Here's a thing for a Friday.
I spotted this FedEx logo (Kinkos colour version) in Austin earlier this week. What's happened to the famous hidden arrow?
Either this is a mistake by someone, which is really bad or it's an approved arched version of the classic logo which would worse.
Can anyone shed any light?
On Tuesday I popped in to say hello to DJ Stout and Pentagram Austin.
Over coffee DJ kindly showed me round the studio, let me take a few pics and we chatted about stuff. Topics ranged from SXSW to his excitement about the iPad and the possibilities for magazines and books We even talked about Silicon Roundabout.
He showed me some stuff he was working on including an incredible project documenting the history of the Alpine Cowboys Baseball team. A beautiful and very personal project which you will hear about when it launches later this year. It's a wonderful, fascinating, delightful thing.
I've always been a fan of these photographs, taken for the covers of Dairy Today and seeing them big reminded me of the video that went round when the magazine relaunched.
Pentagram Austin is different in many ways from the other offices but at the same time it has lots in common. Everything looks meticulously well designed. Even the dogs appeared to match the interior. How do they pull that off?
I had a lovely time, thanks to DJ and the rest of the office. And make sure you look out for that Alpine Cowboys project later in the year.
A good day yesterday. We're busy working on a thing for our panel but we found the time to go and see Clay Shirky speak. He was very good for lots of reasons but it was noticeable that he was better at the art of speaking than many others here.
He spoke loudly and clearly, he had actual jokes with actual punchlines and he had a well researched arguement. All good. But as well as that he very clearly sign posted his talk. Upfront he told us the three parts his talk consisted of and then he mentioned each chapter when he reached that point in the talk. So you always knew where you were. Superb.
And he stood up. Must remember that for my panel.
Drove down from Houston to Austin last night.
Interesting cinematic scenery, amazing sunset matched by an incredible sunrise this morning.
To recap, we're here for SXSW Interactive. Can't promise to update every day, but I'll try.
The judges contemplating the floor.
Wow. Tonight the category winners of the Design Museum Designs Of The Year awards were announced. Amazingly we won the award in our category, Graphics. That's pretty crazy.
There are a few thank yous over on the Newspaper Club blog.
The other category winners are here on the Wired blog.
New strategy for the new year. So far it's working brilliantly.
I like those Supertelly ads you see kicking around for Sky. Not the full ad with the robot arms, I hate that one, but the simple one that's just colour and type.
I was hoping to post about it with a short description of why I like them. But I can't really work out why I like them. So I'm going to blog about it as very rough notes. Maybe we can work it out together.
1. I'm a designer. I'm a sucker for colour. We all are. Normally I hate those 3D glass effect logos, but the Sky one is well done and they use it effectively. And those colours so nice.
2. That song. Oh my Lord that song. So creamy and so rich. So gorgeous.
3. Something about the media dictating the creative in a good way that doesn't sound as shit as that. There's something in the sheer completeness of the execution that makes me think this is the bit leading the campaign.
What do I mean by that? Lots of screens are starting to appear, but they're not really tellys, they're more like animated posters. It's very rare to see any creative that's been adapted well for that format and that's probably the problem, they all feature creative that's been adapted for the format. These almost feel like they were designed with animated posters in mind.
Short little bits of moving image that work as 10 second idents after Sky News, work as silent posters on the Tube and work as 60 second ads on the TV at home.
And still looks good as a web page background. Yes, something like that.
4. Supertelly. A brilliant expression. Supertelly, you can imagine people saying that in pubs and cafes across the land.
Colour, sound, thoroughness, those alone are not recognised reasons for liking something. But who cares about that?
I picked it up badly and it slipped out of my hand onto a hard tiled floor. Then it wouldn't restart.
Thanks to IT I was able to work out that only the hard drive was broken so I bought a new one, we replaced it and it's working fine again now. But I'd lost all my data.
I dropped my Mac first thing on a Friday morning. I had backed up last thing on a Wednesday night. So I only lost one days work. A miracle, really.
I backed up via Time Machine, and restoring it was amazing. You insert the start up disk, plug the back up drive in and it gives you the option to Restore From Time Machine. Click OK and that's it. It took around 2 hours to restore 150GB. EXACTLY AS I LEFT IT. All preferences, passwords, settings, even the desktop, exactly as I left it. Amazing. Stunning.
Why am I telling you this? Because you should back up right now.
Creative Review has reached 30. They've celebrated with a special issue featuring this lush colourful cover.
And a piece where they've asked 30 people what they're excited about in the future. Including me.
You'll have to buy the mag to see what I said.
But when I opened this issue I actually felt really proud. I love Creative Review. I remember it through various points in my life as a designer. I have fond memories of my uncle's copies when I was a youngster. We all looked forward to it when we were at college. We fought over it in my first job.
It has good periods and bad periods, but this is a great time for the publication. The blog is one of the best in the industry. I'm glad it's 30. Long may it continue.
For the last few weeks I've been working with W+K London as the Creative Director on the ad campaign for the relaunch of The Observer.
We made a TV ad which was brilliantly written by Rob Burleigh and David Stevens, brilliantly directed by David C Kerr (from That Mitchell & Webb Look, among other things) and brilliantly acted by Justin Edwards (from The Thick Of It). I mostly stood around telling everyone the objective was to get home on time.
