Noisy Decent Graphics

We Make Stories

We've just spent a very enjoyable hour listening to The Boss and playing with Jeremy's new project We Make Stories.

It's the latest in the excellent We <verb> Stories series and follows on from the multi award winning We Tell Stories. It's a story making thing for 6 - 11 year olds. My kids are younger but they still enjoyed it.

You can build comic books, treasure maps and even a pop up book which you can print out and make pop up! It's really simple to use, a 6 year old could do it alone, and it looks great.

The interactions are nice. Playful, cute and well done.

If you have kids and you're permantly attached to the computer, you should combine those skills and make some stories this weekend. After you've been outside playing with the organic carrots etc etc.

Jeremy found 3 of the designers used in the project via Noisy Decent Graphics. ico who made remixit, comic creator, and Telling Tales. Studio Tonne who made Pop! and Willow Tyrer who made Tom Mouthy.

Further proof that reading this blog can seriously help your career.

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

I've just had an email from James Pardey who sent me a link to his wonderful website. The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.

Rather than me witter on for ages, let us hand the microphone to James who will witter on for a bit about this fab project.

"The purpose of the website is to complement a series of articles I've written for the Penguin Collector's Society on the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to 1977.
 
The website is primarily intended to be a visual experience (there are over 150 Penguin sf covers, which Penguin has granted me a licence to use) with the articles going into more detail about the sf itself, and the connections between sf and twentieth-century art (abstraction, surrealism, Pop, etc.) which is my main area of interest. This linkage between sf and modern art will also be the subject of some talks and further articles in newspapers and magazines that I am now planning.

My main area of interest is the linkage between modern science fiction - by which I mean Jules Verne and H G Wells onwards - and twentieth-century art (abstraction, surrealism, Pop, etc.).
 
Where Penguin comes into this is that in the 1960s they launched an sf series with covers by the great Germano Facetti. But instead of using pictures of aliens, rocketships, and bug-eyed monsters, Facetti chose reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro and Rene Magritte to name a few. Why? Well, each painting was carefully chosen to tie in with some aspect of the novel, and it is these connections that form the heart of the website and the articles that I've written to accompany it. The articles are being published by the Penguin Collectors' Society (last December and two more due this year) but the articles and website only go so far.

There is more to explore, such as the links between J G Ballard and surrealism, Jules Verne and the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux, Delvaux and Ballard, etc., etc. I am therefore planning to examine this in some talks and further articles for newspapers and magazines. Incidentally, instead of starting in the 1960s I decided that both the website and articles should start at the beginning, when Penguin was founded in 1935.

I did this in order to tell "the whole story" since the early orange-and-white banded covers of Penguin books have since become regarded as design classics and, to many people, miniature works of art in their own right. And after the sf series in the 1960s, the influence of Pop Art and Op Art can be seen in the later Penguin sf covers by Alan Aldridge and Franco Grignani, while those by David Pelham have also achieved iconic status. Facetti was no stranger to sf either, as he appeared in La Jetee, a seminal art-house sf movie by the French New-Wave director Chris Marker."

blogs.com

A few weeks ago I was honoured to be asked by Blogs.com to write a Top 10 for their popular site. I chose to write Top 10 Blogs Important To Designers (That Aren't Necessarily About Design).

Take a look, you might be on the list.

Chicken Graphics

Ages ago I saw a brilliant interview with Mr Chicken. A designer who has created 90% of the Fried Chicken logos in London. Ninety fucking percent.

That interview was over on the CR Blog and is an exert from Siâron Hughes' excellent new book 'Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie'. You should read the interview and then you should buy the book. The blurb says it's an "Honest and charming look at fast food establishments from a design perspective – eatery aesthetic, logos, signage, menus, etc" You don't get that every day.

 

I'm sorry that the best title I could thinking up was Chicken Graphics. Surely you can do better?

You should buy The Guardian today

Seriously. There's a little thing on page 5 of the Let's Get Creative supplement that you might like.

UPDATE: The full article is online here.

Some things you should do

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.

Look what I've got

A Management Guide to Corporate Identity

A while ago Julian very kindly sent me this lovely, wonderful book. For free. As a gift. What a nice man.

It's from 1971, it's a handy Management Guide to Corporate Identity and it's bloody brilliant. Lots of bonkers charts.

Loads of gorgeous stuff in there including Crown, Smiths, Peter Dominic and the British Transport Docks Board. Wonderful. Thanks Julian.

This could be the best book ever.

I'll read it and let you know.

Unproduct Wayfinding Signage

Thankfully they thought of a better title.

I've written an article for a new magazine in the Design Week / Centaur stable. It's called Interiors and it's available in all good bookshops now. Helpfully the article is also available online and you can read it here.

Bollocks

I was gonna write about this:

But they've already done it. They being David and AceJet and every other internet person.

Devil May Care

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.

Just in! New blogs!

I tend not to write about other blogs and I try not to just link to stuff I've found on the web. I like to be a little more in depth for you, my beloved listeners. I also tend to think that you lot read all the same blogs as me. That's probably wrong, but probably broadly right.

Anyhoo. Here's some new blogs I've found. I hope I'm illuminating you a little bit with these.

Martha Stewart's Blog
I'm not a Martha Stewart fan at all. But she's got a blog and that (in my opinion) is exactly the sort of thing Martha Stewart should be doing. I've being reading it for about 5 months, and you know what? It's brilliant. It's updated regularly, it's well written, it has good pictures, it's honest, it's interesting and it's refreshing. You get the feeling she writes a lot of it, she probably doesn't, but t feels like she does.

Here's some photos from a helicopter trip she took over her farm.

