Last year I borrowed a funny looking yellow book from one of my esteemed partners. Now, months later, I can finally return it.
It has taken forever not because I’m a slow reader. Not because book got relegated to the skim-and-get-to-someday pile. But because it is one of those rare books that sucks you in and demands you go and find out more.
It is impossible to read a few pages and just go about your business. Essay after essay your curiosity is activated and you simply have to go digging for the examples, the references, the history. And the secret, I think, lies in its incompleteness.
This is a 272-page book on design without a single image. Not a single one. The essays in the book get you to do things because your brain needs to complete the visual part of the story, much like the Andean pan flute covers of 80s tunes at airports get stuck in your head because your brain needs to complete the song.
Here is my to-do list after getting through it. 22 out of the 79 essays made me go explore something else. From what little I understand about Americans, .278 is not a bad batting average.
Set by the whims of your web browser probably in Helvetica, designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, if you are on a Mac; or Arial, designed by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders in 1982, if you are on a PC.
As gold and diamond-encrusted frequent fliers we have been fans of Dopplr, the social network with an iPod-like focus on travel, for a while now. However their latest feature has ratcheted our fandom to a new level.
We are, of course, talking about Dopplr’s personal annual reports that came out last week. A masterpiece of information design, the report uses your individual travel data from the past year to display a visual travel timeline somewhat reminiscent of a genome sequence.
Not only do memories of specific people and places come flooding back, but all the data is put into context. The hardest hitting of these is the Hummer-meter that translates your flight CO2 emissions into the equivalent number of Hummer H3s driving year-round.
22,300 kg of CO2 means nothing. 2.2 Hummers makes you feel more disgusted about yourself than eating three diavolas in one sitting. A great example of how making the invisible visible can change behavior.
A little gem of an interview in which Steve Jobs talks about his experience working with Paul Rand on the development of the NeXT identity. Think of it as a seven-minute masterclass on client-designer relationships that produce great work. A high bar to meet for both parties.
Back in September 2001, President George W. Bush urged Americans to go shopping as a patriotic duty. Now, as the clock counts the minutes down to his coronation, President Barack H. Obama has actually done it.
Yes, he can. At least symbolically.
The creator of the iconic HOPE posters from this year’s campaign has just designed a series of shopping bags and ads for Saks Fifth Avenue, a high-end American department store. That’s right, shopping bags. It strikes us as a fitting conclusion to the Obey phenomenon.
Recession. Credit crunch. Gifting season. What better time to discuss bargains.
For the past few months, Nokia’s design and research team have been hosting an interesting online initiative to compare what $5 can buy you around the world. Our top 3 picks from the submissions:
Bolly printed mud-flaps for autorickshaws (or tuk-tuks, if you haven’t been to India), from Ahmedabad, India
a pint of Tsingtao plus a posse of singing-dancing ladies in the ‘VIP room’ at a bar in Handan, China
However, more recent news suggests $5 might well pay the 2009 salaries of the CEOs of GM, Ford, Chrysler and AIG. And we’d still have a dollar left for the piggy-bank.
When Douglas Rushkoff speaks, people listen. One of our favourite media/cultural/theological critics is coming out with a new book next July.
We can’t wait, but thanks to last week’s Bloomberg/Ofcom conference we don’t have to.
Strap in for an explosive 45 minutes that previews some of the thinking from the book and takes you from Lehman’s non-existence to open sourcing the laws of the economy. All while stuffy British media regulators struggle to understand what hit them. Beautiful.
V is a powerful letter. It has a natural energy rising up from its “vertex” (the base of the V) in a celebratory outstretching of its “arms”. If you don’t have any better ideas for your logo, and your company name starts with a V, you could do worse than creating your own version of a V symbol.
Here are the five greatest V’s in branding history.
If the Volkswagen V feels very Germanic and engineered, you’re on to something. The logo was the result of an office competition to come up with a logo. The winner of the competition was an engineer named Franz Reimspiess, the same man who perfected the engine for the VW Beetle in the 1930’s. He won 50 Marks for his efforts.
The Vertu wingspan, on the other hand, exaggerates the stretch of a V like a soaring eagle. Not surprising given Frank Nuovo, the chief designer of Nokia’s luxury line also known as the Calvin Klein of mobile phones, brings Italian flair to his work.
The Visa V was a recent update of a 50-year-old classic. After eight months of working with mammoth, process-obsessed brand consultancies Landor and Wolff Olins, the brand was getting nowhere. Internal designer Greg Silveria who recognized the unique serif on the Visa V was its most distinguishing characteristic simply added a highlight to it to create an elegant solution to the problem and break the logjam. Rumour has it, it took him 30 minutes to come up with the idea.
The spontaneous and energetic Virgin V is another example of an instinctive solution. Richard Branson went to see Trevor Key, a photographer, back in the early 1970s about changing the Virgin logo. He drew the current Virgin logo known as “The Scrawl” on the back of a napkin, which Branson bought for a princely sum of 200 pounds. The angle of the logo apparently stems from the fact that napkin happened to be at an angle at the time.
Last, and most definitely least, we come to the Von Dutch V. Popularized by the likes of Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears in 2003, the faux anti-status symbol has become an essential part of any hip-hop wannabe’s uniform. However, the true origin of the brand is much more authentic and goes back to Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard, the father of the 1960s custom car culture. He developed the logo as a teenager and used it all his life. Many of his friends are convinced he would now be turning in his grave.
So there you have it. A few happy accidents have made the V into the most powerful letter in branding.
Much has been written about China’s unabashed acceptance of capitalism. But we thought this particular choice of name for a property development in Guangzhou was remarkable, to say the least.
We’re all for truthfulness in branding, but this one is more brutal than honest, don’t you think?
There has never been any doubt about which American presidential candidate inspires better graphic design.
Obama supporters have taken poster-art to a whole new level, and what’s more, they’re available for all to see, discuss, download and share. Reproduced below is one of our own favourites, but there’s a whole treasure-trove to be found at Design for Obama and 30 Reasons.
Meanwhile, the pranks and parodies that characterized the campaign have made their mark in this medium too. Shepard Fairey’s celebrated Hope poster has spawned dozens of spoofs. Lots more on flickr.
Have you ever wondered why Asian girls always make the victory sign in photos? Us too. After seeing album after album of the same phenomenon this Halloween we finally decided to get to the bottom of the matter.
It turns out the story starts in July 1941 during the dark days of World War 2. The armies of the Third Reich had just launched Operation Barbarossa and seemed unstoppable in their advances across the continent. This military might was backed by a powerful symbol – the swastika – designed by Adolf Hitler himself to reflect “the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”
The Allies needed a potent symbol of their own, and on the advice of British occultist Aleister Crowley Churchill launched his “V campaign” in response. In what is arguably the best piece of gesture branding in history, the idea caught on. Soon Allied soldiers from Europe to the Pacific were flashing the sign.
They continued to do so even after the war, especially when they were taking pictures of themselves in places like occupied Japan. For many Japanese, taking snaps with American G.I.’s was their first encounter with photography, and they assumed the victory sign was just part of the process of taking photos and a trend was born.
It was given an additional boost during the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, when figure skater Janet Lynn became a media darling for her performance. She apparently used the v sign in it’s hippie peace sense during interviews on Japanese TV and things snowballed from there. As Japan became the mecca of pop-culture trends during the 80s, the phenomenon spread across Asia, and the rest is history.
