Posts Tagged ‘signage’

letters from Rome

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

For the first time this century I got to spend a few days in Rome. In the throes of elections for Mayor, Regional Head, Premier and Pope, the city seemed more than usually disconnected—but the timelessly great stuff is still very visible and a tangible sense of community endures. Still seemingly on the edge of collapse, little has changed. Slow it goes.

Corruption and chaos condemns Rome to minimal progress and drives its children abroad to find work—but also stops the past being swept away by development and keeps the eternal city gloriously Starbucks-free. In the birthplace of the slow food movement the speed of change is close to zero. The only visible concession to this century, Zaha Hadid’s glorious MAXXI building is discretely tucked away well out of the centre and down a side street as if Rome is a little embarrassed by it. I made a third attempted pilgrimage to Trajan’s Column, ground zero for the western typographic tradition—on two previous occasions cloaked in restoration scaffolding, this time clean and clear but resolutely not open to the public despite facilities and signs insisting on the contrary. As ever, Rome is as frustrating as it is fabulous. I took snaps:

Sant Eustachio: literally the best coffee in Rome and almost certainly anywhere else. Unchanged since the 1930s.

coffee bar

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inside out: designing sustainable brands

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first.  So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand.  How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.

Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral.  Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill.  Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.

At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…

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ghost typography

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Over the past year or two one side effect of the Global Banking Brouhaha has been a lot of high street retail refitting, briefly uncovering glimpses of signage and typography hidden for many years.  If not quite as revelatory as Tutenkhamun’s tomb, these archaeological micro-events on the high street nonetheless show fascinating traces of old graphic design, rendered more intriguing by incompleteness.

Without nightvision cameras, bogus paranormal experts, or suggestible members of the public these glimpses reveal eerie traces of the past lives of type. In most cases the letters’ physical presence is long departed, their spirit inferred by shadows, fixing holes and accumulated detritus. Like some new kind of Kirlian photography the remaining traces hint at life and energy absent from the image.

Such marks are usually revealed fleetingly and soon cleaned up or built over. The above delicately shaded façade of a former Sketchleys branch is now sadly as pristine as its former customers’ shirts and suits.  So keep your eyes peeled. The truth is out there, but not for long. Further evidence may be revealed from time to time here.