Noisy Decent Graphics

Guest Writer: Matt Dent

It's been a long hard first half of the year and the team at NDG deserve a break, so as is traditional we'll be taking the whole of August off.

I don't want to leave you without any high quality design blogging, so following on from the runaway success of Henrietta and Mike, Matt has kindly agreed to Guest Write for the whole of August.

Matt Dent needs no introduction apart from that picture up there.

As with all guest writers he's been given a free reign as long as it has some tenuous link to design.

To be clear: it won't be me writing on this blog in August it will be Matt Dent.

Be nice to him. I'll sit back and wait for the "Oooooh, and he's cute!" comments.

In defence of the 2012 logo, 2 years on

It's just over 2 years since the London 2012 Olympic logo was launched to such derision.

Being a prominent design blogger I wrote about it back then. I've just reread that post and I agree with everything I said. Which is reassuring.

Actually I think I agree even more. I like the logo even more.

The chief argument from the loverz at the time was that it would grow on you as it was used in different applications. That it was so ahead of it's time, everyone would catch up by 2012.

Has it grown on you? Honestly?

We haven't really seen it used in a big way yet, there are still 3 years to go before the Olympics, but we have seen graphic design work creeping out of LOGOC HQ so now seems like a good time to stop and take a look and see how we all feel about.

The best piece of work by miles is this fantastic map by Stamen.

Without question the best piece of graphic design and the best use of the branding to have emerged so far. Vibrant and exciting but still easy to navigate. Lovely.

To take one small detail, look how they've used those shapes in the water of the map above. That's a sensible design decision, but it's also exciting and different. I hope this is how the branding was intended to be used when it was conceived.

 

This is some digitally eventy work from Matt and the guys at Universal Everything. Nice isn't it? EXCITING.

Some of you are getting a bit scared now because we haven't seen an Helvetica yet. Look again, there was some on that Stamen map.

This is the main LOGOC website. A pretty standard corporate affair in terms of content. Looks good though.

The colours are nice. They are lively. All that stuff above seems to have a fast moving pace about it which is good and appropriate. It doesn't look like clarity has been scarificed for style.

Managing this brand must be very difficult. Bureacracy and vested interests at every turn, so it's even more impressive that they manage to eeak exciting graphics out.

Not everything is rosy though. Take a look at this hideous beast.

That's breath takingly bad. Just stick the logo over there by the swimmers head it'll be alright. Incredibly insensitive and ill thought out. Terrible.

But to me the success of this logo will be how it's used by non roster approved LOGOC people. If it's a great logo even the fake shirt sellers will make it look good.

Or the press. That up there looks good to me. Obviously it's not gonna win any design awards, but it looks exciting. The colours are good - and those colours have been forced on the Telegraph by the attitude of the brand. That's a good thing.

 

I like it. I like it more. What do you think?

Vote For Me (please)

A few weeks ago I met with Tiffany from D&AD and we discussed a few things (exciting forthcoming things that you will like!) and she also asked me to put my name forward for the Executive Committee.

I thought about it for a while and spoke to some people who are on the Committee and who have been on it previously. And I decided to stand. Tony Davidson and Matt Dent were kind enough to nominate me.

The Exec Committee is a slightly strange thing, but it would appear that they are after some 'younger' representation and some people who aren't in Tokyo/New York/São Paulo when the meetings take place 6 times a year.

In Design there are 9 other people on the list (which is quite a lot) and we've all had to write a manifesto and include a CV. To save you some time my manifesto is below and my CV is here.

I’m sure you have lots of these to get through and many of them will be sesquipedalian, so I’ll keep mine short.

I’m sure there are many things I have in common other exec members (a passion for creativity and a belief in education, for example) but if elected to the D&AD Committee I hope to specifically add the following attributes.

1. I will turn up.
A friend of mine was kicked off a committee at the RCA once, “I missed two meetings” he said, “and they wrote to me and said if I couldn’t commit to the panel they didn’t want me on it”. I’ve had the luxury of learning from his mistakes and don’t commit to things I’m not passionate about.

2. I don’t mind looking at spreadsheets.
Seriously. I run a small business and I sit in meetings with accountants. I actually enjoy those meetings. I like to think I’m not afraid of an empty A4 sheet or an empty balance sheet.

