I recently rediscovered The Art of the Title Sequence site, which is a goldmine of inspiration for anyone who needs to animate type, and I’m surprised I’ve not posted about it before. Title sequences are remarkable in that they have to fulfil some important roles in a film - they’ve got to tell you who made it, who’s in it, who paid for it, in a way that complements and introduces the film (but is clearly not the film itself, so you can get all your arrangements with popcorn/noisy snacks/coughing/sneezing, etc. out of the way), and all in a short a time as possible. Those requirements provide a fertile ground for all sorts of creativity, to the extent that the title sequence becomes a genre in itself: a very specific kind of animated short; an animated infographic if you like. So we have sites like this one for people like me to trawl through and drool over lovely examples of typography, lettering and iconography. First up, one of my favourite films, Bullitt.
Isn’t that just perfect? See it as part of the full sequence, here.
When I first saw this sequence I was scrabbling for my camera to try and get some shots of the lettering, but didn’t manage to get much worthwhile. The typeface is just beautiful, and I’ve always wanted a copy of it, but after a lot of investigation it turns out there isn’t an exact digital version of it. There’s a very, very similar one called XXII Black Block, but you’ll notice that it has slanted terminals on the E and T - almost there, but not quite.
I love the way the lettering leaves a ‘hole’ in the current scene, which expands to show the next one.
Next up is Stranger Than Fiction, a film I’ve never seen but might get around to watching one day just because the title sequence is interesting. It looks like it could be great or dreadful, and nowhere in between. Either way, the title sequnce is great and makes playful use of type, instructional iconography and labelling to enhance the story. I like the way the labels for everything definitely feel like part of the main character’s world, his obsessions, so real to him, made visible (and real) in the world for us to see.
This next one is not so much about the type. It’s not really about the type at all. In fact, I hate the type in this one. The exploded diagrams are lovely and the way they tie in with the live footage of the Farnborough Air Show is highly compelling, so to have this clumsy uninspired type stuck over it is a real disappointment and a wasted opportunity. I’m including it in my favourites because you can imagine how nice it could be if a typographer had been given a chance to polish it up before delivery:
Nice graphics, shame about the type. Full sequence here.
Gradually coming back to nice type with this one - I remember, years ago, playing around with analogue electronics to draw letters and simple shapes on oscilloscope screens and though it was pretty painful it was satisfying when it worked. The animations in Tron were done this way, with the flat surfaces coloured in later by hand. The end sequence for Iron Man deliberately references these very first vector graphics with these CAD-style animations, with the type done perfectly to match:
A still from the Iron Man end sequence. Full animation here.
Next I’ve got this one which is just good solid no-frills typesetting, enlivened with great use of a close-up and, again, those vector graphics:
And last of all, a very satisfying and clever use of 3D to form the names and titles by constantly changing the camera angle. I imagine it would be a nice way to tell a short story, as I found myself watching it and reading the words quite comfortably. It’s paced very well, and the fascination you develop for how the letters come together makes it an entrancing experience:
I’ve been merrily tracing some of these Notgeld that Design Observer linked to last week. I could quite happily spend months tracing all these, they’re so beautiful. But what, I hear you cry, are Notgeld? Well to answer that, I’m going to quote from Wikipedia:
Notgeld (German for “Emergency Money” or “necessity money”) was special money issued primarily in Germany and Austria to deal with economic crisis situations such as a shortage of small change or hyperinflation. It was not issued by the central bank (Reichsbank) but by various other institutions, e.g. town savings banks, municipalities, private and state-owned firms. It was therefore not legal tender, but rather a mutually-accepted means of payment in a particular locale or site.Wikipedia
I knew about the money issued during the hyperinflation period (and posted about it too), but not about these ones. The big giveaway that this isn’t hyperinflation currency is the small denomination of the notes - 25 Pfennigs! On a banknote! The fifty pfennig one I had to trace because of that F, and unsurprisingly it’s taken me rather a lot longer that many other tracings I’ve done. The lettering was originally hand done, with all the interesting variations that implies, so no copy’n'paste shortcuts for me!
Wandsbek 25 Pfennig note, traced from this original. Click the image above for a larger version.
I love that F so much. Click the image for a larger version, or see the original here.
The local currency idea reminds me a little of a project near me, The Lewes Pound, designed to encourage local commerce in and around (you guessed it) Lewes, in East Sussex. The Lewes Pound notes are rather nice things, but I think a lot of these old German notes are actually beautiful. Indeed (and I’m basing this on Wikipedia again) Notgeld were issued for a few years after the need for them had subsided because people liked to collect them so much. I suppose having a lot of people collecting and framing your notes instead of spending it must affect the money flow a bit, so perhaps making money too beautiful isn’t a good idea. I guess that explains the designs of the US dollar and the Euro then. Ahem.
