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Look carefully on the top left. Pizza Hut has changed it's name to Pasta Hut.
No joke of a lie. Pizza Hut is now Pasta Hut.
Go to the website and watch the cheesiest flash video (again top left) of two workmen replacing the neon Pizza with a neon Pasta. Unbelievable.
And here's a picture of a new Pasta Hut restaurant from the Daily Telegraph. I was starting to wonder why they keep saying, "these are strange times" on the news...
Apart from the tiny red HSBC logo, that homepage is totally black and white. Brave, rare and it looks great.
The main thing I don't like is the sizes. It seems like the three separate elements have been stuck together. They all fight with each other. The relative sizes are all over the place. There's no elegance to the spacing. Way to complicated visually.
Moan, moan, moan.
I tried to find this when I wrote that post, but I'd misplaced it. Mike's kindly emailed it to me so all is well.
The best, best map is Mike's moving version of Bucky's Dymaxion Map - the Faumaxion Slippy Map. It's hard to explain, but click through and have a go. You'll soon get the idea.
About two years ago I was looking at a map of the world and noticed that Britain seemed disproportionately large.
My companion remarked that this was because in days of yore whoever was drawing the map always made their country look bigger and more important. This nugget of information sticks in the brain.
So for the last two years I've been taking pictures of Britain on world maps. Not accurate maps, but drawings or illustrations of maps. The differences are amazing. You might assume that all maps were accurate, or at least accurate-ish. But no, designers play fast and loose with the truth making the host country bigger, more important or more central.
Look at Britain in these photos. Look at the size of it compared to Europe. It's the same, but different.
Americans will be used to seeing this map of the world.
Whereas Europeans will be used to seeing this map of the world.
In this instance one isn't more accurate than the other, but the perception is very different and the power designers wield in shaping that perception is huge.
New Zealanders can often play Spot Our Country. Next time you see a map of the world on the BBC News or in the paper, look for New Zealand. Odds are it will have been left out in the name of aesthetics. If it's not left out then it's cropped to within an inch of it's life.
Most New Zealanders would probably prefer their maps to look like this.
The answer to most of these problems is to look at the world via Buckminster Fuller's amazing Dymaxion Map.
OK, OK, we're drifting off the point a little bit. Map projection is a huge topic and this Wikipedia page is a good place to start. There's also a good article called The Map Gap on BBC News.
Back to where we started. Over the last few months I took lots of photos of maps, you can see them on Flickr.
Today I traced over England, Scotland and Wales. Please note these tracings were done quickly and aren't massively detailed. The results are quite odd.
They all look pretty different don't they? You know it's Great Britain, but some of them are wild approximations.
Next I dropped them all on top of each other (here I left off Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because I wanted to compare just one shape).
That's a bit higgledy piggledy so I filled them all in.
Viola! The mean shape of England , Scotland and Wales by 14 graphic designers. Not very accurate, is it?
This isn't a cartography blog and I know some of these maps are over stylised for a reason but I want to make a wider point about graphic designers and the assumptions we make and how easily they are accepted. If you look at all the maps on Flickr they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together it looks like madness. Like people having been taking liberties with the truth.
Think of other times you do this.
Hierarchies are a good example. The point of bold and italic and underline is to make one piece of text more important than the other. But how many times do you see a poster where the text is bold, italic and underlined? I bet I could get a load of notices like that and achieve the same effect as the 14 shapes above. Everything would be bold.
Premiumisation - there's a word that really fucks me off. I once heard the MD of a famous packing company droning on about how his firm's USP was that they could design premiumisation into any old piece of packaging. In case you're wondering, that means lots of over elaborate folds, some foil blocking and a healthy does of script and moody photography. Problem is, take a look at the chocolate cakes in Tescos, I bet you'll find 10 'premiumised' brands, 4 value brands and nothing inbetween.
What I'm saying is that graphic designers have a certain amount of power, people tend to trust what they see without much questioning. We should use that power carefully.
So this balloon thing, good or annoying?
I've wasted a decent amount of time playing it today and I've had fun. I was even 5th at one point! But I can totally understand that it's very annoying seeing all those balloons when you arrive at this site.
On the internet some people seem a little confused by it (I was at first) and some people seem very annoyed with it all. What do you think?
