I was hunting for a link I’d omitted from a previous post and came across an old bookmark for these infographics (found originally via Chris Glass). I especially like the red tape one, and the map part of the tobacco one is great.

Drawn! the other day had a link to this treasure trove of retro illustrations, posters, books, covers, and pretty much everything else committed to print, and an on-link to the Mid-Century Illustrated Flickr pool. Looking through these is a bit like browsing ffffound, you keep finding things you want to keep links to… or just keep. I tend to want to redraw things, as I find it helps me understand how it was done a bit better and I often learn some new technique or style, or get inspiration for something else. I particularly liked the Black Pearl cover - it’s an engaging and compelling image, but made with just three colours. No halftones or tints either. I didn’t redraw this, I just used clean-up techniques to recreate it:

The Aircraft Propulsion Data Book is interesting as the curve appears smooth and aerodynamic, but under close examination it seems a bit… well, clumsy. Still, that’s the kind of thing that interests me - for example, when doing things like icons the details can seem crude and ugly up close but at their intended size provide useful (and subtle) clues on how to interpret the whole image.

Also in the sets of images are various examples of very nice typography, these two caught my eye in particular:

And linked from the Photo Lettering one, this beautiful, beautiful thing:

Then, finally, no collection of mid-century illustrations would be complete without at least one retro-futurist image, so here’s a fabulous subway illustration by Klaus Bürgle:

Just followed this link from Design Observer, to this great clock by Christiaan Postma. I daren’t think how long it took to work out. It’s made out of lots of smaller clockworks that all combine to spell the time. For a large part of the day though you’d be at a loss what time it is, say at half-five, so if you wanted to make it practical (why?) you could stick a big set of hands in front… but I like it the way it is. Watch the animation (page 3) to see it in action.

You know, when it comes to designing a logo that’s going to appear on documents, mousemats, brochures, you know: portable things, you really do have a duty to examine it from all angles. It also helps to get people in whose thought processes tend to the profane, because such people exist in great numbers ‘out there’ in the real world and will at a moment’s notice point out any even slightly lewd or coarse associations*. Also, perhaps develop a familiarity with iconographic representations of the human body, just in case your logo resembles such a figure. Say, like the Cerne Abbas Giant would be if the ancients fancied a more demonstrably explicit image…

Anyway, this logo for a British Government agency is quite hilarious, and I’m amazed they’re going ahead with it. Oh, and from the Register article that the Times sourced this from:

For the record, and in case you’d like to get your hands on a rebranded OGC mousemat, we gather staff have stripped the building of every example not nailed down, so check eBay later this week for your five-knuckle shuffle collectable.

* I have to state that I, of course, would never do such a thing. I blame the Times.

I’ve been checking this site periodically for quite a white now, it’s great to look through the updates when you’re in need of a bit of inspiration. Unusually for any site anywhere, many of the comments are good too, sometimes providing links to similar works and some good opinions. Either they moderate heavily or the site content means it doesn’t attract too many idiots.

I was catching up on Oh Joy! earlier today and saw this post about Lou Dorfman’s gastrotypographicalassemblage. Wow, what a piece. Cho links to a collection of images on Flickr (where else) showing some original photos of the piece in situ, and some of the work being done to restore it - more on that here. I love the restoration pictures, with all the letters laid out like that.

I would love to have something like this at home, or even at the office for that matter.

I came across Jörg Block’s site this morning from a link on Drawn! There are some fantastic illustrations and paintings on there; I love his clean, crisp, often isometric drawing style, and especially the page layouts:

Have a look at the paintings too, they remind me of the paintings of intersections and roadworks you’d see advertising the Glorious New Future in the 50s and 60s, but with a solitude and darkness that suggest the future isn’t all that glorious at all. Of course, he could just like architectural paintings and puts the figure in for scale?

This advert for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra has been linked from several design related sites (I can’t remember where I first saw it), but all of them were linking either to Zapp Internet or to YouTube, both of which only had low quality and low resolution versions. For animations with such fine detail as this has, you really need to see the clean, high-res version to appreciate it fully. So, a good few Google searches later, and I’ve found this article on Llámame Lola, which not only carries a link to the MPEG but appears to be the originator of the Zapp upload. My paraphrased translation of their description, which is, to be fair, a bit random:

Here’s a great commercial for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra made by the agency Euro RSCG Zürich. Recently the orchestra carried out a concert in Spain with the Swiss flautist Emmanuel Pahud, at the Palau de la Música in Valencia. For the opening night last week, Emmanuel Pahud performed with the ZKO under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, the Flute Concerto nº7 by Devienne.

Also, I was intrigued by the ZKO logo, and not immediately finding any PDFs containing a high-res version of that either, I decided to redraw it, as is my wont. It’s a beautiful logo, and probably is the subject of much jealousy by other orchestras.

You may need to download VLC to play the video from Llámame Lola as Quicktime claims it’s not a valid video file. Go figure.

A fair few sites have linked to this recently, but I’ve only just got around to watching it and I can’t recommend it enough. As well as Fry’s flawless presentation of the story of Gutenberg and his invention, there are a few examples of nice lettering to pause the video for too. Mention of the Gutenberg Bible reminds me of this article, from a while back.

It’s the first time I’ve used iPlayer, as it’s the first time my internet connection has worked at a reasonable speed (thank you Virgin Media, it only took you years). I rather like the way its laid out, it’s a bit like my other site, which has looked like that for years, I hasten to add.

Also, for those of you who’ve ever watched the original TV series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, having Fry present this is just perfect; it’s like a chapter from the Guide itself.

Update: I hadn’t realised that people outside the UK had no iPlayer access at all. Kottke provided these links to a YouTube version in six parts, which unfortunately weren’t encoded to take into account the original widescreen format, so everyone looks a bit narrow: One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. They may be removed if the BBC requests it, however.

There’s a nice article on Cocoia Blog about the ‘pollution’ of various Mac OS X user interfaces by Helvetica. It’s worth a read, though I can’t resist excerpting this little bit, as it made me laugh:

Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the utterly mind boggling feature that it shows you calendar information on a computer screen with everyone’s favorite 1950 typeface for print, and prints these exact calendars on paper in Lucida Grande, a computer display font from this milennium. “Utterly backwards” might be an apt term for such misfit typography.