Did you know that there are 10,060 frames of video in Michael Jackson’s seminal television performance of Billy Jean? Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth requested the services of individuals to help isolate and track the occurrence of MJ’s infamous white glove in each of those frames. Within a 72 hour period, thousands of internet users willingly clicked and dragged, compiling a significant set of data that would end up being shared, visualized, and interpreted by others. The White Glove Tracking project is what a creative collective can produce from a rather mundane source. Check out the animation gallery or Evan’s set of limited edition prints. My favorite variation on the theme? Giant White Glove by Tim Knapen.

Design collaborative Wear It With Pride invited over 40 creatives to put their own spin on classic, cult, and otherwise obscure films through one of the more ubiquitous forms of commercial art, the poster. The result is Now Showing, a collection of prints, one-offs, and sculptures exploring the lost "art" of the movie poster. Currently appearing at Soho’s Cosh Gallery, the exhibition features the works of Veer faves Corey Holms, Marian Bantjes, Michael Gillette, Si Scott, Non Format, and many others.

Collectors of filmic ephemera rejoice … a number of the posters have been made available as limited edition giclée prints as well.

San Francisco designer and coder Randy Reddig likes type. He like type a lot. He likes using type to say things. He is particularly fond of sans serifs, specifically Helvetica. Although, he has been known to flirt with Akzidenz Grotesk on occasion. When someone like Randy really likes a typeface, he’s going to play with it and push it around and experiment. Then, he’s going come right out and say I Like Your Face.

Urban photographic treasure hunting … that’s Snap-Shot-City in a nutshell. Participants are given several categories to interpret while capturing their home town vibe for the rest of the world to see. The first competition out of the gate will be a New York City vs London snap-off, linking two of the world’s largest urban gaming festivals, NYC’s Come Out & Play and London’s Hide & Seek … both happening this June. Won’t be hanging in one of those metropoli? September brings a Worldwide Snap-Shot-City for the rest of the planet to embrace and enjoy. Grab your camera, focus on your home town, and start shooting.

Photograph from Honesty is/not the best policy by ScorpionForce5BAM

Type designer (and our good friend) Stefan Hattenbach goes ‘face to face’ in an enlightening interview over at I Love Typography. He reflects on the challenges and influences behind his typefaces, as well as future releases destined for collections such as Fountain, Umbrella, Cabinet, and Psy/Ops.

Photograph of Stefan Hattenbach by Stephen Coles via Flickr

It’s part typographic Wikipedia … and part glyph palette on crack.

The decodeunicode project is collaborative information gathering, powered by a typographically inclined community. Developed at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, decodeunicode facilitates the documentation, research, and understanding of the 98,884 distinct graphic characters defined in the Unicode standard.

Sound geeky? Well yeah, it kinda is.

Basically, the decodeunicode site lets you browse through every single one of those characters. Fonts that come pre-installed with modern operating systems can contain literally thousands of characters and symbols, many unfamiliar to the average user. How does your computer display Kanji ideographs and complex Arabic ligatures? Where can you find the currency symbol for Mongolia? When would someone even use an ogonek anyway? Answers to these types of questions are what this project plans on providing.

I’m not sure why I didn’t link to this before, but I published a bit of backstory related to the development of the new Veer Ideas on my personal site earlier this month. Take a moment and read about Dungbeetle. Comments are encouraged and always appreciated.

Compiling bits of digital data gleaned from the communication habits of millions of New Yorkers may seem like some covert national security exercise. It’s not … at least not in this case. Using several months worth of anonymous, aggregated long distance telephone and internet data flowing between the five boroughs and other international centers, MIT researchers created something intrinsically attractive (and actually kind of useful). The NYTE (New York Talk Exchange) project was recently featured as part of the Design and Elastic Mind exhibition at the MoMA.

Designer (and self-admitted type dork) Adam Dustan has been squirreling away our highly collectable Veer catalogs for several years. One day he decided to remove all of the type-related pages and create his own custom type specimen book. Adam thought we might enjoy seeing the coil-bound fruits of his labor … and he was right. What a clever (and obviously useful) way to repurpose those teetering piles of direct marketing goodness.