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There was a fascinating obituary in The Guardian on Saturday of John Berry. He illustrated 20 of the Ladybird People at Work books as well as coming up with the 'put a tiger in your tank' slogan and drawing the Esso tiger for 10 years.
I'd be proud of any one of those things were in my obituary.
Read it in full here.
Typography by Joe Harries, found on Tom's blog.
I love this.
It's an artwork by Knut Henrik Henriksen on the new bit of the Northern Line at Kings Cross.
Can't see it?
My friend Blech has a better picture.
The thing I like about it is that it's so easily ignorable.
It's the kind of thing you might not see for years and then you'd suddenly discover it. And it would bring a smile to your face. It's so elegant and beautiful and now it has been given, by accident or by choice, a position that makes it a hidden gem. A needle in the haystack of the commute.
It's fantastic.
More details on the TFL website.
From the Design Disease Flickr Pool. Still awesome.
Seattle is a wonderful place. I've been there before, but only for a few hours.
There was this building was I was quite taken by. It gives the impression of being so precarious.
It isn't. Obviously.
And then there's this wall of gum.
Actually called Gum Wall it's apparently the 2nd germiest tourist attraction in the world, the Blarney Stone was the winner.
I was strangely attracted to it. It was the colours. Designers can see past all those germs if you have colours like these.
At the end of last year I was in Portland and Seattle. There were a few things I saw that I wanted to blog about, but I never really got the time. What with all that end of the decade madness.
I'll rectify that now.
I've always wondered why more towns don't do this. I guess everyone has. I know there are all sorts of boring bureaucratic reasons why you can't just turn empty shops into pop-up shops. Sometimes landlords actually want properties to be empty for a short period of time.
This is good though. Christmas seems the perfect time, with all that increased footfall, to do this.
What first struck me about this notice was the expression 'Pop-up Shops'.
Pop-up shop is jargon which has entered (is entering) the civilian lexicon. I always find that a bit odd. Does it mean anything to anyone? Does anyone care what type of shop it is?
Pop-up shops used to be really quick, for a few days only, only for those in the know, retail experiences. Cool and trendy brands would open them is fringe areas. This year I've noticed an increase in pop-up shops in traditional retail areas by mainstream brands. Cath Kidston has called her new shops Pop-In Shops.
All this made me think about shops a bit more. It feels to me that as the longer the internet sticks around the more relevant the questions we first asked of it become. The 'death of print' is one, the 'death of the high street' is another. We were without internet recently and I had to buy a dishwasher. The thought of going into an actual dishwasher shop filled me with dread. The internet has made that such an easy experience. And crucially, when purchasing something you're unfamiliar with the internet makes you feel like you're being ripped off less than you would be on the high street. That might not be true, but in retail perception is everything.
And just like there are some retail experiences that are better online, there are days when it's better to shop in the real world than the virtual one. Christmas Eve for example.
Which makes me wonder if we'll start to see big, famous brands who only have high street shops at certain times of the year. The pop-up shop concept but slightly more permanent , regular and on the busiest high streets. Borders and HMV strike me as good examples. Everyone knows that the internet is killing the high street bookshop and record shop. Borders are in administration. That's old news. But every Christmas Waterstones and Borders are always packed. So maybe we'll see brands, old brands I guess, that exist all year round but massively ramp up their high street presence at certain times of the year. Most of these businesses make all their profit in one quarter of the year anyway. Greatly reduced costs, same profit.
Popped up not propped up.
Apple had a nice little promotion running over Christmas. They made an App which launched on Boxing Day and 'ran' for the next 11 days.
Every day the App gave you a free gift from iTunes / the App store. Songs, videos, films, games and apps.
The app looked really nice. They managed to pull of that lovely American Christmas graphic style really well. Seriously, that's not easy to do. Hard enough in print, even harder on a device.
The animation was good. And the gifts were of a good variety.
I found myself opening the app every day to see what the gift was. Some days I even opened it up at midnight. I looked forward to opening it up. Which makes me wonder if making Apps that have something that makes you keep going back to them if the marketing challenge for 2010.
The gifts were good. I got a Robbie Williams video, a Foo Fighters video, Peter & The Wolf film, a Golf game, a Trivial Pursuit game and some other stuff.
Nicely done.