Sigurdur Armannsson has published his type-related RSS feeds, and it’s quite a list of typographic goodness. I already follow quite a few of these, but I’ve added a fair few more of these to my RSS feed, and the only thing stopping me adding the whole lot is the fear I’ll never do anything but read them for the rest of my life. I’m honoured to say I make the list, so if you like the kind of things I write about, you may find a bunch of other things that interest you here too. Go and look!
I was mailed a link to these scans of tape cassette inlays the other day. It’s fascinating seeing some of the designs again - most of them look like they’re late 70s and early 80s, but I’m sure I had a few of these in my late-80s “taping things” phase.
I have of course traced a few of my favourites, though there’s plenty more than these four worth looking at. The EMITAPE one is lovely - I recall friends of mine with flashy computers had a few of these. The AGFA one is interesting - I naturally assumed the type would be Helvetica or Univers, but closer inspection (the reason why I trace) reveals a rather different balance to the letterforms. The ‘6’ is rather odd - it looks like it’s about to topple over backwards. The positively psychedelic Happy Sound one was incredibly pleasurable to trace; I think only four points in the whole of that funky set of curves is not at extrema - it’s lovely when that happens. I’ve put a closeup of the patterns on the right (or above, if you’re reading this on RSS).
I saw Airside’s great brand/logo system for Greenpeace’s Airplot! campaign (against the new runway at Heathrow Airport) the other day, and today Bauldoff linked to more information on the development of it. I love the development process for the typeface used in the identity, printed in acrylic paint with letters cut out of corrugated cardboard; the corrugations in the cardboard brilliantly emulate the ridged appearance of ploughed fields, and creases and imperfections bring to mind the parch marks brought about by underlying geology (or archaeology!) you can only see from the air. The whole system is very flexible, and as you can see from the examples, allows for a wide range of messages to be created and set while maintaining the strong visual identity of the campaign.
All in all, it’s a great idea, well executed. The campaign itself is interesting and rather amusing, it certainly caught my imagination when I first heard of it. Basically, Greenpeace bought a field in the middle of where the new Heathrow runway is going to be, and is parcelling it off and selling it to potentially hundreds of people worldwide, with the idea that the Government won’t easily be able to track down the owners to force a compulsory purchase. It may not prevent the building of the runway, and may not even slow it down very much (the original purchase could be identified as being legally ‘vexatious’ and nullified) but it brings the protest to light in a positive, clever and interesting way that is likely to appeal to the public. Other recent airport expansion protests have focussed on inconveniencing the travelling public, which, while you might say it’s justified in highlighting the importance of the issue, isn’t going to get much support from said travelling public.
I got sent a link to Spacesick’s photostream this morning, mainly for these fantastic ‘novelisation’ covers of movies. I especially love the Close Encounters one. That, and the Temple of Doom one I want as posters. It’s the attention to detail that makes them special, the scuffmarks on the covers, the ‘repairs’ with yellowed Sellotape, as well as the quality of illustration. Great stuff. Make sure you have a look further back in the photostream too, as there’s plenty of great work in there, like this, and this. Delicate souls, easily offended by sketches of partial nudity, might not want to click that last one.
I’ve had the basic kernel for this article sitting around since 2007, when I was sat around recovering from an injury and needed regular doses of painkillers to make it comfortable. I was surrounded by the empty boxes of these painkillers (hey, who thinks of cleaning when injured?) and started thinking about the ‘brand space’ of consumer drugs. Writing about the Arabic logos and brands reminded me that I’d not finished the article, so here goes.
Years ago I’d read how there’s a great deal of conservatism in various industries, and especially the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector when it comes to designing packaging and logos. The basic idea is that when your Average Punter goes into a shop to buy, say, bathroom cleaner, he will span the shelves for the specific and familiar constellation of bright colours, dramatic lettering and packaging shape that would identify the product type. It is the combination of all these things, taken in at a glance, that helps us quickly identify bathroom cleaner from, say, furniture polish even though they may share some aspects (in this case, packaging type and lettering, but not the colour range). For the designer of such packaging, coming up with something new and different enough to get noticed without being so different as to move it out of the visual category entirely is the difficult job, rewarding to some and incredibly constraining to others. I follow The Dieline regularly, and while there’s a steady flow of new and often beautiful products and rebrands, FMCG packaging design seemingly only evolves through a glacially-slow process; any slight innovations that improve the success of one product are adopted by them all until they’re all exactly the same again.
