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I know some of you (yawn, yawn) are getting bored of the Fletcher posts. If that's the case, look away now.
Millions (well, not millions literally) of people are arriving at this blog looking for pictures of the AF exhibition. Mostly this is because they're overseas and can't make it to London.
Here's two places where you can find superb pictures of the show.
1. Go to Flickr and search for Alan Fletcher.
2. Click on this excellent post over at City Of Sound.
You can look back now.
Over on Ace Jet 170 there's a fantastic link to an illuminating blog called The Branding Of Polaroid - How we beat Eastman Kodak and it's little yellow boxes at point of purchase despite a clunky product and an irrelevant corporate name.
Written by Paul Giambarba who initiated Polaroid's corporate image development and product identity in 1958, it's the fascinating story of the Polaroid brand. I think the 'story' has finished now, so it's kinda not a blog. Just a very interesting story. Do take a look.
(All pictures from the blog, obviously. Usual stuff applies.)
Lebowski wants more posts that are strictly about graphic design. So here's one.
This is brilliant. This is what good design is all about. And I don't reckon it was created by a designer, do you?
It's a guide showing you which exit to use when you leave Westminster Tube station. Rather than just listing the local attractions/land marks and their relevant exits someone has gone to the trouble of photographing the attractions and sticking the pictures next to the exit numbers.
Let's say you couldn't speak English, chances are you wouldn't recognise the letters that form London Eye. But you'd definitely recognise a picture of it. Great design, great usability. Common sense. Brilliance.
On Monday a colleague and I will be speaking at the Cardiff Design Forum. We'll be sharing a platform with the design team from Torchwood, which should make for an interesting evening.
I'm not sure if it's open to the public or invite only, but if you're reading this in Cardiff and you'd like to come along let me know and I'll put you in touch with the organisers.
We're hoping to do something a little different to the standard 'patronising agency comes to provincial university' speech. If I get time I'll upload some of the stuff we're thinking of doing up here.
I've been messing around with Flickr since the summer. I really like it. It's especially brilliant for getting photos off my phone.
I've been trying to post pictures from Flickr to here, seamlessly. But
I can only get the pictures to be 500 pixels wide and all pictures on
Noisy Decent Graphics are strictly 400 pixels wide. Anyone know how I
can change the Flickr settings?
I'm really interested in photography and I consider myself pretty good at it (who said blogging was narcissistic?). I love the Magnum photographers and like Mrs Colman I'm a huge Martin Parr fan. He's a genius.
When I was much younger I had to go with my Mum to Cardiff, she had a
meeting or something, and left to wander round the city on my own I
found an exhibition by Sebastian Salgado, the infamous images from Serra Pelada, Brazil. I'd never been so moved by an exhibition before. The images are beautiful.
Rankin is still good, this picture of the Queen is a refreshing take on familiar face. I'm also a big fan of Elaine Constantine. We tried to use her for a project recently but it didn't work out. Shame.
In case you hadn't guessed, these photos are all by me. Photographers seem a little wary of posting images online and I'm a little wary of posting images by Rankin and Magnum.
David's guess is amazingly accurate. Take a bow.
In found this in the 1985 version of the D&AD annual (the D&AD bit was a tad obvious). It's quite hard to ascertain exactly who wrote the judges review but I think it was Edward Booth-Clibborn.
One of those silver nominations was indeed for a Trickett and Webb calendar and they also got a mention for some stamps. I've met Brian Webb a few times, lovely man, great work. The other calendar was by Pentagram.
Booth-Clibborn also talks about the "new John Blackburn Partnership". Whatever happened to John Blackburn? Paul, you would have liked him. He always wore one black and one red sock (geddit?).
He came to give a talk at our college and I really liked his approach. I remember him saying if you can't sum it up in 5 words it's not a good idea. Anyone care to agree or disagree with that?
1. A World Without Design
As part of the London Design Festival, The Partners hosted a panel discussion on the theme of a world without design. This is the transcript.
2. Bad Design Is A Health Risk
"inappropriately designed hospitals, medical devices and healthcare systems can directly contribute to the accidental harm of patients, harm that may affect as many as 10% of all acute admissions."
"there is no doubt that confusing and poorly conceived medication packaging contributes to pharmacy selection errors and problems with patient compliance; that unnecessarily complicated medical devices contribute to user error"
Who said that? Colum Menzies Lowe, head of design and human factors at the NHS National Patient Safety Agency
3. Is Design The New Management Consultancy? Not Exactly.
"When I hear a designer say, 'We were doing the same kind of work McKinsey would do' I think 'You really have no fucking idea what McKinsey does.' "
4. A Whole Bunch Of Useful Articles from the Industrial Designers Society of America.
5. 5 Keys to Promoting Thoughtful Design Leadership in Education from the nice people at Core 77.
One of the things that struck me about Alan Fletcher was the fact that he actually did stuff. I'm sure millions of designers have collections of letters but very few would actually make them into something.
So, inspired by this I'm going to do more things with all the stuff I've collected over the years.
For example I've got all these photos.
They're all of typography, mainly signs. I've always wanted to turn them into a book or something. I haven't added to the collection for a few years, so when I look back now they were mainly taken between 1998 and 2003. Australia, Spain, France, UK, San Francisco, Vegas, Colorado, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Memphis and Monaco are the locations.
So what should I do? A book? A series of posters? An exhibition?
What do you reckon listeners?
I was half watching CSI New York which is no way as good as the Vegas one and half checking Design Observer which is great at the moment to see if they had linked to my No10 post like Creative Review have when I read about the RCA Secret project which made me think that I must go to that and then I started looking at the RCA website absentmindedly thinking that I'd like to do an MA one day when I probably wouldn't and then I looked at the list of visiting lecturers and I Googled Daniel Eatock thinking his site would be a load of bollocks and his site is a bit wank but actually really interesting and there's loads of good work there which is what it's all about really when I saw this Pantone Pen Print which is brilliant and so I thought I'd share it with you.
All pictures from Daniel Eatock's site. Usual stuff applies.
The first Story Of A Blog Post is here.
The Times has given itself a new masthead and a new headline font, art directed by Neville Brody.
You can read about the history of their headline font here.
Strangely, in the article they don't use the word font once. They say 'fount' throughout the whole article.
To check I wasn't being ignorant I looked 'fount' up in the dictionary. Here's what it says, "The English spelling (c. 1980) of the once Americanized (1828) and now ubiquitous 'font'.". I never knew that. Did you?
They've used fount 8 times in the article. Are they being clever dicks? Are they correct? What's going on there?
By clicking here you can see a history of the masthead design. There are 20 in all, over 221 years. This post brought to you via Design Observer.
In his book Picturing & Poeting Alan Fletcher says, "The 0 in the number 10 on the black door of the British prime minister's house at 10 Downing Street is wonky. Take a look when you next see a newsreel."
He's correct. And I know why.
It's supposed to be so that when you look down the street (from Whitehall) you see the door at an angle and the 0 looks straight. Like this.
Do you think it works?
Who said this? Where? When? Why etc?
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