I was surprised by how much attention The Long Car Purchase got, including some email chatter from Japan. But this is a long, slow process. There isn't much to report this month, except that I've had this email (from someone who wishes to remain anonymous) which is almost exactly how I feel. It's repeated below. There might be another post next month, possibly with diagrams.
"I just read your post about maybe buying a new car one day.
I am in a startlingly similar position, except my timeframe is more advanced – I will buy one in the next 3 months, as my old Saab now has a street value of about £1500 and every time I get things fixed (new brakes and a drive belt – a mere snip at £600) it makes me a bit ill.
I am checking out second hand German estates (Audi hold their value best, and don’t break down), and also looking at Saab estates, which don’t hold their value as well and sometimes break down. (I have a loyalty to Saab – my Dad worked for them for many years when they were an independent Swedish design-led company. Now they are owned by GM and quality has suffered.)
I also looked at a Lexus hybrid the other day – it was an SUV and quite snazzy but too expensive and still a bit of a planet killer – the hybrid bit only partly atones for the SUV part of the equation. Not as big inside as you might think either, although I have done my homework and it would seem that Lexus build very reliable cars.
It’s in my nature to get quite heavily into the research and comparisons, coming from a family that takes cars fairly seriously."
* Yes, yes I know 'almost exactly' is a bad phrase. Sorry.
They enjoyed seeing their stuff on the blog, so I thought I'd do it again. I'm not saying too much about the project, but you don't have to be a genius to work it out.
So here's some stuff. Sketches, ideas, workings out. Have a look, let us know what you think in the comments. As always there's more over on Flickr and on Ffffound!
A short exhibition deserves a short review I find.
This exhibition is good in that very Design Museum way. IE go if you're in the area and don't expect to be there very long.
I'm not really a big Hussein Chalayan fan and I was pleased to note that you don't have to be to enjoy the exhibition. It's interestingly put together and it moves along at a decent pace. It's unusual but not wanky.
When I was there it was besieged by fashion students who making the most of the Design Museums wonderful Yes You Can Take Pictures We Are All Grown Ups approach to copyright.
You should go, if you're in the area. Just don't expect to be there very long. More pictures on Flickr.
What's good? The maps are fantastic, a delight. The detail and the wit are a joy to behold.
The typography (wait, typography is maybe a bit strong) the drawings with type in are lovely. The drawings have a lovely depth to them.
What's not good? It ain't very big. Actually, it's even more spatially challenged than a Design Museum exhibition and that's quite a feat.
There isn't enough stuff from the New Yorker. Just the one cover.
It feels a bit pricey at £9. Nine pounds isn't exactly a lot of money, but it feels like a big deal for a very small show. Still, better to spend your hard earned at cultural venues than the local Wetherspoons...
So go. You should definitely go. Just lower your expectations a little bit. Mike Dempsey has written a good post about Saul here. A must read if you like that new Audi cardboard box ad.
At first I was unsure whether I would blog about it. But now I've changed my mind. I won't go into every detail about the project, but I sort of think it's important that the students get used to their work being blogged and flickr'd and talked about and ultimately critiqued online. That they get used to that feedback loop. Know what I mean?
We've only just begun, but already I'm really pleased with the stuff that's coming out. Look at this.
Gorgeous isn't it?
They're interesting, aren't they?
If you're reading this and you're from LCC (like you Katie and Masum) say hello in the comments. I've started a Flickr set over here. Take a look at some of the stuff in there. More to come soon.
It's smart, fun, beautifully executed and interesting.
I've never talked about Dopplr properly. And so I shall do that now. Dopplr is basically a social network for frequent travellers. But you don't have to travel that frequently. And you don't have to be a Lounge junkie either. You simply add your trips to your page and your friends can see where you'll be and when. This leads to interesting little coincidences and global bump-in-to's. It's simpler than it sounds.
I met Aaron from Flickr t'other day. It was a great privilege because Flickr is one of my favourite things ever. One of the reasons I love it is because it's so quiet. So polite.
Unlike Facebook which is the drunk sex pest of the internet, Flickr is your smart, humble, heart warming friend. Quiet and brilliant. And Dopplr is similar.
Thing is, it's really hard to explain why. You have to sign up and use it for a few months. Properly use it. Update it as required.
