AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

Burning up the blogosphere recently is Cameron Adams’s Handwritten Typographers, a brilliant sampling of how today’s finest typographers write stuff down on paper. Some of the results are fantastic. Hardly surprising that people devoted to designing type also write in an interesting hand, but Adams asks some further questions:

Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?

One thing I’ve always been interested in is the conscious development of a handwriting style. Do people (typographers or not) spend time practicing and perfecting a handwriting style? One guess is that any naturally talented designer already has some drafting skill that’s automatically transposed into the more automatic features of handwriting, but I’d like to see a feature that looks at prominent designers who admit to practicing and perfecting their handwritten styles, like an illustrator would perfect his line.

I’d buy a little pocket-book made up of notebook scraps that chronicled the handwriting evolution of, say, 25 famous artists/designers. Yes I would.

Recent experiences in renewing my passport made me reflect that we all probably spend a fair amount of time developing our signature–I’ve got notebooks from my childhood filled with flailing attempts to make my name look cooler on the page, most of which failed.

Ever been forced to sign your name exactly inside a little box, any contact with the page borders immediately invalidating the entire form? There’s a handwriting-consistency test if there ever was one. My shaky hand means the one signature I did manage to get inside the box still doesn’t look all that close to what you’ll see on an average contract or credit card slip. Oh well, it’s only border control, right?

Adams’s experiment struck me as a wonderful spin on the “ask artists how they do what they do” genre, which has always been a wonderful/terrible thing for me. Reading great essays on how, for example, certain novelists do what they do can fill you with inspiration, and then along comes some anecdotal evidence that some of the best living authors of the day, say Philip Roth or Don Delillo, write almost monastically, genius writers hammering away in solitude for 10 hours a day, trying to get something, anything right, and we’re all reminded that you’ve got to put the work in, no matter what you’ve done before. But we’ll save that digression for another day.

There are times I’d rather just see how an artist writes stuff down, or organizes his/her day, than always read about the why. In a unique way, that’s what Adams has done here.

We’re not overly political here at Cartel, though we couldn’t help but notice the attention Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is receiving with respect to his typography choices. It’s one of the most visible choices the Senator has made, and it’s burning up the blogosphere and YouTube, being debated on the radio, printed in publications the world over and even parodied.

It’s a typeface, of all things; namely Gotham, which the Illinois Democrat chose for his rally banners and campaign signs and which many typographers are calling the hot font of 2008.

To most a discussion about fonts may seem a tad of obscure, though anyone who has ever written a report, created a wedding invitation or sweated over a resume knows that the shape, size and placement of letters can say nearly as much about a person as the words they spell out. And in the computer age, the message conveyed by a font is no longer subliminal. It’s overt.

“We see type as the clothes that words wear,” typographer Tobias Frere-Jones said. “You have more than one outfit in your closet because you don’t wear the same thing to the office that you’d wear to the beach.” Typefaces with big round Os and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of “rigidity, technology and coldness”, according to British psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lower-case “a”, serif styles “conjure images of trustworthiness”, whereas uncluttered sans serif styles “carry less emotional baggage”, he says.

The serif typeface used in Senator Hillary Clinton’s logo is New Baskerville, commonly used by book publishers, law firms and universities.

Senator John McCain’s sans serif Optima was created in 1958 by Hermann Zapf (who, like the Arizona Republican, was once a POW). Simon Daniels, lead program manager of fonts for Microsoft’s typography team, noted one poignant and high-profile use of the typeface. “It’s the same one used to engrave the names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall (in Washington),” he said. “An interesting coincidence.”

But Senator Obama’s sans serif Gotham has been getting all the attention. The font on his signs and banners proclaiming “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” has a vague familiarity.

John Berry, author of books on typography, calls Gotham the font of 2008. “It’s the hot one,” he said. Another commentator likens it to an Armani suit. Online, typography blogs are full of love letters to the typeface, and one artist created a spitting-image parody of an Obama sign declaring: “Gotham, a Font We Can Believe In”.

“It’s funny to see it used in a political campaign because on the one hand it’s almost too ordinary, yet that’s the point,” Mr Berry said. “It has that sense of trustworthiness because you’ve seen it everywhere.”