I was having a look through Behance’s Typography Served website and found this. It looks like it’s in Jihad Lahham’s portfolio (well, I think it does) but on his site there’s a post with pics and nothing else about it. Need info!

I think I saw this one on Coudal Partners, an ongoing photo study of London shop fronts. What fascinates me is the range of type and typography on the shop signs. Some are good, some are strange, some are very strange, and there are quite a lot that are pretty dreadful, all making up what I suppose you could call London Small Shop Vernacular.

Nice bit of signage archaeology on this one.

From time to time I’ve thought of doing this in Brighton, there’s quite a range of shop fronts, and they seem to change quite frequently too. I saw a lovely roundel on the window of a burger takeaway announcing the availability of halal meat, and it got me wondering whether there are any sort of recognised marks for halal and kosher, and it turns out there are. Quite a few of them in fact, and not really very consistent. I guess if you’re sure no-one is actually going to out-and-out lie, these are all consistent enough:

The idea of being ‘consistent enough’ reminds me of other logos for food labelling. There’s the ‘v’ for vegetarian, and sometimes vegan, food - something you see a lot in Brighton. There’s also the Vegetarian Society logo which often gets used by food suppliers whether they have permission to do so or not, but again, no consistent mark for the whole thing. Perhaps with some things there’s no need for consistency because the truth of what the symbol claims can be easily checked, but with other things there definitely is a need. For example, the demand for fairly traded products has led to the development of an official Fair Trade logo. However, there are lots of other ones that imply lovely, fair, environmentally and socially responsible origins, but have so few checks and balances as to be essentially meaningless - greenwashing in other words.

This is fantastic. I think I saw it here, linked from Design Observer first, though quite a few sites have linked to it too, but that’s no reason not to link to it again. It’s got some beautiful touches in it, with a gentle kind of humour and some reasonably groan-worthy puns. I love the little joke about the perfect proportions of the dot, playing off the classic ‘36-24-36’ hourglass proportions supposedly ideal at the time for women. The calipers are great, with the little hearts instead of arrows for the dimensions, and just demanded to be redrawn:

A few sites I’ve seen it on have lamented that things like this aren’t made anymore because it wouldn’t be popular, that people would be afraid of anything that mentions ‘hard stuff’ like mathematics. Perhaps they’re right, and maybe it is really anti-intellectualism preventing stuff like this being made today, but the animation is hardly a mathematical treatise. The only mentions of anything mathematical are the title and a few puns scattered here and there, ending in the rather nice, “To the vector go the spoils”.

The real point of this animation is the animation itself. It’s certainly not the story: a simple morality tale on the importance of hard work and discipline (and also, avoiding narrow thinking) to achieve your desire; in this case, a remarkably shallow and feckless sounding creature who is easily wowed by flashy glitz and glamour. Perhaps these days we might wonder whether that was worth all the poor line’s effort; “You can do better than that” we might say.

So the animation seems like a kind of showreel, a portfolio piece, beautifully done of course, but more remarkable in that it was released by the studio commercially. I have a little theory that it might have been released with the new technology of colour TV in mind - the audience at the time was very small and would have consisted of those who could afford it; professional, college-educated people? That might explain the choice of story too.

Pascal Blanchet has some great illustrations and artworks on his site, well worth a look. Follow a few links and you get to Drawn & Quarterly, with more of his (and many others) graphic novel work, which is definitely worth a look.

ISO 50 posted about the Taschen book, “East German Design from 1949 - 1989”, with some photos of the inside. There’s a fantastic ‘z’ logo on the cigar box, which of course I had to trace. I’m thinking of getting the book, as East German design shows how creativity can flourish even when resources are limited, and as I found when writing this piece, the resources were often very limited indeed.

Antonio Carusone mailed me to announce his new project, The Grid System, a site (obviously enough) about grid systems. Now, I don’t normally post about things from mailouts or press releases, but since I’m particularly partial to a good grid and I’ve already found a couple of useful things on this site that I’ve found interesting and even bookmarked, I reckon I’d end up writing about this anyway. So, go and have a look.

What did I bookmark though? Well, Syncotype for one. It’s a bookmarklet, i.e. a bit of javascript you can bookmark and then run on any page you’re viewing, that overlays a baseline grid on your page. I have an 18px baseline grid on this site, which often ends up being broken by images I post not having a multiple of that as their height. It’s certainly something I could solve with a bit of extra javascript of my own (or even something server side) to ensure the height of a containing element of an image is indeed a multiple of 18px or a round number of ems, but I’ve not got around to it yet.

The 18px baseline grid. If you have default text settings in your browser, and use Syncotype with an 18px grid, this should all line up. Should.

