I’ve been waiting a pretty long time to write the words “press embargo lifted” since it sounds so important. Our latest project, VIP Art Fair is publicly available after nearly a year of work– sort of. The registration phase started and it’s now possible to request invitations to the week-long event that will go live in January.

We worked very closely with art dealers James and Jane Cohan and  Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren to design and develop the first art fair to take place exclusively online. Some of the biggest names in the gallery world (Zwirner, Gagosian, White Cube) are on board and the New York Times and Art Info have already covered the project.

We’ll discuss the thinking that went into the interface here in an upcoming post.

A little insight behind the scenes of August here at SUPERMETRIC— while things are getting more and more sophisticated, there are moments when it feels like sanity is at stake. That’s when a day trip to the beaches of Long Island comes in handy to reset the eye, the mind, and the arms (when there’s surf).

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a very brief story about map makers who, in a quest to replicate the details of the original perfectly, created a gargantuan map the same size of the country they were illustrating. I’m always struck by how difficult it is to show an image of a website one a website. Should I make it small enough to show at once and loose the details in the typography? Should I crop in to a detail and loose the overall impression? Here’s my newest contribution to the problem: excitingly tilted in a a constructivist 2.0 kind of way. Terrible, isn’t it.

Oh, by the way, take a look at the new website we designed and built for Kliment-Halsband Architects. We did the first one four years ago and they came back to us to rejuvenate. That felt good. Portraits of the partners were shot by the amazing Francois Dischinger.

The iPad is coming and whether you like it or not, whether you are under- or overwhelmed and whether you will get it or not: the iPad will be here soon! At $499 and the alleged savior of the print industry, it will most likely make as much of an impact as the iPhone did.

To help us to get ready for some iPad GUI design, we found this handy PSD template (via teehan+lax). It’s quite a collection (24mb) and it even has the blue cube icon that indicates a missing Flash plugin.

About two years ago we designed a new website for Dattner Architects. The second part of the job was to help the New York firm put together their second monograph, which took considerably longer but just hit the street and we finally hold it in our hands!

We liked the idea to create two pieces that would showcase the company’s work in the distinct nature of their medium, and at the same time allow them to reference each other through a mutual graphic language. Front and center, book and website refer to the wide range of public and private projects Dattner Atchitects has realized over the years — in lieu of a title, the full list of their their fields of action is stacked in large letters, filling the entire available height and marking the sections projects belong to.

Get “Dattner Architects” from amazon. Funnily enough, at amazon there’s an older design of the cover showing up for the book which they took from the publisher’s catalogue (and which we really really liked because it was a little more mysterious). take a look…

Using a custom font as opposed to a system font has been a huge issue for web designers for a long time. Luckily there is sIFR and cufon, 2 methods we use to realize dynamic rendering of fonts on web sites. The latest browser generation (at least Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) support the @font-face CSS rule which forces the font to download to the clients computer. The result is quite amazing but the results vary widely between browsers.

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Speaking of sIFR and cufon, there appears to be more fish in that pond: FontJazz and facelift both offer custom font rendering but in very different ways. While FontJazz appears to be a cufon clone (which appears to work on many, even old browsers), facelift renders images in real time. Not sure if I am tempted to try these approaches as cufon works pretty well for us.

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csstypeset is a nice tool that allows you to format small snippets of text using system fonts. On the left you have a WYSIWYG editing area and to the right your CSS code is generated. Bookmark!

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Today everything is about em in CSS, no px anymore. Yeah, I know, how nerdy can it get. But seriously, this online tool helps you convert to em easily and thus enables you to create better stylesheets.