Noisy Decent Graphics

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.

D&AD Annual 2007

Last week the 2007 D&AD Annual was launched. Last year I posted about it and lots of people who couldn't get their hands on one (Mike in particular) liked looking inside. So this year I thought I'd do it again.

First up, the flags. You will all remember the flag project. You kinda helped after all. You can see all of the flag submissions here, some of them are good. Some of them are absolute bollocks. Creative Review covered Mike Dempsey's objections here and Michael Johnson talks about it here. 500 people were invited to take part and I think 39 people had their pictures used in the annual.

Five of mine were used, which is brilliant. Really exciting. Three were used just on the end papers (this one, this one and this one) and two others were used, big, as section dividers. Like the one shown below.

The category below is Writing For Design which I helped judge. The picture was taken by Tom and involved me standing on the roof of the building next to our office and throwing the flag off. Tom stood on the roof and captured this shot. It's one of our favourites.

Next up, and much more exciting for the blogosphere, is the picture of Famous Rob Mortimer holding the flag for me on the stage at the end of the Future Marketing Summit. Famous Rob, in Campaign, in Creative Review, now in the D&AD Annual.

Enough about me. Seriously, enough. Let's look at some of the stuff inside. There doesn't seem to much inside and not a lot that stands out, although I've been reliably informed it was a good year (in terms of numbers) for graphics.

I really liked this moving card for the Manchester Evening News.  

Designed by Vicky Beswick and Lionel Hatch at The Chase - In Book.

Also Manchester related is this great ad for the Manchester adidas store. Nice and simple.

Designed by Richard Irving, Dave Price and Karen Matthews from McCann Erickson, Manchester - In Book.

These posters for Apple are fab. I've never seen them before and I've no idea what they're for (well, they're for the Shuffle, but I mean I don't know where they were used etc). I love 'em. Those great colours and a really nice use of graphic shapes and patterns, a trend, I think you'll agree, that is coming back.

Designed by the secret squirrels at Apple Inc - In Book.

This signage at the Barbican has been in development for a long time. I love the big numbers and if you visit the Barbican you'll see that the circular wayfinding thing works really well. I think the colour is a bit suspect but...

Designed by loads of bloody people at Cartlidge Levene, Studio Myerscough and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris - In Book.

Last but not least is this amazing project from Japan, the Fukutake House. I really loved this one. I think it's gorgeous. Do you like it?

Designed by Masayoshi Kodaira and Yukiharu Takayama from EPA and FLAME Inc - Yellow Pencil.

It looks like Masayoshi has done some similar work before. Lovely isn't it?

Churnmore

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.

The importance of grids online

Via AceJet170 I found this brilliant article on Khoi Vinh's blog about the importance of designing online with a grid.

It's a really simple, powerful way of explaining a few differences that print based designers usually struggle with, like;

"in digital media we must make some compromises for the added factor of the way elements behave. Which is to say that, unlike the printed page, the components of a design — photos, illustrations, shapes, flourishes and type — can transform, change state, move, transform etc.".

Not only is it an important article, it's well written and it's easy to understand. Plus, Khoi is the Design Director of the wonderful New York Times online, so he knows a thing or two about grids.

If you're a designer who has designed mainly print all your life and you find websites a little bit, well, hard, then this is the article for you.

I'd like to know what you think about it.

Graphis Diagram & Charts

Things To Look At posts a lovely selection of graphs and charts from some old Graphis annuals.

Whatever happened to Graphis? Someone once said to me that it always felt as though the magazine had sat on the work for 2 years before they published it. Still, I've got some issues from the 80's which are cool.

Einstein was right, probe shows

Ever so slightly better than 'Duck comes back from dead, again'.

The only design blog

Design Observer have been nominated for a People's Choice Webby Award. Which is nice.

They're in the Blog Personal/Cultural category. Design Observer isn't perfect, but I like it a lot. Each different writer has a different style and I like some writers more than other, two good recent posts include Dancing to the Sound in Your Head by Mr Poyner and Good At Art by Mr Bierut (I'm minded of that Alan Fletcher joke about 'all those years having your name spelt wrong' but I can't remember it in full) and this brilliant post from the archives about how the house Mr Bierut grew up in affected his life as a designer.

Anyway, they're the only design blog nominated at all. For anything. So really we should get behind them. You can vote here. Get voting.

Why I don't like Monocle

Everyone seems to like Monocle, and that's fine. But I don't.

I haven't been so excited about the launch of a magazine for sometime. I was a big fan of the original Wallpaper and Tyler Brulé was due another hit. I rushed out to buy it when it launched and brought into the office under a big fanfare.

And there it sat. Unloved and apart from the obligatory 'new magazine in the office flick through' unopened.

I've tried to think a bit harder than normal about why I don't like Monocle and I reckon I've found 3 reasons.

