For those who attended the 99% Con­fer­ence a few weeks ago in New York, got a pre­view of stills from most of this com­mer­cial; but now that it’s be released to the pub­lic, we can all enjoy it:

What do you think, dear read­ers? Can a bank really stand for some­thing? Would you do busi­ness with Stan­dard Char­tered Bank if it were in your town? And how about the visual side of the piece? Love it? Hate it? Are you a fan of Sag­meis­ter and his work? Never heard of him before? What do you think??

It may be almost a month before the Acad­emy Awards, but Ellen Lup­ton has already posted her picks for the Oscars of Type.

Per­son­ally I love her Best Serif pick:

Cal­luna, by Jos Buivenga

Which faces made your list, dear readers?

Ever had that exis­ten­tial cri­sis where you lose sleep won­der­ing what type­face truly exem­pli­fies your cre­ative spirit? I know I’ve long suf­fered the anguish of not know­ing– am I Meta or Ma(n)son?

Well, our col­lec­tive prayers have been answered! The design sages at Pen­ta­gram have given us the quiz tool: what type are you?

You will be happy to know Camus him­self is Bifur while I myself am Archer Hair­line… or was it Marina Script…

How about you, read­ers? What type­face are you??

Make sure you use the pass­word ‘character’

Ever the type-geek, I couldn’t resist shar­ing this TERRIBLE (ter­ri­bly AWESOME, that is) video parody:

Kind of makes you want to grow a well-kept beard, n’est pas?

For what­ever rea­son, I’ve had a ten­dency over the last three years to avoid gen­eral silli­ness here on Aman­daMuses; some of it can be chalked up to an attempt to keep my pri­vate self pri­vate and allow this site to serve as more of a pub­lic sketch­book related to my work. But for those who know me in real life, the absence of gen­eral humor on this Web site has seemed a lit­tle odd (some of you have even told me so), since in real­ity I can be a fairly silly per­son when social­iz­ing with loved ones. Well today, marks a con­certed effort to serve the pub­lic demand for fun:

Recently, I came across a totally ran­dom but clever time-waster– Cheese or Font. Com­bin­ing the loves of typog­ra­phy AND cheese, Cheese or Font chal­lenges your knowl­edge of fine fonts and fromage.

So how well do YOU know your cheeses and fonts, dear readers?

For the last two days, or evenings really, I’ve been read­ing The Barn­brook Bible as my break from work. It has been an absolute delight, leav­ing me fur­ther inspired by and in awe of Barnbrook’s work and per­spec­tive. I had the good for­tune to spend some time with him at Grafic Europe in Berlin 5 years ago, but tried very hard not to be THAT per­son at the con­fer­ence– the annoy­ing fan who asks really spe­cific ques­tions about old work, celebrity clients and odd hypo­thetic situations.

Ear­lier this morn­ing, I decided to catch up on what I’ve missed in the Virus Fonts and Barn­brook Design uni­verse online. In so doing, I came across a num­ber of his motion pieces from the last few years, here is one of the lat­est breath­tak­ing pieces:

A Half-Rememebered Sen­tence from The Quiet Man

Here are a few pieces from a series of polit­i­cal pieces he did in 2004:

This is one of a series of three pieces pro­duced in 1995 for BBC Radio Scot­land:

See more of Jonathan Barnbrook’s amaz­ing work here on his studio’s Web site.

Lately, I’ve been gen­er­at­ing increas­ingly more work after hav­ing lapsed into a brief cre­ative coma of sort ear­lier this year. As I shake off the cre­ative cob­webs and jit­ters, I feel more com­pelled to work and tend to have more ideas than I can make good on or even record or realize.

Typ­i­cally, when I get into this state of mind, I tend to pay even more atten­tion to art, and find myself seek­ing out new ideas, inspi­ra­tion, artists, etc. Recently, a friend turned me on to She One and not sur­pris­ingly, the cogs in my brain are turn­ing and crank­ing out of control:

I’ve been dream­ing of let­ter­forms and just haven’t made good on the pic­tures in my head. Per­haps it’s time to roll up my sleeves and dig in… Where have you found inspi­ra­tion lately, dear read­ers? Has it been from new stars in your own field, or seem­ingly more abstract sources? Talk to me people.

For what­ever rea­son, I’ve been look­ing at a lot of let­ter­pessed work lately. I’d like to share the work of an Austin-based cou­ple, Heather & Thomas hol­li­field, also known as Let­ter­press Del­i­ca­cies. The pre­ci­sion and clean lines of their design style is exciting.

Tak­ing a peek at their charm­ing work avail­able for pur­chase online via Etsy.

Images: Let­ter­press Delicacies

A col­league of mine likes a but­ton on one of the jack­ets I wear too often at work. She just moved into a new office space and needs to per­son­al­ize her space; this is for her:

It’s my adult equiv­a­lent of col­or­ing on my lunch break and giv­ing her some­thing to put on an imag­i­nary refrig­er­a­tor. Yes, I’m THAT co-worker…