Thematically related to the previous post (i.e., being about illustration) is this beautiful piece of work, a linocut by Hubert Tereszkiewicz. He’s got a couple of pieces of linocut work on his site, and the detail and quality of them is incredible. Make sure to have a look at his other work too, I particularly like the Dr Strangelove poster.

Another serendipitous find, this time via Font Bureau on Twitter. The linked image, of a piece by Micah Lexier and Christian Bok, got me looking for some background on it, and more info on the artist himself, and through that I found this wonderful installation: I Am The Coin, a story from the viewpoint (apparently) of a coin, told in 20,000 coins attached in a grid to a wall, with no spacing or punctuation. The bottom half of the grid has the story in a conventional readable form, while the top half has the mirror image of the text. Wonderful stuff — I’m off to have a look for more of his work.

Below is the image that Font Bureau linked to, followed by a few from the I Am The Coin website. Lexier’s site is mostly ‘under construction’ but there are a few links to further information, and of course there’s always Google.

Update: The original image is by Jacklyn Atlas from this article by Booooooom.

Linked image from Font Bureau’s tweet.

Some ‘making of’ images from the I Am The Coin installation

While writing the previous post I noticed that Javier Garcia has quite a collection on Flickr of mid-century design, and has put up some of his own mid-century inspired work. There’s more info on his blog, but it’s also fun to browse through the pictures:

Found via Drawn, this post by Javier Garcia on his blog about the 1961 Sports Illustrated Book of Bridge. The book is illustrated with work by Jerome Snyder, whose work I’ve apparently often admired in the past, even though I didn’t know they were his. His pieces are dense with detail and (when printing allows) rich with colour — that he illustrated a book about bridge with playing-card inspired designs is pretty exciting; how did I not know about this before? I’ve managed to order a copy, so hopefully that’ll arrive soon in all its inspirational splendour and I’ll be able to take my own pictures — these I’ve nabbed from Garcia’s blog post:

Interestingly, Garcia has also featured a set of cards designed by the ceramicist Stig Lindberg that’s worth a look at, and also links to the Grain Edit article about those Jean David El Al cards (which inspired me to buy a set and post about it here).

Lettercult has posted an incredible collection of custom lettering projects by hundreds of lettering artists, all completed in 2010. There are so many projects that they’ve split the post across two days, and there are 33 (quite long) pages in each post. I’ve not had a chance to go through all of them yet, but the variety and the quality is remarkable — so much to look at! I’ve posted a few favourites below, one by David Croy, another by Jordan Jelev of The Fontmaker, and I’d be surprised if you’ve not seen her work already (but very worthwhile admiring again), a piece by Dana Tanamachi.

• Lettercult Best of 2010, Day 1
• Lettercult Best of 2010, Day 2

By David Croy

By Jordan Jelev of The Fontmaker

By Dana Tanamachi

Andy Clarke (aka @malarkey) tweeted a couple of links to Where The Danger Lives, a site on crime films, which has reviews and in-depth info on classic crime and noir films, studios, and recently, a countdown of the best posters used to advertise the films. Each poster has been restored and cleaned up so you can see it clearly (with links to a decent size larger version to look at) and an illuminating analysis of the design and how it fits the film. It’s all pretty impressive stuff so far (I’ve only read a few of the posts as of writing this), so go and take a look.

Three of the posters that caught my eye.

What would Das Kapital, The Iliad or Faust look like if they were printed on a single page? What about Macbeth? This set of four posters by All The World’s A Page can show you exactly that. Oddly, they’re simultaneously both compelling and repellent — the concept, the flow of text, the exposed structure (especially in Macbeth) and the beautifully consistent and even colour give you a sense of wow, look at that, while the sheer scale of them, the obvious difficulty in reading them feels intimidating, even slightly upsetting. Not too upsetting, I might add; I bought two as soon as I saw them. I can’t wait for them to actually print Ulysses too…

Found via Under Consideration’s For Print Only.

