As many of you probably know, Type Directors Club defines itself “an international organization for all people who are devoted to excellence in typography, both in print and on screen”.
This year edition of TDC2, its Typeface Awards had 165 participants from 26 countries resulting in 18 winning entries representing 8 countries.

The jury was chaired by Fiona Ross, lecturer at University of Reading, and Associate Designer to Tiro Typeworks , included Ken Barber (House Industries); Jonathan Hoefler (Hoefler & Frere-Jones); Richard Kegler (P22 Type Foundry), and Gabriel Martinez Meave (Kimera Type Foundry, Mexico ).

All winners have been awarded with the Certificate of Typographic Excellence in Type Design.

All winning entries will be published in Typography 30: The Annual of the Type Directors Club available at the end of 2009 (free to all members of TDC).
While you’re waiting, you can enjoy a copy of Typography 29 (with last year’s winners, and a lot, lot more), which I highly recommend.

I really wonder if out there there are some of us that never had the frustration of a rejected work.
Lucky few guys!

For the rest of us Matt Gustavsen and Justin Hastings created Project Never competition.

It may be true that a lot of design concept gets rejected for (probably) a good reason, but many times worthy ideas are condemned to oblivion just because: “Ehh…this is good, but this is not what we had in mind” or : “we’re not going in that direction”.

Very frustrating.
Although this could be the obvious end of a poorly defined Design Brief (always be aware and take care of this point!) it is also true that sometimes it happens that customers don’t have any idea at all of what they want and we end up that we have to throw away our work and restart again.

Here it comes Project Never, which aims to give to all discarded designs all the fame they deserves.

Let’s summarize:

• award is open to all print and and web design concepts developed between January 1, 2007 and December 1, 2008;
• to all countries (but obviously they have to be presented in english);
• deadline is 1st december 2008;
• winner will be announced on 1st march 2009.

All rules and details are available on the website of the competition, the only fee is the willingness to be slapped in the face once again. ^__^

PROJECT NEVER
Rejection never felt this good.

It took almost three years and three designers to develope it, but now is here and it has a whole website on its own.

Front page of website immediately announce: “The most influential sans serif of the digital revoulution now has a serif companion: Introducing FF Meta Serif“.

All through the 90′s designer Erik Spiekermann had tried to create a complementary face for his successful FF META. Many times happened that he was asked what could be the best serif match for it and he realized that he just had to create it.

He finally asked collaboration to designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby.

Development of the new font started both from the original META for the body (which, in its uniqueness, is heavier in the center stroke, while the two end strokes are lighter) and from Antiqua face to take inspiration for serifs.

In website there is the whole thread of eMails exchanged between three designers during the period of creation to present the story of the font, which shows the great love they have for their profession and the great care for details they had all the time.

We can buy both font in various combination of packages, and if we use FF META SERIF in our designs we can also submit our work to be featured (if selected) in the gallery and enter the competition to get a FONTBOOK.

One best of the competition will win a FREE trip to the annual HOW Design Conference (international taking place in Boston since 1991), all other winners will have their work featured at the event, receive a $100 discount for the conference along with a nifty certificate.
There are plenty of design categories and you can enter in more than one, just submit a separate entry and payment for each category with 2 well protected samples of your work. NO SLIDES NOR DIGITAL IMAGES.

Deadline is 1st September 2008

You can find details about competition HERE
and download a PDF of the Rules and Entry Form HERE