Upper First is a motion graphics firm with offices in Sweden and Spain. They have only been around for about a year, but they already have an impressive reel.

From Upper First’s website:

Built on a foundation of creativity, credibility and freedom of thought, our productions entice the imagination beyond the expected. Through the value of awe and entertainment our communication aim to increase brand value and awareness. Every project will stretch our limits, challenge convention and result in a high-end visual experience.

The emergence of the eBook has been quite elusive over the past few years. It’s one of those things that seems like it’s becoming quite popular, but neither you nor your friends actually know how popular. The only instance that I’ve ever seen someone reading one has been on a plane trip back from Hawaii. Nonetheless, companies continue to create, produce, and market these now seemingly mainstream items.

The WordPress theme Basic Maths, created by Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole, features an underlying grid system.

Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole released Basic Maths, a  theme for the popular blogging platform WordPress, back in November. Vinh is the Design Director for the New York Times’ online edition; he also runs the popular blog Subtraction.com. Vinh gets a lot of attention because of Subtraction.com’s custom design: it is clean and accessible. So, to fill a hole in the market, he designed Basic Maths in the spirit of his blog. Basic Maths is on sale ($30 instead of $45) until December 31.

Writer’s Note: I haven’t purchased or installed Basic Maths, so I haven’t used it. It runs on WordPress, which is what we use here at The Journal. WordPress is a powerful publishing tool, has a beautiful back end and is very user friendly. Vinh and Cole have a demo of Basic Maths to show it off.

A couple weeks ago I saw some display fonts by FontFabric that I was hoping to feature in our journal. They have put together quite a collection of both free and pay fonts. It’s always exciting to find good type designers releasing a few of their fonts for free (yikes! what an alliteration!). They have everything from a simple sans serif font like Zag all the way to some crazy display fonts like Portal. You can tell they have some personality with the text they use to preview their type with, be sure to check them out! Here are some of my favorites (in no specific order):

We made a short video for you to enjoy. Check out more of our videos on our Vimeo page. Happy holidays!

Motion graphics artist Tomas Nilsson made this short animation for a school project to reinterpret the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. It is visually simple while containing complex information. Its a fun, unique take on the classic story. Enjoy!

After this flood of top 10 of 2009 lists over the past week, it was really refreshing to see Wolff Olins post a list of ten things they believe are to come in the year of 2010. Its always interesting to read future predictions others have for technology. Some are realistic, and some seem like they will take a bit of time to be comfortably implemented. Designers and artists alike need to be thinking with this mindset, of the future in relation to inventions of the past.