Archive for the ‘visualisation’ Category
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (iPhone snap)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of great-looking product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. This approach is arguably now so dominant that physical design has been usurped by graphic design as the driver of function. Apple’s record in graphic design is mostly strong (I have always liked their – possibly redundant since the products are so intuitive – instruction booklets) but recently they seem less sure-footed: iTunes is much harder work than it used to be (and its ‘new logo’ was widely disliked); the iCal leather/stitching effects are retro and retrograde. Even the ‘candy box’ presentation of apps on iPhone/iPad, once fresh and friendly now seems more irritating than helpful (the sheer volume of apps available making visual distinction near-impossible). The iPhone remains a beautiful piece of work, even if its most impressive features (like the beautifully machined, spookily high-tolerance sim card tray) are hid beneath the bumper required for practical everyday operation – but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make some Apple products feel a little behind the curve.
This was thrown into sharp relief for me by my wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design is restrained and elegant and it has a crisp customsable ‘tile’-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I find myself envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, graphic design, information design, Nokia, product design, typography, UI design, Windows phone
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
No Phillumenist I, nor proper collector of anything, but like most graphic designers I love a nice bit of printed ephemera. I bought these matchbox labels in Thailand, and as far as I can tell they are mostly (all?) Japanese, made for the Chinese market and stone lithography printed. I can’t read the text (which might explain much) but the use of flags in some puts them in the second and third decades of the 20th century – beyond that my ignorance is complete, not that that hinders my enjoyment of them. What is going on in the example above for instance? A diminutive husband and wife extending hospitality to an outsized westerner? or two smartly-dressed children welcoming Daddy home (wondering why he could not afford a full-sized house)? Either way – the drawing, pattern, texture and colours are beautiful.
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Tags: decoration, decorative tradition, graphic design, inspiration, matchbox labels, ornament, packaging, phillumeny, printed ephemera, visual culture
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Saturday, November 5th, 2011
Back in nineteen-seventy-when? a young me wrote to the Astra Fireworks Company for some samples of their firework labels – the examples here are from the collectionette I received by return. Within a few years, the postwar explosion of richly decorated British firework packaging had suddenly fizzled out and most firework production had reverted to its original source, China.
Now our fireworks are designed to appeal to the Michael Bay generation, named ‘Street Legal’, ‘Air Strike’, ‘Big Bad Dangerez’ (whatever that means) and so on, their packaging fit only to be viewed in the dark. UK ‘Bonfire Night’ never went away but got transformed into two weeks of shock & awe nervously monitored by the Noise Abatement and Dead Pets’ Societies. Thanks to Health & Safety we must now ‘stand well back and be well amazed’. As if looking at the TV, watching Baghdad burn.
Remember Remember is a wonderful exhibition in conjunction with The Museum of British Folklore at stately Warwickshire art gallery Compton Verney (past events include The Tulse Luper Suitcases) that vividly reminded me of what we have lost. Revisiting fire festivals going back centuries, the exhibition also focuses in delightful detail on post-war packaging & presentation of fireworks in Britain. Names like ‘Martian Ray’, ‘Barrel of Imps’ and ‘Mine of Serpents’ evoke a more innocent time. Simple designs, largely by semi-skilled employees rather than designers, printed in limited colour have all the character, wit and fun of what used to be a thrilling, intimate and accessible celebration of darkness, fire & sausage rolls.
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Tags: charm, collections, communication, creativity, decorative tradition, fireworks, graphic design, illustration, inspiration, visual culture
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Monday, April 4th, 2011
Photo: Bernard Gagnon
Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?
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Tags: brand design, branding, colour, creativity, design process, graphic design, industrial design, visual culture, visualisation
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Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Tags: decoration, decorative arts, ephemera, graphic design, inspiration, ornament, packaging, print, traditional typography, typography, visual culture
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.
For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.