There are many examples of ‘animated typography’ out there, some of them are good, most of them are crap, and some just take you by surprise and are utterly brilliant. This one on Newgrounds, sent to me by a friend, fits the ‘utterly brilliant’ category, but for slightly different reasons than you might expect.

It’s an animation of a review of a game on the site, written by someone who, if we’re being charitable, isn’t a very careful typist. The animation itself (by Mick Lauer) is well done, with some nice touches — the pause to define ‘contrail’ and the ‘explain to me’ parts are particularly good — and Impact is a perfect choice for the subject matter, but what really makes it brilliant is the voice track. It was done by voice artist Deven Mack who I imagine has quite the career ahead of him. Well I hope he does.

Go and watch, and listen.

Advice To Sink In Slowly is a project set up in 2006 for graduates to pass on advice to first-year students when they arrive at university. Graduates design posters to illustrate their piece of advice, and each new student is given one at random — the idea being that each graduate now knows something they wish they’d known when they started, and that this is how to pass on that advice in a creative and welcoming way. It’s a great idea, there are some really good bits of advice in there — even the more obvious ones are cleverly illustrated so are made fresh and new. I wish I’d had some of these when I arrived at university.

A few people tweeted links to this brilliant collection of packaging redesigns by Antrepo — they’re done as an exercise to illustrate the idea of reducing the design of the labelling to its simplest form, while also showing an intermediary step of a ‘partially simplified’ design. It’s interesting the effect it has on the different products. Some gain a sense of being a premium, high-value product, while others start to resemble economy, basic versions. The Pringles packs look pretty basic; with the full-colour printing gone, the basic nature of the cardboard tube stands out, and with the simple black printing it looks like a supermarket own-brand or something bulk-bought by caterers. On the other end of the scale you have Nutella and the Schweppes drinks — both of them look like the kind of ‘artisanal’ packaging you’d see featured on the Dieline or similar targeted at people who want the same old stuff but to feel a bit special about buying it. And having said that, the Corn Flakes one is just great. It’s absolutely perfect — if I ate cereal then packaging like that would definitely have shelf appeal with that beautifully simple and stark lettering, and how. It reminds me a little of the General Mills Kix packaging, which I also like a lot.

Visit Antrepo’s site for more info and links to the full set.

Of course, packaging for most fast moving consumer goods is brightly coloured and covered in imagery for a reason — it’s to draw the eye and make its purpose, contents or intended use immediately obvious to the shopper. Without going into some kind of pop-psychology analysis of consumer habits, it’s interesting to think what the manufacturers are intending with each package. The simplified Mr Muscle one looks great, but on the original you can easily tell it’s for windows and tiles even without reading any of the words. Similarly for the Durex boxes, I’d hazard a guess and say the orange box contains flavoured ones — the word ‘select’ hardly makes that clear — again, the original packaging wins out.

The food ones all have some kind of serving suggestion (albeit a ridiculous one in the case of the Corn Flakes, I mean, that’s quite a tempest going in the bowl) designed to put the image of the food in your mind, a simple association that makes you more likely to buy it. The only one I think where that doesn’t happen is with the Schweppes bottles. The type is pretty small on the simplified one, but it’s a hell of a lot more legible than the original. Given that you’re likely to see bottles like these in a fridge behind a bar, you’re going to be hard-pressed to read the label and form an idea in your mind that maybe you’d want mandarin as the mixer in your drink, as opposed to orange juice, say. You’re going to look and see confusing labels all done up with sparkles and images of bubbles, and not know if it’s soda and plain old OJ in them or something more special. You’d just end up asking for something generic, and end up (in a lot of British pubs at least) with some rank pre-mix out of a tap on the bar. I could mention at this point that Red Bull might be considered drinkable by some, and therefore a food. It’s not, but it is easily recognisable in a behind-the-bar fridge, which tells you something about British pubs and the drinking culture they encourage, but that’s an entirely different rant.

So yes, beautifully simple packaging is a wonderful idea, but I doubt we’ll see many big manufacturers opting for it, sadly.