top of the sidebar.Comments Digest:By clicking on the MySyndicaat button below, you can see a reverse-chronological listing of all of the comments made to all of the participating posts. Ah, the wonders of Web 2.0!Got an idea for a Big Question?Use the form found in the side bar to submit your idea for future conversations.

Do you want to be a cutting edge educational expert on computer games? Here are the two, key principles. Point #1: There is Value in "Doing Something With Feedback" Argue that computer games are fabulous because players do things, and learn from their mistakes. "But what if someone argues back," you are thinking, "that people also learn from gardening, changing a light bulb, running a lemonade