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Picture from Telstar Logistics. Usual stuff applies.
Following along the 'Pantones in my life' theme, here's an explanation of how to paint anything the color of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Tom, I think you ought to do that.
Ask anyone why they blog and inevitably the expression "it's a good place for sharing half thoughts" will come up.
So here's a half thought.
Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn't really such a thing as a typical day - that is a pretty much a typical day.
The same person then asked me what advice I would give a graduate today and the one thought I can't get rid of is that I think today graduates should be aware that if they want to get anywhere in this industry they'll have to start up on their own. Write a list of all the designers you admire; I'll bet all of them either run their own consultancy or used to, like Jonathan Ive. From Glaser and Fletcher through Ive and Saville all the way through to Eatock.
I don't mean you have to have a business degree or read the FT everyday, but just bear in the back of your mind that one day, probably, you'll have to run your own show.
Which reminds me of Iain's post about Mini CEO's. You see if we have a bunch of people who are thinking about starting up on their own, we'll then have an industry (and a pool of people) who have other skills than just designing. People who can read a balance sheet and who can present and string a sentence together and write and handle difficult clients and handle difficult staff and design stuff. And that will be a good thing.
Half thought over.
Hello,
I am contacting you regarding the new site that the Nouveau Jour agency is launching directed at bloggers.
The site is called Buzzbox and offers to send you little surprises specially and carefully prepared that will let you exclusively learn about offbeat marketing campaigns and new products. After that, it is up to you whether or not to relay the campaign; what’s important is that it entertains you as much as us.
All our clients, like MySpace, Foot Locker, Diesel, Calvin Klein and Disney, are already excited about this project. In short, the only thing missing is you!
So sign up now by clicking on the following link:
http://www.buzzbox.fr/uk/register.html
Happy buzzing,
Etc, etc
Put that as a slide in your next presentation. That'll be a crowd pleaser.
Said by a good friend of mine this morning.
Thoughtful have an ethical policy.
It's on the website where everyone can look at it. We bank with the Co-op and so when asked we use their ethical policy as a guide to these issues. But we don't talk about it on our website.
Does anyone know of any graphic design companies (small or large) with an ethical policy?
Brilliant. I might play that game.
Pictures by RIVET sf, link via infosthetics.
Whilst we're on the subject of WMH. They have some nice stationery.
How many of us have sat in meetings that started like this.
I've just finished reading this excellent book by Richard Murray from Williams Murray Hamm. It's a hilarious little tale of the rebrand of a leading 'yellow fat' Churnmore. It's cute and clever and doesn't take itself seriously. It even looks like a tub of 'yellow fat'.
No one escapes the satire; designers, ad agencies, brand experts, brand managers, innovation companies.
It's one of those books that's a little too close to the truth for comfort, 'Play Angel's Advocate' is brilliant and reminded me of an agency that I heard mention 'Crazytivity' last week.
It's well worth a read. You can buy it here. You can't borrow mine I'm afraid, I want to keep it handy in the office.
Another one for all you planners.
We're busy at the moment. Which is nice. The picture below is Kingsley and Guy (who was on a placement) working on a nice brief for a nice client.
Busy is good for all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons it's good is that everyone spreads out across our little big studio. Little teams working in all the nooks and crannies. Stuff happening everywhere.
I've probably bored you to death about this before, but one of the reasons for the big studio move was to have the space to do stuff. Before we only had 5 desks. Like just five desks and some room to walk around them. In the new gaff we've got 10 desks and a meeting room and a whole floor with a few Expedits, some great chairs, a stuffed sparrow hawk and stuff like that.
It means we can take on placements, invite people round to stuff bags, have more than one meeting simultaneously, good stuff like that.
Speaking of placements, our first ever official placement scheme is going really well. They don't drink any hot drinks, they love 80's guitar bands, they can
come up with loads of ideas very quickly, they don't say a lot and the
ones that do say a lot get on better. We're really enjoying having some new people around.
So far Jen, Marie, Nina, Rob, Luke, Katherine, Freya, Luke and Alan have all paid us a visit. We're hoping to extend the scheme and invite some of them back for a longer stint later on.
Freya even made us this incredible sign. Nice isn't it?
Yoni came in yesterday to interview Tom and I about our lives as designers.
That's Yoni and Tom and our lovely studio.
It was quite MA-ey if you know what I mean. Lots of questions about process and methodology. But it was all good fun and I enjoyed it.
It's weird, but we always try and go out of our way to help students out with projects like this. I get lots of emails saying, "thanks for replying to my email - no one else has!". We don't do this out of any great philanthropy, it just seems like the right thing to do. I guess the fact that four of the founders went to university together helps the benevolent feelings towards the students.