Feels better than all those fake cutaways of Surallen's Canary Wharf empire, doesn't it?

Here she is out and about at the White House Correspondents Dinner. No pictures of her with the President, but lots of genuine 'night out' photos.

It's good. Subscribe and be surprised.

Mark Porter
Mark Porter is probably a genius. I say probably because I don't want to sound like an over excited football commentator. He's Creative Director at The Guardian and he won a D&AD Black Pencil for that redesign. I'm the only person I know who's not a huge fan of the redesign, but it's massively popular and to win a Black Pencil is a huge achievement. Even more so for a newspaper redesign.

He only started blogging two months ago and as you'd expect he writes about graphic design and editorial design. Here's a review of the FT Magazine's redesign and here he is talking about the Mirror's ongoing redesign. Interesting and valuable stuff from someone at the top of their game.

Jan Chipchase
Jan is Principal Researcher, User Research at the Nokia Research Center. He blogs about the future, which sounds awful but he actually spends his day researching the future, so it's a fascinating glimpse at weird and wonderful things all around the world. Like the Golden Week in Japan. Jan is also an 'on the road' project management expert. Find out why, on the road, inanimate objects have names. Laptops = Names beginning with L. Dispatches from the frontline, you should take a look.

David Jones
David is IT Director for AEG Europe  (owners of The O2 ) in London. He blogs about the effective use of IT at home and at work. Here's a good post about the (frankly horrific) possibility of using your mobile on the tube. Here's another good post about how the BBC manages it's different web design relaunches. Good stuff.

id8
I'll declare an interest from the outset here - I'm on the Board of Advisors for id8 and we designed their business cards last year. Based in Chicago and San Francisco they've just started a blog and it's going to be exciting. If you're interested in usability, interaction design, start ups or the emerging technology iRise then pop over there and subscribe.

Dymaxion Chronofile

In other Buckminster Fuller news did you know that he loved to Twitter?

No I didn't either. The Dymaxion Chronofile was Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as fully as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983. Every 15 minutes!

There's a good description on Wikipedia and shed loads more on the Buckminster Fuller Institute's site. Amazing.

&AD

Here's some more pictures from last night.

Three great links from the CR Blog this morning. First up, here's the full list of all the D&AD winners from last night.

And here's a good discussion between Michael Johnson and Sean Perkins (from North) about why they think graphics was so under-represented this year. This year there were no pencils in graphic design.

Lastly, here a great article from Patrick on where the D&AD and Graphic Design go next. Well written, well worth a read and well worth taking part and commenting. It's an interesting debate.

Pentagram - The Black Book

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.

Things you should be reading

Morning.

Right, today you should read this by Iain. It's good and Iain knows what he's talking about. You should also read this (admittedly slightly fluffy) article on the Beeb about airport design. "Ten minutes in a horrible space can feel like half an hour but in a nice space can pass relatively fast."

You should then read this article tantalisingly called Secrets of UX Design Productivity from Google, it seems that "Google is in the process of getting great ideas produced quickly" which is no bad thing. Lastly read this article in the Harvard Business Review about a Japanese bank's new IT system which was developed using the path method. As you'd imagine it's a bit heavy going in parts, but it's interesting and there are the makings of some good lessons, "firms should not have to sell new systems to users; rather they should build systems that users willingly embrace".

Good Blogblag

Increasingly I get sent loads of utter rubbish in the post. This stuff is intended to get me so excited that I'll blog about it and then all my 200,000 daily listeners will rush out and buy said stuff.

This almost never happens.

I don't want to sound ungrateful. It's very kind of people to send me things, it's just that most of it is badly targeted, shamelessly promotional, uninteresting and a bit crap.

The other day I got some books from the people at Princeton Architectural Press. The catalogue was lovely and one book in particular stood out. Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings That Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot. I don't know about you but I simply can't resist a good revolving restaurant! I've been to revolving restaurants in New York, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Suffolk and London (the one that isn't the BT Tower, can you guess where it is?).

Anyway you can buy this excellent publication here.

From now on when people ask me my favourite type of restaurant I'm going to say, revolving.

Lines that journalists have been wanting to write for a long time

All spotted in one day.

"Gordon Brown’s government is suffering from a richness of embarrassments."
I especially like that one.


"BBC throws the booky-wook at Brand's fake phone-in."

"Father takes Amy back to rehab"

The Next Issue

I got this magazine the other day. It's called The Next Issue.

It's not just a magazine it's a whole new thing. "The Future Department (who have but together The Next Issue) is a growing network of interesting people from disparate creative and business disciplines. The Next Issue is their magazine."

Now, I'm aware all that above sounds like total bollocks. But it isn't.

Firstly The Future Department  / The Next Issue is run by Alex West. Alex is a clever, hard working, and unbelievably well connected bloke (he used to organise the Future Marketing Summit).

Secodly the networky bit means you can connect with an amazing (and I really mean that) bunch of people across the globe (and I really mean that). But there'll be more about that later.

Thirdly the magazine has articles by John Maeda, Will Alsop, Anomaly, The Sag, Digit, Imagination and Taxi. All good, very good people. It's also available as a PDF. I think the idea is to end up with just a PDF or some digital format. Click on The Future Department above for the online version.

I'd said I would write something but I didn't get round to it. Kicking myself now. Which reminds me of a bloke I know who once told me that he'd been invited to sit on a panel at the Royal College of Art. He turned up for the first panel but didn't bother for the second. He missed the third session and then he received a letter saying they'd kicked him off the panel. From that day on he vowed two things; to never accept a place on a panel unless he knew he was able to make every meeting and to take things he'd volunteered for seriously. Good advice.