3. I am your design audience.
95% of the design community is like me. Exactly like me. Did the same stuff at college, scrabble round for the same work, worry about the same things, bookmark the same pictures on Ffffound.

4. I can blog.
I don’t really think this is important, but I know other people do. I would like to use the stuff I’ve learned from blogging (that’s another manifesto) to help the D&AD spread the word to more people in new ways.

I hope you’ll give me the honour of joining you on the committee

The D&AD isn't perfect (nor is my manifesto) but it's our organisation and we'd be a poorer industry without it.

The election is only open to Members, so if you'd be so kind to pop over here and read all the manifestos and if you decide to vote for me that would be grand. Thank you very much.

I suppose this is a virtual hustings so if you'd like to ask me a question, then you can do in the comments below.

Vote early, vote often.

Up betimes

Clarity Diversion

We understand that the road is closed, that's pretty obvious from the massive steel barrier shielding the huge orange digger. But still the red and white sign is a necessary notification.

It's helpful to know which way to travel as we can no longer continue straight on. The yellow sign that says 'Diverted traffic' and points to the right does that job perfectly well.

The contractor has the right to advertise his firm.

The other four signs (six if you count the cones) are unnecessary, ugly, make the street considerably more unpleasant and are insulting to my intelligence.

Newspaper Club

A few weeks ago you may have noticed this gorgeous thing whistling around my Flickr pages.

It's a newspaper we designed and printed for the BBC called 8.

It's a collection of essays which came out of 8 studies commissioned as part of the AHRC/BBC Knowledge Exchange Programme. The paper contains articles by Bill Thompson, Katherine Corrick and Pat Kane among others. Brendan from the BBC talks more about the project here.

I'm particularly fond of the cover. Looked great on the press.

Back in January when made TOFHWOTI we said it was a product of the future. The success of that project made us investigate that a bit more. We spoke to 4iP, Channel 4's investment fund, who agreed to fund a separate business called Newspaper Club.

Newspaper Club will have two components. It's main purpose is to allow anyone to curate, create and then collect (by that I mean print, but that doesn't alliterate) newspapers. It might be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a yearly “best of” printed product for obsessive bloggers. You'll be able to organise this stuff online and then print as little as a few to as many as a few thousand.

Like TOFHWOTI but made by you.

Those newspapers will be based on template designs and the user will have limited design choices. Obviously. Which is why I've been thinking about this stuff.

But we realise that some people may want a bespoke option to create something extra special, like 8 for the BBC. A document created from scratch. We're currently working on another one for Penguin which I'll tell you about soon.

Newspaper Club is a major project, lots of people already seem excited by it and there is a lot more I want to tell you. Stuff about how we're working as a team, how we're building the Newspaper Club brand, 4iP, designing templates and so on. But I shall save that for another day.

We launch in September, but in the meantime you can follow our adventures on the blog over here. According to Tech Crunch it's 'hilariously frank'. You can sign up for a beta invite here, you can read our insightful Twitter updates and if you'd like a bespoke newspaper for your corporation you should give me a call or drop me a line - [email protected].

More to follow.

Straplines my Dad would like

Increasingly I find straplines irrelevant. The world of [visual pun + punchline = ta da!] seems a million miles away from where branding is heading at the moment.

However, there's a small sub category of branding where a pun or a strapline always makes me smile. Like this.

That's good isn't? Funny and relevant. Even without being funny it's true. It won't win a Black Pencil and it won't win any Lions, but it made me smile.

More importantly it made me ring my Dad and tell him. My Dad doesn't work in anything to do with advertising or marketing or anything like that. And he never has. But it made him smile, laugh even. In fact if he saw a line like this he would probably ring me, and I would laugh.

And then there's this.

Photo from Acme, usual rules apply.

Which is for a cement / paving sort of company. It's good isn't it? Makes you smile. My Dad loved this one even more.

Turns out this is a very common strapline for cement / paving companies, but it's still good.

There are two points here. Number 1, straplines / overtly punny communictions still have a role to play. Maybe not for the launch of the next Ubi Webby Cola, but for the everyday 'backbone of Britain' firms. In fact, for people who still call themselves firms.