We created a press campaign too. For the teaser ads we used quotes from an online campaign set up to save The Observer when it was faced with possible closure back in the summer. Some of the quotes from well known people were amazingly bold things for a brand to say. So we used them as 6 sheets.
And there's this.
The whole idea behind the campaign is pause, review and reflect which came from something John Mulholland, the Observer editor, wrote about the role of Sunday newspapers in the future. A few days before we were due to do a photoshoot of the paper I asked the creatives at The Observer to run me off three section headers with pause, review, reflect written in Prelo the lovely font they're using in the paper. I wasn't really sure what they were for, but we shot it and it looked great. So we ran it.
Photography by Jonathan Kitchen.
There was some other exciting online stuff, but I shall talk about that later. The campaign seems to have gone down well. Read more on the w+k blog.
In other news Newspaper Club has launched as a small beta. It's fascinating seeing what people are doing with the platform and we're already working on tweaks, but more about that another time because the most bloggable news is that I'm amazed and proud to report Newspaper Club has been nominated in the Design Museum Design Of The Year awards. Incredible news.
An exhibition of all the nominees (including the iPlayer, the Kindle, a BMW and err, us) is on now until June at the museum. We commissioned the brilliant James Bridle to create a special one page newspaper for us which you can take away from the show. One side features a massive logo, obviously. The other side features a map for a walk which starts at the Design Museum. You can read more about A Wide Arm Of Sea on James' blog.
All good stuff. Good times.
There is always lots of talk on the web about privacy. With an election looming we can only expect this to increase.
I'm a teeny weeny bit paranoid about privacy. I shred, regularly. But I'm also an advocate of being open online.
But like a lot of arguments the issue isn't as simple as privacy yes or no. You can say you live in London without mentioning the exact street. Or as Tom said once, "Privacy. Get over it."
Now, I don't want to debate privacy here. I really don't. People cleverer than I have written better things elsewhere. But I do want to talk about a type of transparency that would make my life easier.
We've all experienced frustrating email conversations where you're trying to arrange a meeting with someone. Sometimes they go like this:
A: Yeah let's meet up, when's good for you?
B: Sometime next week?
A: Yeah great. Tuesday?
B: Perfect. Morning or afternoon?
Natural delay of a day or so.
A: Oh, sorry. Tuesday has gone now. Internal thing. How about Wednesday?
B: I can't do Wednesday. I could next Monday though? 10am?
A: Ahhh. I'm free all day Monday apart from 10. Thursday at 3?
B: Perfect. See you then.
Natural delay of a day or so.
A: Sorry. Really sorry, client coming in at 10 now.
And so on.
It seems odd to me that I can very easily find pictures, phone numbers, address, likes and dislikes, marital statuses, of people I barely know and yet there's no easy way to see the availability of slight associates. I'm not suggesting making our calendars available to everyone, but I would like to see a pretty basic busy/not busy thing similar to how Google show you the chat status of people you have previously emailed.
And not just inter-company, something broader than that. Something vague. Something useful if you're trying to gauge the availability of someone but useless to a stranger. Something where you can get an idea of hereish, soonish, nowish.
Something glanceable.
In this example, because I've had a few emails with Rob I can quickly see his basic availability. No details, just free or busy, like the calendar at the start of this post. I know this is not perfect interaction design, it's just a quick sketch.
<ducks>
FHM gets a redesign. Take a look. Seriously.
This is me earlier today watching Chelsea v Arsenal on my iPhone.
I am the worst type of football fan. The kind you probably all despise. I don't support a team, I couldn't think of anything worse than standing on a wet terrace watching Accrington v Morecombe but I love the Champions League and I'd happily pay over the odds to watch Man U v Chelsea or Arsenal v Liverpool.
However, I have never thought a Sky subscription was worth the money. We don't watch much TV at home and £50 a month seems a lot just to watch the 'big four' games each season. (£50 a month or whatever it is.)
Except now there's a now a Sky Sports app and for £6 a month you can watch all the Premiership and Champions League football Sky have. That sounds reasonable to me. And actually I never really watch the football, I just have it on and glance at it every now and then. The iPhone seems a better way of doing that than some bullshit 50in High Definition TV. I've never really understood the obsession with massive TV's, I think watching TV on your phone or your watch is a much more useful experience than installing the local Odeon in your front room.
So I downloaded the app and signed up.
Today was the first game I watched. And pretty good it was too. The quality was superb and it streamed well for 90 minutes. I think the connection dropped twice, that's all.
Mid way through the game my brother called on Skype. Whilst I was telling him about this something occured to me. Look again at that picture.
There are three screens in the photograph. I'm watching TV on my phone, I'm talking to my brother on the laptop and the actual television? Switched off.
Photoshoots take a very long time, are hard work and, let's face it, are pretty boring.
Although we got some great shots.
The absurdity of much of today's news reporting highlighted in one simple screen grab.
Here's an ad about traveling on the Tube to football matches.
Normally these Tube posters are quite good. Simple enough and nice and graphic. But this one seems like a massive missed opportunity to me. Surely they could have made some pitch markings from the map?
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