It doesn't email you all the fucking time by default. You can set the prefs to email you as little or as often as you like, even never. The design is smart and elegant. But more than that the little interactions are elgant too. Every fade, or ajax effect is effortless. It feels crafted and cared for. That's a rare quality on the internet.
Matt and Matt often talk about creating a website you never have to visit. I love this idea. They're starting to build it. For example, if you book a trip with BA (or any airline) simply forward the email itinerary Dopplr and it will automatically update your page. If you're suddenly taking a last minute one day trip to Manchester, send Dopplr's Twitter account a DM Tweet and it will add the trip for you. You don't even have to go to Dopplr to see your trips, you load them directly into iCal. Smart stuff.
They do loads of other clever things to. Quietly building on the original concept. Elegantly, appropriately and exactly how you would do it (you know, if you were perfect and were doing all the things you said you'd do). Like this, they bring in pictures of places from Flickr and add them to that places page, all under a Creative Commons licence. Perfect.
There's a post in my drafts folder called 'The difference between an advertising business and a design business'. It's been there for over a year. Look there it is.
It's about the differences in the businesses, not the industries. The things an advertising business is good at and the things a design business is good at. It will be a great post. I may never finish it.
But I was reminded of one thing an advertising business is good at the other day. Something design businesses don't ever do properly. (Well, packaging companies sort of do it, but it's different.) Strategy, trends, consumer research, call it what you want. It's looking outside of your field at the wider world and, most importantly, real people. Those last sentences sound very clumsy but you know what I mean.
Luckily for all you designers Piers from PSFK is putting on a brilliant thing called Good Ideas Salon London. You should go. Here's some people from the speaker list.
Jeremy Ettinghausen \ Director of Digital \\ Penguin Kate Moross \\ Designer Eva Rucki \ Founding Partner \\ Troika Design Paul Graham \ Partner \\ Anomaly UK Kevin Anderson \ Blogs Editor \\ The Guardian
...and 20 or so others. I'd like to hear what all that lot have to say. Wouldn't you?
Lots of agencies are freezing pay but increasing training at the moment. You could do worse than to book a ticket for this and write training on your expenses form. You can buy tickets here.
Whilst we're on the subject. Here's another thing you should do.
Ruby Pseudo is speaking at the above event (that's reason to go in itself).
But you should definitely subscribe to the Ruby Pseudo Chat Chat blog. Ruby Pseudo is essentially a youth consultancy. And a brilliant one. They have a network of over 250 kids and they offer genuine, unfiltered, raw research. "If you want it told like it is, with some very real and useable strategy recommendations, then you have found the right person..." Simon Pestridge said that and he's Marketing Director of Nike UK. So he probably knows what he's on about.
I've just worked with them on a project and it the stuff they provided was superb. And I definitely probably knows what I'm on about.
If you still think the kids wear chambray shirts, dance to Deacon Blue
at discos and say "wicked" (like I do) then you should start reading that
blog. This post, for example, rounds up 23 brilliant, talented teenage photographers on Flickr . Not two, or five. But twenty three.
Again, as designers we don't really get exposed to this kind of stuff very often. Nowhere near as often as we should, and it's a revelation when we do.
So. Subscribe to Ruby and go to Ideas Salon London.
So you know, the final batches are going out today. They will be with you soon.
Can we just take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Seb, Tarik, Rosie, Ruby and Jenny who have all helped with the stuffing, sticking, stamping, labelling and folding. Thanks guys.
Well, they were all free, but you know what I mean. They've all gone. Thanks everyone for the amazing response. If you've ordered one give the wonderful team of helpers above a few days and we'll get them all posted.
Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 is a publication that's been dropping through letter boxes over the last few days.
Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun.
We only printed 1,000 and they're all individually hand numbered.
In this post I'd like to elaborate on the design of it and explain some things I learned during the process.
From the outset there were two things I wanted to avoid.
Firstly I wanted to avoid a pastiche of a newspaper, complete with a crossword and a weather section. I hate stuff like that.
Secondly I wanted to avoid looking it like a newspaper that a designer had been let loose on. Graphics every-fucking-where. Something you might see from a bad brand. There's one out at the moment from Lush that betrays the format. Horrible and ugly.
Not our newspaper, no, no, no.
But I wanted to make use of the familiarity of the newspaper format and the vernacular.
It's notoriously hard to design something from a complete blank canvas. No house style, no corporate fonts, no brand colours, nothing. So I tried to make life easy for myself wherever possible. We call this reducing the enemies. To me this is what good design is about, reducing the enemies.
