Some fonts best left for late night viewing.
It's the Effing Typeface.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
TV reinterpreted in print
Exergian has some brilliantly executed print to promote some brilliantly executed television. See for yourself. It's gorgeous, it's tasty, and it's perfect.
There's a saying about that...
Health care advertising can be rather dry and staid sometimes. Promotional items are usually pens, pads, boring stuff. Then there's this calendar for health provider AOK.
It's refillable, and brilliant.
I wonder if I can do the same kind of thing for Frito-Lay?
When you design like Paul Rand,
your name speaks for itself.
Who is Paul Rand you ask? Well, in short, he's the designer who came up with some of the more iconic logos of the past few decades.
The advertising time machine.
Print ads from the last 100 years. Seriously. Well categorized, indexed and organized. And priceless. Very, very priceless. Do yourself a favour and check them out. See how things were done and perhaps 'source' some ideas for yourself. You'll be glad you did.
The rules
made simple.
Do you ever find yourself having to explain to a client or account person why they can't use 7 different fonts? Why Comic Sans is horrible and should never, ever be used? Why word art is not art but a crime? Well you're in luck. Here's a lovely little primer that you can send to them when they ask you why they can't condense a gothic typeface and then drop in a little sans serif action to jazz it up.
And you can spend your time on more important matters, like reading this blog.
Advertising on the menu
What is a menu? It's a sales tool. It's selling you food using subtle cues to guide you towards what the restaurant wants you to order. It's not all about price either. It's about using buzzwords and other non-specific cues to influence your behaviour. Just like advertising some might say...
Here's a very interesting article about menu psychology from the New York Times. Just in time for the holiday rondelay of restaurant visits.
Playboy purchasers pull publishing
Playboy. They only want you for one thing. It ain't the nudie pictures. It ain't the comprehensive database of centerfold likes and dislikes. and it's definitely not all those fine, fine pieces of journalism by Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, the authors whose writing was the only reason I ever bought the magazine...
It's the Bunny. The icon. The insouciant symbol of sin, sex and swingin' good times. It sells.
So, now the brand has waned, gone limp, if you will and has been superseded by the brand emblem. But we'll still be able to buy all number of really well made, quality products with a Playboy bunny logo and that is what's important.
Pick the wrong colour and watch profits vanish.
What colour is your brand?
It's a crucial question, and one that has vexed designers and branding agencies forever. Just to give you an idea have a look at the chart. Now try and figure out how you're going to differentiate yourself from all the other competing companies who are using similar colours.
Your font offends me.
Purloined from the New York Times:
Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists
Dirt. Noise. Crowds. Delays. Scary smells. Even scarier fluids swirling on the floor. There are lots of reasons to loathe the New York City subway, but one very good reason to love it — Helvetica, the typeface that’s used on its signage.
Seeing the clean, crisp shapes of those letters and numbers at station entrances, on the platforms and inside the trains is always a treat, at least it is until I spot the “Do not lean ...” sign on the train doors. Ugh! There’s something not quite right about the “e” and the “a” in the word “lean.” Somehow they seem too small and too cramped. Once I’ve noticed them, the memory of the clean, crisp letters fades, and all I remember are the “off” ones.
That’s the problem with loving typography. It’s always a pleasure to discover a formally gorgeous, subtly expressive typeface while walking along a street or leafing through a magazine. (Among my current favorites are the very elegant letters in the new identity of the Paris fashion house, Céline, and the jolly jumble of multi-colored fonts on the back of the Rossi Ice Cream vans purring around London.) But that joy is swiftly obliterated by the sight of a typographic howler. It’s like having a heightened sense of smell. You spend much more of your time wincing at noxious stinks, than reveling in delightful aromas.
If it’s bad for me (an amateur enthusiast who is interested in typography, but isn’t hugely knowledgeable about it), what must it be like for the purists? Dreadful, it seems. I feel guilty enough about grumbling to my friends whenever I see this or that typographic gaffe, but am too ignorant to spot all of them, unlike the designers who work with typefaces on a daily basis, and study them lovingly.
“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.” One of his (least) favorite examples is the Cooper Black typeface on the Mass sign outside a beautifully restored 1885 Carpenter Gothic church near his weekend home in Cape May Point, New Jersey. “Cooper Black is a perfectly good font, but in my mind it is a fat, happy font associated with the logo for the ‘National Lampoon,’ the sleeve of the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ album and discount retailers up and down the U.S.,” Mr. Bierut explained. “I wouldn’t choose it as a font for St. Agnes Church even as a joke. Every time I go by, my vacation is, for a moment, ruined.”