Whatever.
If you'd like to help Yoni with his research project, contact him here.
You've probably seen this, but I hadn't so here we go.
Original Design Gangsta is a pretty funny video which you watch on YouTube. Found via Armin at Speak Up who doesn't like it. He's got a point.
Armin, for what it's worth I think it's OK. Funny. Ephemeral. But has design got too serious? Hell yeah. Have you turned into the ultimate design grouch? Erm... yeah. Probably.
Discuss. Please.
A while ago I read an interesting article about wet shaving. I was particularly struck by this bit,
"A dull disposable razor dragged across a layer of foam or gel on your cheeks is a step backward from the past, not an improvement."
Isn't that sad? Seriously.
I say sad because think of the hundred's of millions of pounds worth of R&D technology invested into shaving by huge global corporations. Think of all those MBA's and all those sharp brains. Think of all those meeting rooms and flip charts and PowerPoints. All that - and we're going backwards.
Isn't that sad?
The article goes on to say that all you need for a good shave is water, a blade and some cream. That's right, just one blade. Not five.
"Millions of men have been shocked to discover that the “old fashioned” method of shaving they thought went out with the Hula Hoop is actually the best quality shave you can get."
You see, according to the article, a "cheap shaving gel" that "smells just like your deodorant" actually dries the skin. And all those fancy blades don't work because they're designed for "the knucklehead who thinks the harder he rakes the razor across his cheeks the closer his shave will be" when actually the less blades and the lighter the touch, the better the shave.
Isn't it sad that we've actually designed a considerably worse experience than we started with hundreds of years ago?
Lastly, the article says,
"somewhere along the line, when shaving became more about cheap, disposable razors than a nice, precision-made metal tool in your hand, it became a brainless routine to rush through in the morning without even thinking about it".
How does this relate to design?
I think this example is a metaphor for how marketing departments and brands and designers have managed to make stuff worse using design. And not just worse, but we've actually come full circle and designed a solution that's the complete opposite of the answer. You can see a lot of that in modern design. You see it in websites, in products, in basic information, in wrapping swedes in polythene.
In The Hidden Persuaders there's a great story about a guy who was asked to double shampoo sales. He came back and said that they should add the words "repeat if necessary" to the text on the back of the bottle. Sales doubled almost immediately. OK, I'm paraphrasing that, but you all know the story and you get my point.
Yet again we've taken something that was perfectly good at its job and we've added another layer that actually makes the experience worse not better. Not only that we've made it "cheap" and "disposable", the complete opposite of valued.
If we are to take the environment and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle seriously then we've got to stop adding layers of badly designed, badly thought ought extra stuff into everything. We've got to make the best use of the materials available to us. We've got to really think about what we're designing and not just keeping adding blades.
We've got to say enough, more. One blade is enough. One rinse with the shampoo is enough. Nature's natural packaging is enough.
This is why good designers should be CEO's and Head's of R&D departments and FD's and why Design Is A New Management Trend.
Ever wondered what the Internet looks like? It looks like this; just swilling around, looping through the air whilst you go about your daily business.
Blue bits: .net, .ca, .us (America)
Green bits: .com, .org (Global)
Yellow bits: .jp, .cn, .tw, .au (Asia-pacific)
Magenta bits: .de, .uk, .it, .pl, .fr (Europe)
Cyan bits: .br, .kr, .nl (Others)
White: Unknown
With thanks to Julian. Bigger version here.
Everyday bad usability from the fantastic Flickr Group, the Bad Sign Brigade.
All pictures are obviously from the Flickr group. Usual stuff applies.
I'm not sure if everyone already knows this. You may not even want to know, but someone told me recently and I wished I'd been told sooner. So now I'm telling you.
Let's say you're working on one PSD. You've got several other images in PSD's that you need to bring into the main PSD. Portraits into a web page design, for example.
For this design all portraits have to be 100px x 100px, but your image is, say, 120px x 180px. So you've change the canvas size in Photoshop and you're ready to go.
Here's the portrait you want to bring into Photoshop. It was an oblong but you've changed the canvas size and now you're ready to drag it across.
When you drag the layer into the main PSD it comes across like this.
Ahh. That's the wrong proportion.
Why? Because changing the canvas size doesn't automatically crop the image. So you're still left the 'waste' bits of image around the side.
Here's a better way of doing it.
Resize the canvas as before - especially if we know our image has to be a predefined size like 100px x 100px and we've got several of them to do.
Then select all.
Then crop. This will get rid of all the 'waste' around the edges.
