Build your own castle, augmented reality calendars and living letters: Here’s February’s Things

January is over, and Christmas definitely feels like an age ago. Now it’s back to work (properly), but luckily for us, there’s no shortage of reading material to help us through our commutes. From the future of augmented reality to travel pieces that have us dreaming of warmer times as our umbrella is blown inside out by Storm Ciara, these are some of our picks from the post.

If you would like to contribute to next month’s Things, please send your designs to this address.

Grilli Type: Service Manual 1

This publication is a bit of a highlight reel of Swiss type foundry Grilli Type’s work in recent years. This includes its custom type created for Pitchfork, as well as work with brands such as Esquire and Samsonite. It also details its work to embrace new alphabets such as Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Wasted Talent Volume VI

The magazine that focuses on youth subcultures across skating, surfing, art and music has had its largest visual redesign yet. The aim was to give a more premium look and feel, and it’s definitely worked. Taking you on a worldwide tour via Tel Aviv, Barcelona, New York and Madrid, the magazine is packed with photographic and written accounts of places and the subcultures that make them tick.

Metodo Studio

The Italian design and communication agency has created a calendar with quotes from a different writer for each month. To access these quotes requires some work from you though. Open the Artivive app and point it at each sheet to unlock the quotes, as well as other augmented reality content.

Carolina Cela: Beyond the horizon

The focus of this children’s book is the horizon, how it’s constantly there but always out of reach. The few words that there are have been translated from Portuguese into English, yet it’s the illustrations that steal the show. These calming scenic landscapes and beautiful everyday scenes are extremely relaxing.

LA Drive By

This book by German photographer Michael Lange documents isolation and desertedness in Los Angeles. The project was shot from 1996-2001 entirely from a car using Polapan35, which explains the varying levels of clarity in the images. Rather than a cliche-heavy trip along sunset boulevard, this series draws you into the darker and less seen corners of the city of angels.

Karelu

In Tulu, a language spoken in southern India, “Karelu” means the mark left on the skin by wearing something too tight. This zine has been produced to coincide with the release of CJ Pandit’s debut single that shares the name, and looks to explore the marks that we leave on each other in a scrapbook-style collage of photographs and memories.

Build a Castle

This does what it says on the tin!

Building things is always fun (whether aged five or 55) and this simple set of 64 attachable cards gives you a multitude of options when it comes to designing your humble abode.

Moving World 01

This also focuses on augmented reality (AR) and the possibilities that it currently holds. The zine predicts that AR will one day fit seamlessly into day-to-day life, and features interviews with game designers, creative directors and artists that are at the forefront of this exciting medium. It also lists the most important technology in the field being made at the moment by businesses both big and small.

Appearance

This is a speculative set of typographic experiments by Dutch graphic designer Maartin Van Maanen. The main approach for this work was to look at it from the letter’s point of view, considering them each a separate entity with their own character. Merging the type with text and other elements such as sign language and illustration, he treats each letter as a living being and works off of the interactions that result.

Aperture 237

This issue of Aperture is on the subject of Spirituality, and is guest-edited by Turner Prize winner, Wolfgang Tillmans. In the magazine, artists, photographers and writers explore how the captured image has represented the human quest for a spiritual connection. This encompasses a wide range of topics, from the second summer of love to rituals to space exploration.