I've made a list of what I think are good and bad points.
Good
It's genuinely fun when you start playing. It takes a while to get into it but once you do it's quite addictive. And I've never seen anything like it before.
It doesn't seem impossible. A lot of online competitions feel like you've got absolutely no chance of winning, this one doesn't feel like that.
The techie stuff is very, very clever. If you stop and think - what they're doing is pretty amazing and it's being done well and pretty slickly too.
It looks gorgeous. By that I mean the craft, the edges of the balloons, the little balloon loading bar, the detail on the strings - all fantastically well done.
Bad
There's no getting round the fact that basically it's annoying when you visit a site you love and all these balloons are there. I know you can click it off and I like it when I'm playing the game, but it's not hard to envisage people getting annoyed at this.
It's a little clunky. I mean a teeny, weeny, weeny bit clunky. Because what they're trying to pull off is so complex I can forgive a bit of clunkyness. But still, the clunk is there.
Sometimes it repeats that "your balloon has left this site" thing twice. I refer to my point above.
There's my site with a token on it!
I've had some decent traffic from playballoonacy.com today and I'm not writing this so that people from Orange or Poke come on and defend Ballloonacy.
I'd just like to know whether you, my beloved listeners, find the balloons annoying on this site. Should I take them off?
I went to the brand new St Pancras station the other day. It really is a lovely place. What struck me most was the graphic design of the station clock.
The original St Pancras clock was made by a company called Dent who also made the clock for Big Ben. This was sold to an American for £250 in the 1970s. Workmen dropped it
during its removal and an engine driver bagged up the
bits, which were crucial in making an exact replica for the new station.
The clock itself is a lovely thing, all slate and gold leaf. It's quite dynamic and graphic with all those diamond shapes. But what I really liked was how they've used the clock, digitally, throughout the station.
Here it is on the interactive information boards. They didn't have to do that, but it's a nice stylish little touch. It also adds a slight classy feel to those otherwise fairly soulless interactive boards. It helps to slow down the feel of the constantly changing information.
And here it is again on the announcement board thing. Good stuff.
That my friends is what we call Tangible Digital. Sort of.
This is a good thing.
Paul Middlewick spotted animals in the Tube map ages ago. Russell even blogged about it back in March 2004 (that's ages ago).
Yesterday I saw an ad on the Underground, with a picture of a whale, made from the Tube map promoting whale saving. More specifically promoting the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
There are three animals on a series of posters.
That's just a good thing, isn't it? Pictures of whales made from Tube maps, whale saving charity, Underground media sites. Cheap, clever, good, nice. Good.
Wednesday saw the release of the first 'real' James Bond book in years. The first as in the first official book, written in the style of Ian Flemming. Officially sanctioned by the International Committee of Flemmings. Trust me, it's exciting news.
I bought a copy. And it occurred to me that it's the first time for a while that I've opted for the thing as opposed to the digital version. You know, audio book, dvd, iTunes etc. So let's take a look at the graphic design of said object.
First up the cover, or more accurately the dust jacket. I don't like it at all. The type is OK. I like the full cap DEVIL MAY CARE. I can't (quickly at any rate) work out what font it is. It's Gill Sans esque, but it's not Gill. The foil embossing works well and it's a decent tight little unit.
The woman / flower graphic is an OK idea, very Bond, but it's badly executed. The two different styles, one for the woman and one for the flower, clash horribly. It's not a seamless segueway. The shapes are nice but they don't seem to work together.
The dust jacket itself is glossy and shiny and doesn't really feel special. Nothing like those little special editions Penguin were doing a few years ago. I don't feel like I'm being rewarded for buying the actual thing. In fact, I binned the cover straight away, much to the chagrin* of my colleagues. I always bin the dust jackets. These days they look shit and they just get in the way. They're cumbersome and besides, the books look so much better without. Don't ya think?
Much better. There's that nice little 007 Penguin logo. I like that. Do you?
There are end papers too, which is a nice change. They're OK.
But, you know what, everything is OK and OK just isn't good enough. Especially when I've gone and bought the actual thing. You'd think that designing the cover for the first official Bond book in years was a dream brief for many a young designer, wouldn't you? And it's for Penguin too! Not good enough.
