Posts Tagged ‘typography’
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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Friday, January 11th, 2013
Recently saved from clearout: a battered & desiccated copy of my dad’s 1938 ‘Hot Discography’ (second edition). Cover missing, most pages loose (some marked with comp. slips), much of it almost dust. A Jazz-nerd and typophile treat, an encyclopædic list of recordings available at the time. The legends are all there, as are less familiar dance-oriented acts whose names alone are a joy: Barney Bigard & his Jazzopaters; Cootie Williams & his Rug Cutters. I know nothing of Bubber Miley’s Mileage Makers but they must have done some serious touring. Who would not like to meet Sharkey Bonano, Cow Cow Davenport or Putney Dandridge (with or without his Orchestra)? I fear the worst for Charlie Spond whose defiantly downbeat name (his own surely) seems now lost to history. Below are some of the spreads, snapped in haste before they deteriorate further (apologies for quality / size):
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Tags: book design, graphic design, jazz, names, typography, visual culture
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Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
Monotoype UK recently staged Pencil to Pixel: a small-but-perfectly-formed exhibition about the development of typeface production—well worth the minor trek to its slightly off-grid Wapping location.
The decades of change between hot metal and digital production could easily make you overlook the extent of labour and craft that is still involved in bringing type to use. Type may be surface design but it has more in common with furniture or other product design in its mix of essential functional and aesthetic requirements than with most of the graphic design it serves. The sheer beauty of the pencil-drawn curves of pre-digital type masters is something I had seen before but almost forgotten. In the exhibition the evidence of mid-20th century type impressed most, the physically less present display of digital era work on show suffering by comparison: pencils 1, pixels 0. Anyhoo—all of it is better seen than waffled on about. Below are some snaps of things that caught my eye:
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Tags: graphic design, inspiration, legibility, product design, typography
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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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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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Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Tags: decoration, decorative arts, ephemera, graphic design, inspiration, ornament, packaging, print, traditional typography, typography, visual culture
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.
For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.
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Tags: communication, creativity, decorative tradition, decorative type, graphic design, I Wonder, illustration, inspiration, Marian Bantjes, ornament, typography, visual culture, words
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Randomly chosen newspaper spread with stories grouped under two page headings. The wide field of vision allows many other connections/reasons-to-read
The Death of Print is a phrase regularly bandied about since the invention of TV (and probably radio before that), appearing with renewed vigour with the arrival of every new communications platform. The actual death of some newspapers and print publications lends urgency to the drama, but the reality is less apocalyptic. Jobs are lost, companies fail, the media landscape changes, but old formats (with the notable exception of the unloved videocassette) assume new roles rather than become extinct. The life and death struggle of old vs. new media is the easy narrative but old media has unique value which should ensure at least a modest survival.
New media platforms have given us massive advances in accessibility and empowerment – but they also come with a predisposition for targeted communication, ‘narrowcasting’ and self-selection. Old media, print especially, has one underappreciated benefit that is absent from the new stuff. It doesn’t decide quite so forcefully in advance what information will be of value to me, limiting what I might learn about the world.
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Tags: communication, design, graphic design, information design, iPad, legibility, media, newspapers, TV, typography, words
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
This is my favourite road sign. I like it because it treats me as a sentient human being rather than a mindless drone incapable of independent thought. It encourages me to consider the possible hazards of my situation and trusts that having so reflected, I will make good decisions. Were I not barrelling along at 70mph it would also inspire me to muse further on the meaning of life, the universe and everything…
The rarity of such ‘thoughtful’ road signs makes me wonder why few communications assume an intelligent audience. Too much ‘telling’ surely eventually breeds disinterest. On the roads we all see plenty of poorly regulated over-signing: badly placed, ugly ‘street furniture’ laden with overly instructive signs, sometimes there (it would seem) as much to prevent the local council from being sued as to actually help the public. Credible research now shows that careful removal of oversignage increases road safety. De-signing can be good designing. As in most areas of communication design, consideration of the user and limiting the number of messages to be processed increases the likehood of effectiveness. More thoughtful communications crediting users with some intelligence would be no bad thing.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, design, graphic design, information design, legibility, typography, visual culture
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Artwork, print and cheap uncoated paper – 1950s/60s comics’ matchless charm (pic via Half-man Half-static).
Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…
March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid as the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of contemporary beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….
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Tags: brand design, charm, communication, creativity, decoration, decorative type, graphic design, packaging, typography, visual culture, visualisation
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