Archive for the ‘information’ Category
Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
For the first time this century I got to spend a few days in Rome. In the throes of elections for Mayor, Regional Head, Premier and Pope, the city seemed more than usually disconnected—but the timelessly great stuff is still very visible and a tangible sense of community endures. Still seemingly on the edge of collapse, little has changed. Slow it goes.
Corruption and chaos condemns Rome to minimal progress and drives its children abroad to find work—but also stops the past being swept away by development and keeps the eternal city gloriously Starbucks-free. In the birthplace of the slow food movement the speed of change is close to zero. The only visible concession to this century, Zaha Hadid’s glorious MAXXI building is discretely tucked away well out of the centre and down a side street as if Rome is a little embarrassed by it. I made a third attempted pilgrimage to Trajan’s Column, ground zero for the western typographic tradition—on two previous occasions cloaked in restoration scaffolding, this time clean and clear but resolutely not open to the public despite facilities and signs insisting on the contrary. As ever, Rome is as frustrating as it is fabulous. I took snaps:
Sant Eustachio: literally the best coffee in Rome and almost certainly anywhere else. Unchanged since the 1930s.
Tags: decorative arts, ornament, retail, Rome, signage, typography, visual culture
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Thursday, February 14th, 2013
Most of us walk around with eyes closed. A slight exaggeration, but almost true. The inside of our heads is built to ignore the familiar. Observation is a key component of creativity—yet it can take the worst of shocks to fully switch it on.
Living largely via pixel & glass and distracted by everyday concerns we neglect the actual world as a source of inspiration. For those of us without the time / inclination for a Buddhist attention to the now, it can take awareness of imminent death to force a clear-sighted perspective.
As a music enthusiast I was upset to hear of Wilko Johnson’s recent cancer diagnosis. His old band Dr Feelgood
were a timeless one-off. I saw him play late last year—he and master bassist Norman Watt-Roy two fiercely animated Dickens characters. Wilko’s career was resurgent, boosted by Julien Temple’s terrific 2010 documentary Oil City Confidential (highly recommended BTW, even if you hate the music). He’ll be fortunate to see this year out, but in a recent interview spoke of feeling “alive and …existing in the moment”, his appetite for music (and astronomy) in no way diminished. This reminded me of legendary TV writer Dennis Potter, whose original and innovative 1978 TV drama series Pennies from Heaven made powerful use of music—still possibly my favourite piece of TV (The Wire / The Sopranos / Breaking Bad / Treme etc. notwithstanding). In a famous last interview (he died in 1994) Potter spoke of an ecstatic appreciation of nature: “…the blooms were the bloomingest blooms ever…”.
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Tags: creativity, design process, innovation, music, observation
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Monday, December 31st, 2012
The world’s least favourite logo—but for how long?
Was 2012 the year that brand design failed? Certainly the general public and a large number of designers did a heck of a lot of complaining as a long list of high-profile new / reworked logos appeared to increasing derision — so much so that you have to wonder: is a logo launch free of moan-brand misery even possible in 2013?
One by one, ever more brands joined 2012’s year-long turkey shoot culminating in October with the University of California: a logical, reasonably well-executed new device incorporating references to the 150 year-old seal it replaced (see below, or here). Yet it inspired new heights of hostility, finally being withdrawn after widespread media taunting and a 50,000-person petition. Not a work of staggering genius perhaps (the applications did seem a bit dull) but deserving of that much crazed torch-bearing lynch-mobbery?
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Tags: brand design, communication, Ebay, Gap, logo design, London 2012, Twitter, University of California, Windows
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Thursday, November 29th, 2012
Cap’n P. points from somewhere in the well-designed future to the inadequate user experiences of the early 21st century.
You might think that by now we would be getting to grips with the information age and that with endless data literally at our fingertips that certainty and progress would follow. The reverse seems more true. The combination of sheer data volume and vested interests make it harder than ever before for us to separate signal from noise.
The human mammal, supposedly superior to corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods (and other smartarse earth life forms not beginning with ‘c’) has built its success so far on exceptional pattern recognition skills and an aptitude for making sense of complexity. But more often the widespread response to our self-inflicted Infogeddon is a toxic combination of ignorant denial and rampant egomania, most obviously illustrated by (though far from limited to) rightwing US politicians and widespread fundamentalist religious groups. It often works: state your case firmly, loudly and often enough and like rust or some fungus, the maddest ideas take hold. Add power to such posturing and you can take any barking notion and Make It So (as I understand slaphead space commanders of the future will be fond of saying).
