Archive for the ‘visualisation’ Category
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Not so many designers draw now. The benefits of drawing as a language, a process, a means of working through problems are widely overlooked. The idea that drawing is for making pictures inhibits creativity.
From primary school on, drawing is seen as something you either can or cannot do and is permanently welded to a sterile idea of ‘picture-making’. Observational, note-taking and thought-processing drawing has no place and the innate perception and creativity common to most young children (I have seen primary school sketchbooks to shame some illustration degree students) is rarely understood / encouraged. Where creativity survives education, degree teaching’s first task is to remove a decade and a half’s conditioning. Inhibition sees students of design timidly sketching an idea in 4H pencil, more concerned with what onlookers might think than than generating more ideas.
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Tags: creativity, design process, drawing, problem-solving
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Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
Monotoype UK recently staged Pencil to Pixel: a small-but-perfectly-formed exhibition about the development of typeface production—well worth the minor trek to its slightly off-grid Wapping location.
The decades of change between hot metal and digital production could easily make you overlook the extent of labour and craft that is still involved in bringing type to use. Type may be surface design but it has more in common with furniture or other product design in its mix of essential functional and aesthetic requirements than with most of the graphic design it serves. The sheer beauty of the pencil-drawn curves of pre-digital type masters is something I had seen before but almost forgotten. In the exhibition the evidence of mid-20th century type impressed most, the physically less present display of digital era work on show suffering by comparison: pencils 1, pixels 0. Anyhoo—all of it is better seen than waffled on about. Below are some snaps of things that caught my eye:
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Tags: graphic design, inspiration, legibility, product design, typography
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Monday, September 24th, 2012
Liberty Regent Street: above a formal frieze, three stone figures apparently chat and watch the shoppers far below
Big city retail causes curious human behavior. Tourist & architects excepted, no-one inclines their gaze more than a degree or two above the horizontal, as if the world ceases to exist above four metres. Below that height, pushy product displays and shouty fascias browbeat the passer-by. But beyond this retail flat earth lies another dimension of visual enjoyment, as anyone who has noticed what’s going on at the very top of Liberty’s Regent Street façade will confirm.
One of the pleasures of London used to be driving around it (back when ‘driving in London’ was still a thing), low winter sun unexpectedly spotlighting a great building / detail. You can of course still discover gems of unsuspected above-the-line architecture on foot. Incomplete or invisible at ground level, how great must these buildings have looked when they were whole, before they were sawn off at the knees by the local Vodafone / Costa / M&S?
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Tags: architecture, decorative tradition, design, graphic design, innovation, problem-solving, retail, urban environment, visual noise
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Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (photographed badly on an iPhone)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. It is now so dominant that physical design is arguably being usurped by graphic design as the driver of functionality. Apple’s record in graphics is mostly strong (I always liked their 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’ iPhone / iPad apps homescreens, once fresh and friendly now seem more irritating than helpful. 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 hidden from view by the bumper required for practical everyday operation), but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make Apple products seem behind the curve for the first time. This was thrown into sharp relief for me by the wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design (above) is restrained and elegant and there is a crisp customisable tile-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I’m envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever. This is good news – competition raises the game and there is no reason why Apple must have a monopoly on good design. The Windows phone has let in some UI fresh air and is making Apple look just a bit… stuffy.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, apps, graphic design, information design, iPhone, maps, 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 tradition, decorative type, 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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