When you bring the image in this time, it's free of all that crap around the edges.
There you go.
I didn't know that, and now I do. I thought it was useful. I'm sure there will be an element of me teaching you Grannies to suck eggs, but did anyone find that useful?
In case you're wondering, the screen grabs were taken from this minisite we designed and built for the wonderful Carmen Jones show at the Southbank Centre.
Can anyone put me in touch with John Sorrell?
Drop me an email, thanks.
Apple want you to share your iPhone stories with them.
I will be intrigued to see if they do anything interesting with this.
Some fantastic info graphics over here at Similar Diversity.
Info graphics? Or are they just graphics?
Anyway... characters from the main religions are aligned alphabetically, Then their name and arc size is calculated from their total word count in all the books and loads of other stats...
What's even more surprising is that my old friend 'Scratch' Sagmeister was involved. All this found via the excellent infosthetics.com
Yoni has written in, and he'd like to interview a load of graphic designers for his MA. Do you think you can be help? Read below.
"For my MA Graphic Design research project at London College of Communication, I'm interviewing (by video) G.Design professionals of all disciplines and levels. These short interviews will eventually be edited to a video piece that will be published online.
I will arrive to the person's workplace at a scheduled time, will set up my video camera and will ask a few questions that relates to the person's views on the G.D profession. The whole thing shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.
Any cooperation will be appreciated.
Graphic designers in London area who are willing to participate should please contact me at: me at yonialter dot com."
Back in February we popped up to Glasgow to spend some time with the Graphic Design students. One of the pictures I took on that day, which was posted to my Flickr account has just been used to represent Glasgow School of Art's nightlife in an online mapping thing.
My picture is the orange paint on the floor thing, top right.
From what I can gather Schmap takes pictures from online sources (fully credited) and creates content for maps. It's a nice little idea with a terrible name.
Whilst we're talking about maps have a look at Poke's build your own guide thing for Dorling Kindersley. It's good.
The internet, just swilling around, looping through the air whilst you go about your daily business.
I've only ever had one guest post before and that was from the unstoppable Marcus Brown.
Here's another one. Tom, one of my partners at TDC, went to see The Haçienda exhibition in Manchester last weekend and I thought you guys would like to read a little review and look at some pictures.
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The Haçienda: Urbis Exhibition Review
It all started with my sister, like all people with an older sibling, they tend to dictate what we grow up listening to. Being 2 years older, she was always first with fashion and music. The 80s were a pretty special time - and Acid House was my Punk. My sister had the DMs with big safety pins, oversized secondhand jeans and Smiley Face tees. She also had a boyfriend who was very into the scene, bought all the records, and took turns on the decks at the local sticky floored nite spot, and went to the Haçienda.
I was 15 when I first heard about the Haçienda - that was 1988, the 'Second Summer of Love', everyone had smiley tee's, jeans were getting baggier, mens hair getting longer and the sun kept shining. I struggled to get into most clubs locally - I looked so young even with fake i.d. they turned me away! I was never asked for i.d. ever to get into the Haçienda, once when being searched at the door, a bouncer took my passport (my i.d. for the night) from inside my pocket... "Alright son, where you off then, on yer 'olidays... Ha ha ha".
Walk through the world famous Fac 51 doors at the Urbis exhibition and you get a really good display of what the Haçienda was all about, grouped both chronologically and thematically, it contains just about everything and anything from the history of the club.
There is a really great family tree which links all the people and events back to the club.
Previously unseen video footage showing the construction of the club, alongside a giant print of Tony Wilson, Peter Saville and Alan Erasmus, a small amount of early Factory items, setting the scene for the Haçienda, and the visual style of the club.
You then get a great slice of design through the years, with early sketched visuals through to art work and finished items.
Alongside the 2D items, there are numerous videos to view - a whole room is The Fall in performance, as well as original scratch videos by Claude Bessy and Swivel.
One of my favorite items displayed had to be the 'original' neon bar sign for the Kim Philby Bar.
I thought I knew all the design done for the Haçienda, but I found items I had never seen, one of which was the all gold poster for Haçienda90 - a lush print of gold on gold, no copy other than the title...
Also featured are light boxes with Madonna's first UK appearance, a wall of logos, axonometric drawings of the club and lets not forget - FAC51-Y3 The Haçienda 25th Anniversary trainers designed for Y3 by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly.
The exhibition also traces the impact the club had in shaping the economic and urban development of the city.
A final, nice tough was the graphics and items that were created for the crew working on the film TwentyFourHourPartyPeople - Crew tees, invites to after show parties and viewing of the premier.
More pictures:
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