The brief was to be able to read it in bed without glasses on. So I wanted the type to biggish and nice and clear. No Ray Gun typography around here. You remember, readable.
I looked around for typographic styles I liked. In the ideal world it would be law that all books have to state what font they're set in on the inside cover. In reality this doesn't happen much. Much less than you imagine. Even design books don't say very often. I settled on Plantin because that's what Monocle use. 9 on 11. Simple, classic and reliable.
I chose a 5 column grid becuase that seems to be the grid used by most good looking European newspapers these days. Although I was tempted by Hayman and Scher's 6 column Khaleej Times.
I wanted one type style across the whole paper for body copy, but I wanted to have some fun with the headlines. On most of these I've tried to add a little typographic humour or cute reference (which is kind of why I chose Monocle's Plantin for the body copy).
For example the headline for Mad Men: Pitch Perfect is set in Futura because that was one of the only fonts around at the time the series was set. (Remember the furore last year when it was pointed out that most of the fonts used in the programme wouldn't have existed at the time?). I set the headline for Matt Jones' article in the Dopplr font, and so on.
The cover is set in Gotham, because that was the font used throughout the Obama campaign and obviously the font of last year. It's in 96pt becuase that was the super size the NYT used when Obama got elected. It folds over to be read as two halves because Russell was speaking at a Guardian conference and I thought it would look cool if he held up the Written On The Internet 2008 half.
I very quickly realised how important ads are to a newspaper. And not just for monetary reasons. They usefully fill all those awkward little spaces where there's no text. Without them the document feels dull and lifeless. Unpunctuated like a copy of Ulysses. Too much text. A lot of the posts had pictures, but where they didn't we used pictures from Flickr or just white space. Again I wanted it to be like a newspaper, without pastiching a newspaper.
Similarly the bit at the top looked very naked without a running header. The printer requires each page to have a folio so I added a keyline and some of our favourite Tweets from the year. It felt better with that furniture.
This Tweet is a quote taken from Michael Bierut's book. It sits above his article.
We didn't edit any posts at all. So they're full of typos and a lot of the columns end in strange places. This is an odd phenomenon. In a real publication the Sub Editor would shout for a few less (or more) words to make it fit just right. No sub editing here. But as Jeremy points out "The result is a tidy but raw blog-like feel that deals with presentation in a very matter-of-fact manner." That's more eloquent than I could have put it, but that's exactly what I was going for.
Given the chance to design something however you want, you've got to have a little fun haven't you? So I made a small list of things I'd like to see. Some great big dirty Helvetica is always a winner.
I wondered what Emigre's Mrs Eaves would feel like in a more humble, less designery scenario. Looks great if you ask me.
All those Mars Phoenix Twitters were crying out to be printed. I added a few little extras in here that no-one has spotted yet.
A great big full bleed picture. Unfortunately you can't do full bleed, but this is good enough. I wanted this to be like a pull out poster.
And I wanted some nice 100/100 red. We took everyone's content without asking, which we were terribly worried about. We put a big disclaimer in there (and sorry again if you're reading this and you're angry with us) and we tried to make sure authors got copies before anyone else (again sorry if you haven't got one yet, drop me a line and I'll chase that up.) But we obviously needed a way a crediting people. So I designed this little device. This isn't the stuff of design legend, but it took a while to get right and it sort of holds the whole thing together. I deliberately only used two colours (reducing the enemies again) so the red added some much needed vibrancy.
The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one?
I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life.
"Last night a Baseline Grid saved my life". Seriously, it's so important and so useful for a project like this. All that is obvious but I wanted to restate it.
One last thing. When you print one of these you have to go and see it being printed. For all us sufferers of the Design Disease, that's like manna from heaven. Watch.
Good eh? There are loads more pictures in this Flickr set. There's lots more I could say. But you're probably all bored now, so you'll have to catch me in the pub.
People seem tolike it. It's appearing all over Flickr. Lots of nice people have described it as beautiful which is more praise than I could have hoped for. I particularly like Jim Coudal's "whip smart and beautiful". I'm very pleased with that.
I should also thank Alex who helped us with a few speads.
It's an experimental organisational structure, aptly described by Matt from Channel 4 as doing "projects for fun, money, or both". I say experimental as we're trying to make the structure different from a typical creative start up limited company, but that's for another time.
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