Ministry of Type
My own blog, on type, typography, calligraphy, cartography, architecture and anything involving fine detail and an awareness of structure and form.
I started the site partly as an exercise in self-education. In order to understand a thing, what better way than to recreate it somehow? A lot of the posts on the site feature lettering or illustrations that I've redrawn as vectors, both improving my technique and skill with bezier curves and my awareness of type and type design. The site design is deliberately spare and minimal, with a strong but simple grid and limited colour palette to hold everything together, and using the crown device to act as a unifying brand identifier.
The crown device is based loosely on the UK's Imperial State Crown.
The grid is very simple, essentially three columns with an extra wide gutter created by the width of the logo. The site also has a modular baseline grid that works around the varying heights of images rather than restricting them.
Some sample images from the site. The illustration is a tracing from Life Magazine, the grid is part of a set of instructions I created for showing how the Penguin 'Marber Grid' is constructed, and the lettering is traced from an old tourism poster.