Matthew Buchanan (Home)

Letterboxd:

We’re thrilled to announce that after 15 months of public beta, Letterboxd is no longer invitation-only. Today, deep in the Letterboxd HQ bunker, we threw the switch to remove the invitation code requirement during sign-up: Letterboxd is now open to all!

The social film site I and a few colleagues have been working on for the past couple of years is all grown up, and as of Friday, open to anyone to use. We’ve been thrilled with both the response to going live, and the support we’ve received for the site via our just-announced paid membership tiers. There’s plenty more good stuff coming, so if being obsessive about film is your thing, give it a go.

The new Art of the Title went live today, and we had a hand in its re-imagining. All 220+ articles and interviews have been painstakingly re-constructed by editor-in-chief Ian Albinson and his team using a more flexible layout engine, and studios and title designers now have their own cross-referenced bio pages. Very happy to have this out there, go look!

Letterboxd, the social film diary and review site I’ve been working on with a few colleagues over the past year, is nearing its public beta launch. We’ve continued to add to and improve the site since launching at Brooklyn Beta last October — film pages have had an overhaul as you can see above, among many other improvements.

If you’d like to be part of the private beta, drop your email address at letterboxd.com over the weekend, and we’ll get an invitation out to you early next week.

The Dutch Icon collective, headed by Hemmo de Jonge, has an impressive collection of royalty-free work for sale. The examples above are just two of the 99 sets they’ve drawn to date, all of which are sold exclusively through iStockPhoto (which sadly means there’s no way to buy the complete series as a single set). The consistency and proportions are perfect throughout — alongside Drew Wilson’s Pictos sets, these are among the best stock icons I’ve seen.

For more similar resources, Meagan Fisher posted a great round-up of alternatives a month or two back.

Mike Harding:

For a good part of this year I’ve been working with the guys here at Cactuslab on a new site called Letterboxd. It’s a site for film lovers; a place where you can keep a log of the films you watch, rate or review them, and keep up with what your friends have been watching.

I demoed this service at Brooklyn Beta last month. The feedback has been terrific, and we are continuing to make improvements while in private beta mode. If you’d like early access, leave your email at the site, we’re inviting new users every few days.

Richard Miller’s Westin Black is a great take on the friendly slab, by way of Cooper Black. It’s now available for desktop and web use from Fontspring, as part of a new collection of rounded faces that also includes Museo Sans Rounded and Proxima Nova Soft.