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Tags: communication, creativity, decorative type, decorative tradition, graphic design, I Wonder, illustration, inspiration, Marian Bantjes, ornament, typography, visual culture, words
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Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Take a break from the pursuit of high quality and savour the historic charm of 1960s art direction and photography…
From a small collection of postcards on sale in Italy in the 70s, a dozen examples of imagery created before the term art direction was coined. You would think Italy’s obvious scenic charm a sufficient lure for tourist cash, but free-thinking Italian marketeers of the time had other ideas: from low-grade sleaze involving aircraft wreckage to bad weather boating and armed forces recruitment, to 1960s US TV stars and a series of unfortunate animals in varying degrees of discomfort and shame. The images beg many questions: Did a perceived lack of virility in the Leaning Tower prompt the use of the Eiffel? Why three embossed gold stars to censor the boat girl? Are the washing instructions for the cat or the quilt? Was the early use of a lenticular coating (to make the army/airforce girls wink – sadly not evident here) the interactive spark that eventually led to the development of the iPad? We may never know…
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Tags: art direction, collecting, image-making, photography, postcards, visual culture, visualisation
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Randomly chosen newspaper spread with stories grouped under two page headings. The wide field of vision allows many other connections/reasons-to-read
The Death of Print is a phrase regularly bandied about since the invention of TV (and probably radio before that), appearing with renewed vigour with the arrival of every new communications platform. The actual death of some newspapers and print publications lends urgency to the drama, but the reality is less apocalyptic. Jobs are lost, companies fail, the media landscape changes, but old formats (with the notable exception of the unloved videocassette) assume new roles rather than become extinct. The life and death struggle of old vs. new media is the easy narrative but old media has unique value which should ensure at least a modest survival.
New media platforms have given us massive advances in accessibility and empowerment – but they also come with a predisposition for targeted communication, ‘narrowcasting’ and self-selection. Old media, print especially, has one underappreciated benefit that is absent from the new stuff. It doesn’t decide quite so forcefully in advance what information will be of value to me, limiting what I might learn about the world.
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Tags: communication, design, graphic design, information design, iPad, legibility, media, newspapers, TV, typography, words
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Friday, June 25th, 2010
An illustrator, teacher and member of the editorial board of award-winning contemporary illustration magazine Varoom, Anna Steinberg creates beautifully drawn, witty and thoughtful images, some of which were recently selected for Images – Best of British Illustration and the London Transport Museum/AOI Cycling in London competitions. In this email interview she reveals the significance to her work of ingenuity, mountains, biscuits & old Bidies…
How do you work?
With professional commissions I usually problem-solve in words first and then develop through doodles into resolved pictures. With personal work I do visual experiments and it emerges more spontaneously.
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Tags: Anna Steinberg, communication, creativity, illustration, image-making, inspiration, language, visualisation, words
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
The matchless charm of 1950s/60s comics, which comes not only from the artwork but also the basic (but cleverly exploited) printing technology and cheap uncoated paper (pic via Half-man Half-static).
Forty years back (in the Life on Mars era) the fashionable aesthetic is an informal, natural look. There is lingering hippy talk of ‘getting back to nature’. These are lean years for the high street hairdresser, ‘male grooming’ is a laughable concept and clothes are mostly cheap and nasty or homemade. Design is still a cottage industry but it is looking to the future: Michael English’s Hyper-real airbrush illustrations seem new and extraordinary. Robert Moog’s synthesizer is the future of music (although he hasn’t yet worked out how to keep it in tune)…
March 2010, Farringdon. I’m in a tube carriage near an extraordinary-looking young woman who appears in no way real. Her hair, nails, makeup seem somehow beyond human and her high brow and flawless surface reminds me of the actor/digital hybrid the Red Queen from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Blankly shiny, expressionlessly ‘perfect’, she is the HD-ready paradigm of modern beauty. Music seeping from headphones is also soullessly bright, sampled, virtual, autotuned. All of this is in sharp contrast to the immediate noise and grubby texture of London, where illustrators, designers and musicians, bored with software slickness are increasingly going ‘wonky’ (surely the most irritating/overused phrase of 2009), working with the look and feel of handwork, crafts, ‘outsider art’ and forgotten technologies to rediscover ‘charm’….
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Tags: brand design, communication, creativity, decoration, decorative type, graphic design, packaging, typography, visual culture, visualisation
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