Choosing an inappropriate typeface is one problem. Applying one inaccurately is another. Sadly for type nuts, movies often offend on both counts. Take “Titanic,” in which the numbers on the dials of the ship’s pressure gauges use Helvetica, a font designed in 1957, some 45 years after the real “Titanic” sank. Helvetica was also miscast in “Good Night and Good Luck,” which takes place in the early 1950s. “I still find it bizarre to see type or lettering that is wrong by years in a period movie in which the architecture, furniture and costumes are impeccable, and where somebody would have been fired if they were not,” said Matthew Carter, the typography designer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The same applies to TV shows, including the otherwise excellent “Mad Men.” It is rare to find a review of the show that does not rave about the accuracy of its early 1960s styling, yet the “Mad Men” team is woefully sloppy when it comes to typography. Mark Simonson, a graphic designer in St. Paul, Minnesota, blogs about typographic misdemeanors on his Web site, www.marksimonson.com, and he once catalogued the flaws in “Mad Men.” The 1992 typeface, Lucida Handwriting, appears in an ad in the opening titles. Gill Sans, a British typeface designed in 1930 but rarely used in the United States until the 1970s, is used for office signage. A lipstick ad features one wholly appropriate 1958 font, Amazone, but two incongruous ones, 1978’s Balmoral and 1980’s Fenice. He noted lots of other clunkers too, but admits that he has spotted fewer new errors in the most recent episodes of “Mad Men.”
“I guess they must be doing a better job,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that the same applies to other TV shows and movies, with the unfortunate exception of the animated feature film “Up,” in which he espied Verdana, a font designed by Mr. Carter in 1996 specifically for use on computers, in scenes set in the 1930s and 1940s. “But I’m not sure how picky you should be with a cartoon.”
Yet another common blunder is the misuse of the individual characters in a typeface that includes obscure versions of letters and numbers as well as more familiar ones. These gaffes often occur when lazy designers confuse one character with another, thereby making the typographic equivalent of a spelling mistake.
The British typography designer, Paul Barnes, remembers seeing one on a poster in a Gap store. “It was set in Adobe Caslon and was supposed to say ‘Your first clothes,”’ he recalled. “Rather than use an ‘f’ and ‘I,’ they decided to use a long ‘s’ and dotless ‘i,’ thus spelling ‘sirst’ rather than ‘first.’ ” He is equally irritated by similar errors in the use of historic fonts, like the archaic black letter typefaces that date back to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
That said, even the type-savvy Mr. Barnes claims to have become more tolerant — or less intolerant — of such howlers over the years. “I’m not sure if it’s a case of growing older, or maybe I have lower expectations,” he explained. “In France recently, I drank some nice Côtes du Rhône wine with a fairly dreadful typographic dress. I was less bothered than I used to be; after all, it’s the wine that’s important!”
Barcode = art
Barcodes are what makes the world go round. If it weren't for them society as a whole would probably collapse into anarchy.
And they can be pretty fun to play with too...
Countries are brands too.
And flags are as recognizable as many brands around the world. The Stars & Stripes, the Maple Leaf, the Union Jack, the Hammer & Sickle to name but a few.
But context is key. So what happens when you reduce a flag to its constituent colours and show them as ratios to the size and proportion.
Well wonder no longer.
Shahee Ilyas is a designer who has tweaked context and colour and made a very interesting site.
Information isn't just beautiful.
It's gorgeous.
Information is Beautiful is a site that presents data and information with some rather interesting and in some cases tasty design. From gender splits on social networking sites to disease rates around the world and from representations of the political spectrum to competing millennial prophesies, they've got some lovely graphics.
Definitely worth a look.
Amaze your clients and be the envy of art directors everywhere
Have you ever been in a situation where you absolutely, positively must capture the colour the client likes, or else?
But how do you do that if the colour is on a wall, or someone's dog, or a subtle shade that has magically appeared on the craft table during a shoot?
Fear not friends, technology is here to make your lives even more awesome than they already are.
It's the Color Picker Pen - like having Photoshop tools, in your very own hands.
"What if?" package design
What if marijuana were legal? What if you could pick up a dozen joints, pre-rolled, at the corner store. It might happen, recent trending is showing an increased acceptance of marijuana and projections for tax revenues show it paying off a whole lot of deficits.
But more importantly, how would it be packaged?
That's the question print magazine asked in their article "Building a Better Baggie"
If it ain't broke, don't f**k with it.
Pepsi vs. Coke.
Bear in mind that Pepsi spent a mind-boggling amount of money to come up with their newest iteration...
it's a car, no wait, it's a font, no, it's both
A Belgian ad agency came up with a very novel way to promote the launch of the new Toyota iQ compact in Europe. They engaged typographers and a driver to film the car in motion and custom design a font around the captured images. Working together, the type geeks, the driver and other assorted creative types (probably wearing black) met up and essentially built a font out of skids, curves and parallel parking.
Rememberance and design go hand in hand
July 7 is a very emotional day for many people in London. Now, two years after indiscriminate bombings of innocent civilians, a memorial has been designed.
Here is a link to an interview with the typographer who helped on the design and construction of the memorial.
Design isn't all packaging and marketing, wayfinding and entertainment.
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