Sites we like: O Music Awards, Art of the Menu, and beta620
Three spectacular sites we like this week, from MTV, UnderConsideration, and The New York Times.
From the designers at Happy Cog comes a vivid new site for MTV’s O Music Awards. Bold, all caps Freight Sans complements the hot pink and bright yellow blocks of color; while Pragmatica Condensed contrasts with its narrow, light weight. Be sure to note the vertical parallax effect on the background when you scroll down.
The intrepid team at UnderConsideration are back again, this time at the intersection of food and type. Art of the Menu catalogs great menu design, with help from Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova and TypeTogether’s Adelle. The combination of a grotesque and a slab serif is classic, and the many small menu-inspired details (rules of different weights, and pinking-sheared edges) make for a pleasing whole.
And last but certainly not least, this week The New York Times launched beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers. FF Meta serves as both paragraph and headline text, showcasing it’s flexibility and personality at both small and large sizes, and letting the playful, cutout-style illustrations take the stage.
Stay tuned for more sites we like next week!
2 Responses
Comments are closed.
Love the Art of the Menu site. Out of pure curiosity, how do you decide on what sites you feature? Do you just search through the sites you have in your database and pick some randomly?
We discover sites from a variety of sources: submissions to gallery@typekit.com, Twitter, our logs, comments on the blog, and more. Sites are chosen based on their level of typographic excellence (we look for the best sites we can find) and the diversity of fonts shown. I try in particular to choose sites that are using less-popular fonts when I can; we also look for diversity in the kinds of sites (not only blogs, but ecommerce sites, editorial sites, portfolios, both heavy traffic and smaller sites, and so on). And we also showcase sites that are particularly innovative with their use of fonts.
Some weeks I’m also able to pull together sites under a particular theme (like a recent food-related post). Other weeks, I just look for a diverse selection of sites to feature. So, to answer your question, it’s not random at all!