Number 2, if you can create stuff that makes your parents pick up the phone, that's a good thing. I've always thought this. Alan Fletcher understood this and John Webster understood this. And as the world gets older and older, maybe the consumer is no longer your wife - the consumer is your parents.

Coloured chalk stripes on a wall

No bastard ever won a war by kerning for his country

You all know Patton's speech, right? If you don't it's over here. Watch, it's awesome. (If that link doesn't work, Google 'patton opening speech'.)

Anyway. It's now on YouTube as glorious typography.

That, for now, is all.

Gundam Tokyo

I'm not really in to robots and all that, but this is awesome. A 59 feet tall Gundam robot in Tokyo.

Read more on the Flickr blog.

Text In The World

Tom has a written a great little summary of examples of text in the world. Take a look, lots of good stuff like this.

Alphabet City

Lauren sent me this lovely thing in the post which I'm only just getting round to sticking up here.

WARNING: These photos aren't as nice as the ones AceJet takes.

It's from an exhibition Tobias Frere-Jones held in Melbourne of his collection of photos of NYC signage. It's fucking gorgeous.

Since 2002 he's been documenting the lettering of NYC. Here's a pixelly explanation here.

Lovely stuff. Thanks Lauren.

w+k platform

Wieden + Kennedy London have set up a thing called Platform. As the name suggests it's a way for talented people to find their way into advertising and other creative industries. Not just w+k and not just writers and art directors.

Here's the official blurb:

"Platform is a future creative talent platform, which will hire, teach and work with a diverse mix of people, from around the world. We will recruit talent from the arts, sciences and technology backgrounds who will work together to solve business problems through creative solutions. You will learn by doing which means being involved in everything from building prototypes, enabling and assisting in research development to curating your very own event space and programme."

If you are reading this and you're a design student who's just graduated and you're worrying about finding a job (and you should be worried about that) then you could do a lot worse than apply for this. There's a simple brief to answer and they'll pay you £250 a week for 6-9 months.

You should apply. The deadline is tomorrow so you'll need to be quick. But you should still do it. Stop watching the cricket. Apply.

The best 'please turn the lights off' door sign I've ever seen

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.

Redacted scores

I was always led to believe that the great innovation Sky had brought to the world was displaying the score in the top left hand corner of the telly during football matches. Which is good and very useful, especially if you turn the TV on in the middle of a game.

So why, dear listeners, do the BBC not do this for Wimbledon? It's especially annoying as a game of tennis has a lot more scoring than a game of football. The score changes every minute or so and therefore when I come in from the terrace with a glass of Pimms I like to know what the score is.

The BBC only seems to show the score when the camera is on this view below:

but not any other view. Maybe that's the only camera that has the little graphic on it.

My bow tie matches my wife's dress

Last night seemed to go really well. I enjoyed myself, although I was more nervous about hosting than I ever have been about speaking. All the speakers were fab and did a brilliant job of sticking to 8 minutes.

Rather than me blather on, let us let Twitter do the review for us.

6pt Hellicar and lewis = fantastic.

withassociates the geek shal inherit the earth. Jamie from @Airside rules. Must talk more with him about sciencey things.

iaintait Having a bow tie that matches your wife's dress! Shits all over my trainer / jumper combo

tollerton "Damn fine inspiration" from Vaughn Oliver.

antiquote Just left #8x8. Damn fine work by damn fine people.

Futurefabric Nice evening out at 8x8 (http://www.ilovedesign.com/...). John Bateson stood out for me. Online video apparently coming soon...

Wagit went to the #8x8 ilovedesign event last night. Was very good. Better then your normal boring conference... and free beer! brucey bonus

And many more via the #8x8 twitter tag. Apparently they could have sold out several times over. I hope they do it again.

Joke update

There's no way to be nice about this. Your jokes were awful, all of them.

I was sent a million, <insert font> walks into a pub, barman says "Why the long face" and a thousand "How many graphic designers does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Does it have to be a lightbulb?" very lame. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Still, winners have been chosen and notified by email.

I'm getting pretty excited about tonight, it will be very different hosting and not speaking. Still if Richard E Grant can do it, then I'm sure I can.

If you're coming tonight use the Twitter hashtag #8x8 during the event and I'll read out the best ones in the breaks. Should be a great night, the mightly Iain Tait is up first and look what he did at his last presentation...