We’ve just done another Redesigner brief. This time we were asked to design a promotional piece for a typeface.

Our idea is a font house called Type Specimen that sends out 3D letters in a specimen jar. This specimen is Helvetica 55 Roman and was supplied by Max Miedinger.

Here are a few more book covers we did in response to the Serif brief.

Front

Back

At Thoughtful we like to recycle as much as we can, including ideas.

The last cover idea is shamelessly recycled from design group, The Chase. But as this is a bit of fun, we're sure Ben & Lionel won't mind.

The Serif have been running a series of Redesigner briefs recently. A subject is chosen, and Serif readers are invited to redesign it. All entries are then posted on the site. It’s a nice way of getting a non-commercial, non-competitive piece in front of other designers. Past subjects include London Underground tickets, no-smoking signs and the Design Week cover. This time it’s book covers.

We've taken a slightly less serious approach to the brief, redesigning 25 classic book covers using fonts from FontShop.

We've called the range 25 FontShop Classics.

If there are any typo nerds out there who can name all 25 fonts (or get close), we'll send the first three something appropriately thoughtful.

You can see the full set here.

The clue is in the title, or the author.

Send your answers to:
25fontshopclassics@wearethoughtful.com

*Read more here.

Today is a pretty big day in British politics. After 10 year's in the wings, Gordon Brown is announced as Prime Minister.

We'd thought we'd re-visit a project we did in 2005 - a font competition set by Neville Brody's Research Studios. The theme was 'Security'.

The starting point for the font TRUSTME was the end point for type design competition - May 5 2005 - election day in the UK.

The subject of security had been placed under the political spotlight as Tony Blair's Labour Party looked to secure a third term in power, which made it a fitting time to examine who we trust with our security and how far they are prepared to go to ensure it.

This question of trust is so important, because so many of the judgments which politicians have to make have nothing to do with the promises in their manifestos. The clearest example of this during the course of the last Parliament was the issue of Iraq - a word which did not appear in the Labour Party 2001 manifesto.

The Cabinet, Parliament and UK citizens were led to believe (by Tony Blair) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, ready for use within 45 minutes, and that there were no legal objections to invading Iraq. If Tony Blair had told the Cabinet or Parliament that the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, was not always fully convinced of the strength of the Government's legal case for going to war, then perhaps they would have disagreed with his decision to invade Iraq.

If Tony Blair didn’t trust his Cabinet with the full facts, if he didn’t trust Parliament, why should UK citizens trust him on May 5?

TRUSTME 97 doesn't attempt to highlight or expose any political truths, in fact it does the opposite, it masks what's really being said behind the 'winning smile' of Tony Blair.

TRUSTME 97 is a symbol font is consisting of two parts:

U/C - The smile
L/C - A background fill

The numerals use another recognisable smile, Tony Blair's wife, Cherie.

We're not sure if we can get a full character set out of Gordon Brown's smile, but we'll try.

We've designed 2 posters which show the font working: Weapon of mass deception poster (above) and Parliamentary speech poster (below).

We managed to get our hands on a full set of FUSE fonts. Apparently, there are just 15 full sets left in the world. The thing is, we don't want to open them to look at the posters.