If you read this, "The future as it happens" purely as a piece of copy, typed on a sheet of A4, black and white with no design whatsoever, you would probably assume it means "the future at the same time as it occurs".
Given the nature of the publication it is advertising you would assume it means the "the future reported at the same time as it happens".
However, the typographic treatment pictured above implies it's being said by someone with a heavy Essex accent which gives it a different, less dynamic meaning altogether.
One of the reasons for starting RIG was to do things. To do the things everyone talks about in meetings. To experiment. And so using a 3D printer we made these Datadecs at the end of last year.
They're Christmas decorations based on individual social network data. So the size of the head on the snowman represents the number of Twitter followers you have. The silver cloud shows miles travelled per month on Dopplr. The red one represents monthly scrobbles on Last.fm. Blue, the apertures you've used over the year on flickr.
We made around 40 sets and sent them to friends of RIG.
Andy Huntington helped us with all the physical 3D printing stuff and he's written about that over here. He explains more about the data and the difference techniques used. Read it, there's even a video.
Russell has written a detailed piece about the thought behind the project. Read it, there are even charts.
And now I'm going to talk about the colours and the sparkly bits.
Visualising data is very hard to do well. It's hard to communicate the data clearly. Matt Jones talks about making it glance-able. As you should have come to expect from Matt, that's a brilliantly effortless way of describing what success would look like.
Designing in 3D is hard. In fact designing anything that doesn't stay still and flat on a rectangular page is hard for graphic designers. That's why most web pages look so shit. But 3D is another level of hard.
It was probably the snowman that gave us the most trouble.
Here's the first attempt.
Not very snowman like. For me this unlocked a key element of the creative work. Make it more Hallmark.
It's one of those things where you should make it look how it looks in everyone's head. Which is like this.
We had hats for a while. Innocent kindly agreed to donate some of theirs, but in the end they didn't make the cut.
We had changeable parameters to consider, but we were able to work with that.
As I've mentioned before there's nothing worse than a Christmas designed by designers. Christmas should be left in all it's gaudy uncoordinated glory. A good designer should recognise this.
Dopplr is a cloud because we're gently referencing CO2 usage. Originally we wanted to use Dopplr's CO2 data, but that was too hard. The other decs take colours from the host brand, Flickr is blue and Last.fm is red. But they needed glitter. So we added glitter. By hand.
It seems to me that there are 3 aspects to these projects. The idea, the production and then the dispatch. All of those things are hard, but the dispatch especially so. What size box will they go in? How will they arrive unbroken at their destination? And the unboxing. The unboxing is crucial.
Video from Toby.
Which is why we asked a friend of ours Russell Duncan to photograph the decs properly and why we designed this card to explain the project and so you could see all the data next to each other.
Picture from Foe.
This picture from Iain shows how glance-able they are.
I think that's about it. We made something trivial, playful and unimportant using data and 3D printing. We learned lots. And I feel like we're further along a path than we used to be, which is the goal.
There's more if you're interested; people have been writing about them on the internet Beeker, Julian, David, Dan, Anne, and Iain.
Picture from Anne.
Credits
Andy Huntington who did all the 3D data stuff.
Russell Duncan who took the official pictures at short notice.
Ravensbourne College who explained and demo'd all sorts of 3D printing and rapid prototyping for us.
Innocent for donating 40 hats.
James who made The Art of Penguin Science Fiction website has made another corker.
As he says:
I’ve admired the Op Art-inspired covers of these books for a long time, so I finally contacted some of the art directors and cover artists that were involved in the series and wrote the story of the books, which has just been published as The Shape of the Century in the latest issue of the graphic design magazine, Eye:
www.eyemagazine.com/issue.php?id=170
However, the website goes further, and tells the story of the Fontana Modern Masters from the 20th-century abstract art that inspired the covers, through to the 21st-century art by the young British artist Jamie Shovlin who, in turn, was inspired by the covers.
I’ve also signed a deal with HarperCollins (which bought Fontana some years ago) to produce a 'retro' fine art print of all 48 covers in the series which will shortly be going on sale in design shops and museum shops, but is also available via the website.
Lovely stuff. And available as prints too? Very smart.
UPDATE: The url was incorrect, here's the correct one: http://www.fontanamodernmasters.org/
More soon.
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