There are some special editions kicking around and they look pretty decent. This is probably the best one.
That's more like it. I know they can't make special editions for everyone, but they could have copied some of the graphic style.
What do you think?
* Devil May Care joke.
My coins arrived the other day. Lovely aren't they?
Great graphic design if you ask me. It's engaging, it's fun, it will entertain your Grandad as much as your 5 year old nephew, as the designer says, "It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them." It's practical, it's relevant and it's appropriate. It's different, it's very now and yet it won't date. It's brilliant. Literally.
I've only met one person who doesn't like them so far.
The designer, Matt Dent is one of the speakers at Interesting 2008, that'll be good.
I went to the Esquire Magazine Covers exhibition at The Hospital the other day. Don't waste your time going, it's shit.
They've taken great covers from the sixties, the Muhammad Ali, the Vietnam one, the Dustin Hoffman one etc, and recreated them with, er, people from the fashion industry. It's not even well done. Bad photographs and bad Photoshop work. It's quite insulting to be honest.
Anyway. One of them is good and that's this recreation of the Warhol cover with Paul Smith. You can buy these exclusive, limited edition covers at the exhibition and so I bought the Paul Smith one. It cost £5 and came in a handy, foil blocked paper bag. Maybe that's the way forward for magazines - put them in over elaborate bags and raise the prices?
There's a more sensible discussion about these over on Jeremy's blog.
I love this.
Now, there are probably people who hate it. That's fine. I like it and this is my playground with my rules.
Instead of building the usual wank agency website Modernista! have utilised the tools of web 2.0. So the work is shown through Flickr.
Easy to use, easy to find, easy to access, easy to comment on, easy to bookmark, easy to share. good, good, good.
The About Us page utilises Wikipedia.
The best way to get what I'm on about is to take a look at the site.
Found via this month's issue of Creative Review which is also The Annual issue and very good. In the shops now.
There's been a lot of talk about the design of ballot papers.
This one for the London Mayor elections looks OK to me. By that I mean it's simple, clear and easy to see what you have to do. It's even done in Univers. Which will make Bruno happy.
Look what arrived in the post the other day! It's Pentagram's Black Book.
It has a lovely softback Wickertex cover. I'm not sure if that's the correct spelling of Wickertex (Marcus?) but I remember that it was once substrate of the year. Every year designers have a substrate that they're desperate to use. It was edge lit acrylic one year, Wickertex one year and bible paper another year.
This use bible paper too. To great effect. The whole book is printed on bible paper, lovely thin, translucent stuff, hence you can see the text through this page. (We used bible paper once).
Continuing the bible theme, they've used these great coloured ribbons so you can book mark pages.
The tabs are gorgeous. That's a great idea you can easily borrow.
In case you hadn't guessed this is a self promotional book. Designers love self promotional books. The thing is a book is a very hard thing to put together. And writing about your own work is notoriously difficult. Pentagram have deftly avoided this by not talking about the work at all. It's just pictures.
Which makes you think about all that self justifying post rationalisation crap you normally read in designer's books, on designer's websites. Next time you do a self promotional piece try using no words.
That spread up there features a digital thing for Bloomberg. I've never seen that before. Looks great, doesn't it?
Anyway. It's a great book, really nice (more pictrs on Flickr). It's 800 pages long and it's only the last couple of years worth of work. Big thanks to everyone at Pentagram for sending me a copy.
I liked this poster on spotted on the Shoreditch Twoway the other morn.
It's an advert for quiet fridges or sommits and it features a digital decibel monitor which measures the sound live on the Shoreditch Twoway. It was 64 decibels for most of the time I looked at it, but it rose to 99 when a police car sped past. Good fun.
A little while ago the NT had this interactive screen in the foyer.
It was good. Not earth shattering, it's like a big iPhone, but I learnt more about the play than I've ever done from a poster. More pictrs on Flickr.
I went to Unpackaged the other day. John Grant and many others have talked about Unpackaged before, but briefly, it's a shop where all the stuff they sell has no packaging.
I'll admit I was hugely sceptical. It just sounds like some twee, middle England, poncey London, greenwashing fest. After all, anyone can sell this sort of stuff with no packaging.