Also, there’s the problem of whether such automatic measures are even appropriate. For a while I cropped and trimmed all images to a set of heights to match the baseline, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit the image and I found adding extra padding to the container (a paragraph tag in this case) actually spoiled the vertical rhythm of the page. I decided that as this site is a single column that it would be the apparent vertical rhythm that was important, rather than the real one. I wonder how other people solve the problem? Or even if they do…

I’ve been following this series of articles by Johnson Banks about their Art from Barrels project for Glenfiddich. The aim of the project was to get across the length of time it takes to make a barrel of Glenfiddich Single Malt, and the end results are pretty interesting. I haven’t got all that much to say about it, especially as the articles explain it all pretty well, other than to say I’ve discovered I like sandblasted letters in charred wood:

Funny how coincidences arise. I found both Mario Feese’s Air Lines and Chris Harrison’s Internet Maps at about the same time and was struck by how recognisable the continents are, and, as I’m fond of maps I thought I’d compare the two images. On the Air Lines map, most of the continents are rendered as a ghostly but fairly accurate outlines, with South America rendered as a beautiful abstraction, right to its tip. The Internet Map is obviously somewhat different, with almost all the connections between cities in rich countries; Africa barely exists and the tip of South America is shown with a single faint line, whereas North America and Europe are smothered in a riot of lines. I overlaid the two maps onto each other and I noticed an interesting thing about the Internet Map, which I describe below.

So, to align the maps I needed to use various groups of cities that appeared in both maps; using the southern hemisphere to get the horizontal scale right - there are sharp points for cities in South America, southern Africa and Australia, and in the northern hemisphere I used San Francisco, LA and Tokyo to get the vertical scale. Thankfully, both maps are using the same projection.

Everything pretty much lines up nicely, except there’s that node in the Gulf of Guinea which I originally thought might be some satellite uplink affair at Sao Tomé, maybe a huge data haven I’d never heard about. However, after lining up a map of Africa with both maps it turns out to be nowhere near any land at all. In fact, when I was trying to mark the point on Google Maps, I realise this big data interchange point (the biggest in Africa!) is at 0.0°N, 0.0°W, which is a suspiciously default sounding location. Maybe in the data that Chris Harrison used there are a few unknowns, with their locations set to null, and these connections should be shown elsewhere? If they were removed, Africa would be even more ghostly.

Two of my favourite animations of all time are the advert H5 did for Areva, and their Royksopp video. I can watch them over and over again; they’re so good. So I went to the H5 website recently to see if there was anything else they’d done like that, and found the video for Alex Gopher. I’m sure I’ve seen it before somewhere, but it was a long time ago and I hadn’t made the connection it was done by H5 too. It’s available to view on YouTube, but you can see it on H5‘s (all flash) website by clicking ‘films’, then ‘clips’, then ‘alex gopher’.

Anyway, I like things like this, where the label is the thing itself, and it reminds me of the National Geographic trailers for Seconds from Disaster that I linked to before. I’m thinking it would be amusing to remake Powers of Ten in this style - zooming into the word ‘galaxy’ to see it made up of widely spaced words like ‘star’ and ‘nebula’, and so on, down to the sub-atomic level, with everything its own label.

Screen captures from ‘The Child’

Screens from the Areva advert, the Royksopp video, and this rather good public information film by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Talking of labels becoming the object itself, there was a short film, I think on the Sci-Fi channel, about a post-apocalyptic future where the apparently normal, happy, consumerist lifestyle everyone leads is in fact an illusion. There are many layers of unpleasant illusions underneath the ‘nice’ one to stop people trying to break free and see the real world. I particularly remember the ‘real world’ in the film as being made up of cardboard boxes labelled with the name of the object it was supposed to be, and a big barcode (the name set in Helvetica, natch), with one scene showing a load of cardboard boxes labelled as ‘Black Leather Briefcase’ going through some device (gotta love sci-fi) and emerging fully-clad in the illusion of black leather briefcases. I’m sure the film is nowhere near as good or as profound as I remember it, but does anyone know what it was?

The whole thing. Click for a slightly larger version.

I was clearing up a load of saved links on my desktop and rediscovered this site about 56 Leonard. I saved it last week because of the rather nice typographic representation of the building on the site, which unfortunately flies past pretty fast and doesn’t appear to exist in any of the literature. Still, a few screengrabs and many refreshes later (horribly distorting their stats I’ve no doubt) I put together a decent resolution image of the whole thing. It’s not the prettiest building out there, but it does look like a fun, futuristic place to live, some of the apartments have remarkably large outdoor spaces, and it has an Anish Kapoor sculpture wedged under a corner of the building too. It’s a nice idea, and something that the initial animation does explain very well (the rendered videos on the site explain it too).

(Via cityofsound)