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.
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.
I'm trying to be clever here. Well, not exactly clever, but flash. You know. I've just got back from the launch party of Pentagram's new book, Pentagram Marks: 400 Symbols and Logos.
I know that those of you who don't live in London and those of you who don't get invited to things like this love these Behind The Party Scenes posts. (Stop laughing you cynical ones at the back, I'm being serious. These posts are really popular.)
So, what's the clever bit? It's 10pm now and the party is still going strong and I'm blogging about it. It's like live blogging. But not live. Good, eh?
OK I'll stop now.
Amid all the usual tales of gossip and canapés the most interesting thing was this xylophone / z book device. A clever way of solving the near impossible problem of how to show small graphic works. 3rd year degree students take note.
I've been in Portland for a few days and I've a few things to tell you about that and we'll also have a review of the book coming up. Exciting times, listeners, exciting times.
In the past few weeks I've had lots of students emailing me to ask what I think about the Obama branding.
I know a little bit about this having run some sessions in the summer which covered this topic*. I don't want to offer my personal opinion on Obama or even his brand. That has been done many times before and it has been done better elsewhere. So instead I will point you to some things I think you will find useful.
First up, if you read nothing else, read this article in Newsweek where Michael Bierut talks about Brand Obama. It's the best thing I've read on the subject by a long way.
"There's an absolute level of control that I have
trouble achieving with my corporate clients."
Armin at Speak Up wrote probably the first decent article on Brand Obama. It set the tone, it's comprehensive and it's very good. It also includes all those variations of the logo.
"For each segment of people, the logo changes accordingly, tip-toeing a
fine line between cliché and clever, and never crossing to the former's
dark side."
Obama has used the web very well. His Twitter feed is here and an article on him and Social Networking is over here. It tells you why they say Obama is very Cybergenic.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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