But I'm pleased to report it's a lot, lot better than that. Sure - it's small and it's expensive, but it's also brilliant. And it looks great.
Those little boxes hold flour and nuts and dried banana skins and what not. They're all designed to be easy to clean, even the tags can be wiped clean and reused for another product. That's good sensible design.
So you bring your own bag / box / jar and you save 50p. They will even refill olive oil bottles, which is pretty impressive.
There are some things they can't unpackage yet. Ecover won't give them a great big vat of washing up liquid for example, but you can leave all the packaging there for recycling. I understand this is common practice in Germany?
There's lots of great little ideas here. Yes, it needs to be bigger (in size and scale) and it needs to be cheaper to have a big effect, but it's a great start and it's a glimpse of how things could be. Surely all packaging designers should (nowadays) start with the goal of having no packaging and then work backwards from there?
More pictures on Flickr.
UPDATE: Catherine Conway from Unpackaged has just emailed me to clarify a few points.
Firstly (and importantly) the shop was designed by Multistorey
Secondly she's asked me to correct an inaccuracy,
"you mention that some things can’t be unpackaged- the Ecover example is wrong as they do provide us with vats of cleaning products" "most people buy it [Ecover] in refills from us." "an example of something we can’t unpackage currently would be cotton wool or toothpaste."
We also had a little discussion about what I meant by expensive. Cath says, "The question of whether it’s expensive is a moot point- our prices compare pretty favourably with like for like products (organic, fair trade) in supermarkets but are obviously more expensive than their value counterparts…"
I guess I should have been clearer. What I really mean is that for an unpackaged concept to be adopted across the whole country it would have to cater for the people that shop in Iceland as well. Do you know what I mean?
Anyway. Happy to clear all that up.
On Friday I flew into the brand spanking new Terminal 5.
Seeing as you've asked my flight landed 10 minutes early, my baggage wasn't lost and I didn't feel the need to swear loudly at BA staff. But this a graphic design blog and not Lonely Planet, so onwards and upwards with the infographics reviews.
I flew in from Romania and funnily enough when we were there we cited infographics as a huge trend in graphic design right now. The new T5 is full of them.
Already they look dated. They're not brilliantly designed and they just feel dated (all those silhouettes?). Surely the information will date super quick too? (Imagine if T1 said "we're the only building in Great Britain to have two escalators running side by side.) There's a lack of future proofing there. Plus - who cares how long the baggage conveyor belt is?
There's even a whole infographics pod!
I know this kind of information (how do I get to Central London etc) is very important. But it seems they got a little carried away with the screen and the use of English over symbols. It all looks very futuristic, but it isn't. Look at the amount of text on those screens. And as far as I could see the screens stay static.
The spaces are huge and the signage is small. Shortly after being told off for taking this photo I got told off for walking into the crew Passport Control area. If only they'd seen my bottle of Evian I could have been in real trouble.
Those yellow and black signs, are they official airport signage? I seem to recall reading that they were. Is that right?
They work and they look good, but it all feels a bit hospital. A bit too official. There's no wit there, which would be fine but then they're not functioning that well either. They're like new versions of the old signs. No one has taken the opportunity to rethink the signage they've just carried on as they were before.
That sums up my whole feeling about the airport really, it's a version 2 of what's been before. Nothing new, no big leaps ahead. It's a cleaner, bigger, shinier version of T4. Which seems like a huge opportunity missed.
This holiday we played Connect, Ken Garland's brilliant board game (card game?). If you're a graphic designer this is about as good as parlour games get.
I don't know about you but when I see a collection of shapes and lines like that I instantly think - could I make an alphabet out of that?
The Os are normally easy. And seeing as this one is based loosely on a digital style grid the U is pretty easy too. And the N.
The M isn't quite as elegant, but it looks cool.
The connect game doesn't only consist of three lined squares though. And to be honest all these letterforms remind me a bit too much of the Mexican Olympics and all those Helveticalovers. You know the type.
So this M is a little more fun. And more appropriate for the game.
But making a full alphabet is hard. And it's a bank holiday weekend. Easter weekend. So back in the box they go. Until another time.
Still, at least I got enough letters to make COMMUNE.
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