1. It's not the magazine I wanted.
2. It's a magazine.
3. It's not as good as the website.

1. It's not the magazine I wanted.
But then again no magazine is these days. I've always loved and read lots of magazines. When I was about 12 I used to read Look-In, Smash Hits, Q Magazine, For Him Magazine (when it was called For Him Magazine and every issue looked like a Ralph Lauren catalogue) and Vogue. I've always loved Vogue. 

That stayed broadly the same until just before university when Loaded launched. They launched with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front. Fully clothed. And no fluro anywhere.

From here on and throughout university I read a pretty stereotypical mix of Loaded, FHM, GQ, Esquire and Arena. With the occasional Vogue, Wired, Elle, Elle Decoration and Q thrown in. And of course The Face.

This was in the days when Loaded was brilliant and innovative, when FHM had (some) class and GQ and Arena still had men on the front.

As the 'lad mags' and the 'mens mags' descended into their fluro orange tit and bum hell I began to look for an alternative. Wallpaper fitted the gap nicely.

As I started work I, obviously, began to take the trade mags more seriously, Creative Review, Design Week, Campaign as well as Wallpaper, Elle Decoration, American Esquire (which is very different to UK Esquire), Fast Company and still Vogue and still Q. And of course The Face.

Then one day I got all serious and bought a copy of The Economist.

I loved it. It was simple, it was clever and it explained things in a nice way. It also had a pace about it that I liked. So I subscribed.

I read a left over copy of GQ on the plane the other day. I hated it. It felt so patronising - I was surprised at how angry I got over being told what watch to buy or what coat to wear. Obviously your tastes change as you move through different stages in your life and you don't need to be AC Nielsen to realise that the above list reflects that. Broadly speaking I was reading about my interests.

So what am I interested in now?

Design, Graphic Design, politics, greenish stuff, football (as long as it's warm and I've got a good view), the world (usual stuff like Iraq, the Middle East, Europe), being a Dad, business, running a business, what Google and Apple are up to. Technology (as long as it's the kind of technology that means I don't have to wear a tshirt with a technology logo on it) films (and I mean films, never ever DVD's), art, culture and, well, that will do won't it?

So what magazine covers all of that? None of them do, certainly Monocle doesn't. But the web does.

2. It's a magazine.
Monocle is a magazine, but it feels like a bloody Thompson directory. It weighs a ton.

(Picture borrowed from Russell Davies and then adapted by me, usual stuff applies)

I love the cover(s) and I love the black and white idea. When you open it up, bits of it are well designed. But it's still full of those horrible magazine clichés - zillions of Gucci ads before you get to the index, for example. Remember when Wallpaper used to redesign ads before they would print them?

The size really does put me off. Whereas The Economist feels light and friendly, Monocle feels like I'll get told off if I don't read the whole thing before I buy the next one.

I guess the true continuation of the reading list above is that I now get all the same information from the web. For news (political, financial and world) it's the BBC, for work I still read Creative Review but I prefer the CR Blog, Design Observer and a whole bunch of blogs.

For the odd football story there's the BBC again, but I also now look at nearly all the UK newspapers online everyday. I can also check up on IHT, Chicago Tribune and the NYT online. And so on.

So that's my magazine now. It's called the web.

3. It's not as good as the website.
Monocle has a website, Dan (not that Dan) has being talking about it for a while.

The website is brilliant. Gorgeous. Whereas I hate the ads at the start of the print version, I love the Rolex clocks on the homepage of the website. In fact it's so much better than the magazine that it puts me off buying the magazine.

Let me give you an example. On the front cover of Monocle Issue 1 is a great picture of a man in a helmet. I looked at it loads, but never wondered what it was. From the website I found out that it's a member of the Japanese Air Force.

Since the end of the Second World War the Japanese have only been allowed to have a defensive army, and now 60 years on that's beginning to look a bit out of date. Monocle travelled to Japan and interviewed various members of the Japanese army. I found that out because there was an animated slide show about the article on the website.

I could have read that in the magazine. But I didn't. And that's sort of my point really.

"Good advertising is whatever works for this audience today, good design is eternal."

Richard Huntingdon (big cheese planner for WPP) has written a fabulous post about the differences between advertising and design

It's very well written and unusually for blogs and for the marketing industry it's not just a ding dong. It just talks about the differences - not we're better than you etc etc. It's all rather intelligent.

You should take a look and then contribute.

Good advice

A lot of blogging talk is quite frankly bollocks.

So it's great to see Richard and David passing on some good, no nonsense, nuts and bolts advice.

Richard has started a series called Uncommon Knowledge. So far we've had the En-Rule, the Combination Rule (which planners will love) and the Matter Rule (which I don't agree with).

And David has followed up with some excellent advice on text and setting type. Good work Gentlemen.

Great Brand Stories

What seems like ages ago I won the this book from a competition on davidthedesigner's blog.

I've read it and now it's my time to pass it on.

I didn't really like the book. I've been thinking for a while about why and I think I've nailed it down to two reasons.