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Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, information design, social responsibility
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Monday, September 24th, 2012
Liberty Regent Street: above a formal frieze, three stone figures apparently chat and watch the shoppers far below
Big city retail causes curious human behavior. Tourist & architects excepted, no-one inclines their gaze more than a degree or two above the horizontal, as if the world ceases to exist above four metres. Below that height, pushy product displays and shouty fascias browbeat the passer-by. But beyond this retail flat earth lies another dimension of visual enjoyment, as anyone who has noticed what’s going on at the very top of Liberty’s Regent Street façade will confirm.
One of the pleasures of London used to be driving around it (back when ‘driving in London’ was still a thing), low winter sun unexpectedly spotlighting a great building / detail. You can of course still discover gems of unsuspected above-the-line architecture on foot. Incomplete or invisible at ground level, how great must these buildings have looked when they were whole, before they were sawn off at the knees by the local Vodafone / Costa / M&S?
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Tags: architecture, decorative tradition, design, graphic design, innovation, problem-solving, retail, urban environment, visual noise
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Friday, August 31st, 2012
The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.
“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus).
Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience.
Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, creativity, design process, industrial design, information design, maintenance, Stevenage, vision
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Friday, August 10th, 2012
Barely a month seems to pass without someone, somewhere taking a pop at brand design by highlighting the entertainingly high cost of some logos.
This week it is the online enterprise (no stranger to my spam folder) that offers low-grade generic ‘professional logos’ for hundreds, even tens of pounds / dollars. I will not dignify / promote the business by linking to or naming it here, but their pitch contrasts exceptionally fortunate startups paying little or nothing for their first logo (Twitter, Nike, Coca-Cola…) with large corporations (Accenture, Pepsi, BP, Enron, London 2012…) who coughed up six to nine-figure sums for the same thing (no sources quoted of course). So far, so unsurprising.
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Tags: brand design, branding, communication, design, graphic design, logos, London 2012
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Thursday, July 5th, 2012
For something like a quarter of a century, Stanley Green was a familiar feature of the tawdry landscape of London’s Oxford Street. Anyone shopping there between the late 1960s and the end of the 80s is likely to have seen him, his placard and self-produced booklets. I worked with Sedley Place Design for much of the latter decade in the alley off Oxford Street that gave the company its name and Stanley was as much a part of that time and place as the three-card trick, IRA bombs and cheap Italian restaurants. If my colleagues and I admired his eccentricity and outsider typography we ignored the dietary advice in his distinctive monotone and hand-painted caps: ‘LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN…’
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Tags: communication, information design, typography, visual culture
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Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
© not London 2012 – flagrant violation of 2012 brand parameters. So sue me.
There is plenty in the London 2012 Olympics for us to get angry about: The magical / mythical ticket chaos; sponsorship & brand fascism from Union Carbide to intimidation of cornershops; the rooftop missiles; the world’s least-engaging Olympic mascots Hemlock & Mandible – and no-one is without an opinion on that logo.
I remain alone in feeling that – whilst no thing of beauty – the 2012 logo did an effective job of what it set out to do: signal a fresh Olympic spirit to humans under 30 not engaged in sport. But the typeface is hideous, most applications of the identity weak (Otl Aicher it ain’t), and the enforcement zeal of Seb Coe’s brand police defies belief. My mother is helping to organize a sport-themed village flower-arranging competition this summer (‘The Blooming Olympics’) and I fully expect a LOCOG-ordered SWAT team ambush with helicopter gunships and a bloody showdown in the tea tent. (more…)
Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, inspiration, London 2012, sport, visual culture
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Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (photographed badly on an iPhone)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. It is now so dominant that physical design is arguably being usurped by graphic design as the driver of functionality. Apple’s record in graphics is mostly strong (I always liked their instruction booklets) but recently they seem less sure-footed.
iTunes is much harder work than it used to be (and its ‘new logo’ was widely disliked); the iCal leather / stitching effects are retro and retrograde. Even the ‘candy box’ iPhone / iPad apps homescreens, once fresh and friendly now seem more irritating than helpful. The iPhone remains a beautiful piece of work (even if its most impressive features – like the beautifully machined, spookily high-tolerance sim card tray – are hidden from view by the bumper required for practical everyday operation), but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make Apple products seem behind the curve for the first time. This was thrown into sharp relief for me by the wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design (above) is restrained and elegant and there is a crisp customisable tile-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I’m envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever. This is good news – competition raises the game and there is no reason why Apple must have a monopoly on good design. The Windows phone has let in some UI fresh air and is making Apple look just a bit… stuffy.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, apps, graphic design, information design, iPhone, maps, Nokia, product design, typography, UI design, Windows phone
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