1. It isn't written by Innocent.
I couldn't shake the feeling that it would have been better if it had been written by Dan and the team. That's not to say it's badly written, just that the Innocent style is so distinctive and so spot on and now so familiar, I couldn't help wanting it to be written by them. Plus they've written books before and they're good.

2. It isn't written by Sathnam Sanghera.
Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist for the Financial Times. According to the book he turned up at Fruit Towers unannounced one day to see if they really were as nice as they claim to be. Possibly because I'm involved in a business and possibly because the Innocent style of writing is so good (see point one above) I'd like to have seen a book written about the brand from the point of view of a financial journalist.

Anyway. A question. Whoever answers this question correctly will receive the book next. Competition closes Monday night at midnight GMT.

What were Innocent Drinks called before they were called Innocent Drinks? 

Graphic design education is failing students

"If graphic design is a vocational subject, we are teaching too many students. But it isn't - it is a worthy academic subject. the trouble is, few degrees in graphic design come close to the intellectual rigour we should be demanding. Students deserve better."

"The graphic design programme I ran had around 300 students on it. No more than around 40% of them will ever become graphic designers."

"We need to ask serious questions in graphic design, if not in HE as a whole."

Interesting, relevant and valid even though it's from 2004. Take a look.

All the front pages from September 12th 2001

You might have seen this before, but if you haven't take a look. It's fascinating.

Sooner or later... everything digital becomes real.

As someone once said...

As some of you may have already noticed, Creative Review have published the Design Disease post in this month's issue (page 21, available in all good newsagents for just £5.70).

Patrick (the editor) contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if he could publish the post as an article. They've done a good job considering the way you structure a blog post is different to how you would structure a magazine article. They've even corrected the grammar.

If you've arrived here via Creative Review, welcome. The original Design Disease post is here and this is as good a place to start as any. You'll find some helpful FAQ's here.

Good afternoon.

Ace post, ace brief, ace photos

There are so many good things about this post from Richard. Have a read.

Duck comes back from dead, again

The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles

Bloody brilliant. I'm saving this link here so I can read and re-read and re-read. Via Darth Strategist's Delicious.

If you only read one thing this weekend

Make sure you read these comments by Bruno Maag. If you like type, you'll find it fascinating.

"Let's get a little bit of history right. Arial was designed in the Monotype drawing offices, for Microsoft, in the late 80s"

"I am also no friend of Helvetica. In fact, I would love to see this typeface banned from use for a while. Just so designers can see that there is typographic pond life beyond."

"I'd happily give up my day job and wash plates if the rest of the world adopted Univers as the font to be used."

Read, learn and enjoy. You don't get this quality of typographic discussion everywhere.

Two brilliant pieces of graphic design

Two brilliant pieces of graphic design from the Khoi and the gang at the New York Times.

I've been meaning to link to the first one for a while. It's called Faces Of The Dead. Each member of the US Services who has died in Iraq is represented by a pixel sized square. When you click on a square, and therefore a name, the pixels form that person's face.

It's very well done, sensitive, interesting and a powerful way of representing some powerful statistics that we normally just see as lists or numbers. It's graphic design at it's best.

The second one from the same people is a pictorial representation of the key words used in all Bush's State Of The Union addresses. You can highlight keywords and see how often he mentioned that each year. You can pick obvious key words like Iraq or Terror or you can search for more obscure terms - like design, which he said 3 times in 2003. Again it's very well done. Sensitive, powerful and elegant.

What I like about both of these, but particularly the last one, is how they take important, dry information and make it accessible and interesting to a wide audience. The design helps the comprehension of the information rather than hindering it.

And it's exactly the sort of thing newspapers ought to be doing online.

"The first mobile device that I know of to use the typeface Helvetica throughout"

"It’s the first mobile device that I know of, and certainly the most elegant, to use the typeface Helvetica throughout its interface.

Everyone knows I’m a huge Helvetica fan, and you could sell me almost any device that uses the typeface, in part because there are no devices that do. But there’s a reason that this particular usage seems to signal something more to me."

What the ever excellent Khoi Vinh thinks about the use of Helvetica in a UI.

"We need to support it. We need to buy it. We need to tell the companies that we appreciate it."

Interesting post about how "good design is spreading" from Danny at Beyond Madison Avenue.

Helvetica Café

(Picture taken by Tobias Frere-Jones and borrowed from Helvetica Film Blog, usual stuff applies)

Apparently there is a café in Melbourne called Helvetica. Nice eh? Taken from the brand new blog of the notorious film.

Roll up

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to circusmuseum.nl, the ultimate image bank with posters, photos and prints from the collection of Jaap Best, the Netherlands’ largest collection of circus memorabilia.

Blogging advice

Graham (who doesn't post that often but started the New Year with a post almost every day...) has written some thoughts he's going to bear in mind when posting this year.

Worth a read.

Prom Night Fist Fight

Nothing to do with fighting at all, but the digital illustration and typography playground of Joshua Blankenship.

"9:18 am if i die i want you to have my peripherals"

I hope you're watching...