Returning to the design of pharmaceutical packaging, it seems that for branded consumer drugs, the category has a checklist that all packaging must follow. It must scream from the shelf with bold and oblique sans-serif type, bright oranges and reds against dark blues and greens (or silver metallic, if you have the budget) and have at least one swoosh, arrow or starburst, but preferably all three. If you can squeeze an airbrushed diagram of the body in there, then so much the better, especially if you can put a warm orange glow on the medicine’s intended body part. Before you know it you’ll have something perfect for any discerning pharmacy shelf, and there’s no chance someone will mistake your box of headache pills for ground coffee. That’s your brand-name drugs anyway.
Similar enoough
Most supermarkets have a range of common remedies with deliberately plain and understated packaging, and like any range of products identifies itself to the consumer from the shelves with its own signature characteristic; usually a blaze of unadorned white semigloss cardboard. Own-brand stuff can be gloriously simple and often highly compelling, especially when some real thought has been put into it, as in Target’s ClearRx packaging system for example. Other times, own-brand stuff just looks like the brand-name product, type styles, layout, colours and all. In the UK, Boots had a beautifully simple and clear packaging style for its range of own-brand medicines, but recently its ibuprofen has taken on the red-on-silver-with-a-swoosh look, very similar to the brand-name version, Nurofen. From a designer’s point of view it’s disappointing, but there is a very good reason for it in that for most people branded products simply work better. In making their ibuprofen look like the brand-name version, they’re actually boosting the analgesic effect:
In a British study, 835 women who regularly used analgesics for headache were randomly assigned to one of four groups. One group received aspirin labeled with a widely advertised brand name (“one of the most popular” analgesics in the United Kingdom that had been “widely available for many years and supported by extensive advertising”). The other groups received the same aspirin in a plain package, placebo marked with the same widely advertised brand name, or unmarked placebo. In this study, branded aspirin worked better than unbranded aspirin, which worked better than branded placebo, which worked better than unbranded placebo. Among 435 headaches reported by branded placebo users, 64% were reported as improved 1 hour after pill administration compared with only 45% of the 410 headaches reported as improved among the unbranded placebo users. Aspirin relieves headaches, but so does the knowledge that the pills you are taking are “good” ones.Annals of Internal Medicine
And, to make it clearer that this is a more of a symptom of being human rather than a modern result of sophisticated marketing practices, how about this quote (from the same page) from Socrates:
[The cure for the headache] was a kind of leaf, which required to be accompanied by a charm, and if a person would repeat the charm at the same time that he used the cure, he would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would be of no avail.Socrates, according to Plato
Returning to the original example of bathroom cleaner, could this cultural placebo effect apply to more than just pharmaceuticals? I think it most certainly does, and that we usually suspect it when we compare the prices of brand-name and own-brand products on the supermarket shelf, and yet, and I include myself in this too, we so often end up buying the big brands. If a style of packaging, labelling and use of colour identifies the product category, then surely the one that is most identifiable, most familiar, has the best marketing, is the acme of that category, the best one? So unless we have a strong reason not to, and reasoning implies some analytical thought, we buy it.
Extending beyond groceries, we can see this culturally-imposed brand conformity in almost any market sector. Something that I had in mind when thinking of this article in 2007 were the Abbey National rebrands of 2003 and 2005. In September 2003, Abbey National adopted a soft, squishy, pastel-coloured brand identity created by Wolf Olins, and started trading under the all-lowercase moniker ‘abbey’. The new tagline, “Turning banking on its head” signalled the intent of the dramatic change in the brand, and the whole process certainly got Abbey a lot of media attention, but:
In marketing terms, however, the rebrand was a clear disaster. Last year, pre-tax profits in Abbey’s core retail business shrank by 20% to £814m compared with 2003 and there was another big slump in market share. New mortgage lending is also down year on year from 9.9% to 3.1%, reducing its overall mortgage share from 10.7% to 8.6%.Ian Fraser
Of course, it is unlikely that the rebrand caused all of that. The rebranding itself came about to a large extent because the bank was already in trouble, but it’s pretty clear that it didn’t turn banking on its head, and more importantly it didn’t bring them any of the kind of success they needed. In fact, it was only a year and a half later that Abbey was bought by Spain’s largest bank, Santander, and the whole brand identity was unceremoniously ditched. The Abbey name is now set in Santander’s typeface and style, placed next to Santander’s flame logo, with Santander’s colours, and soon, I suspect, will be itself replaced with Santander’s own name too. For various reasons, Abbey did a lot better after being bought out, but the thing about the Santander brand is that it looks like a bank, and that’s important. If a bank looks like a bank, we treat it like a bank. I would say we trust it like a bank, but this is early 2009 and the word ‘trust’ and ‘bank’ don’t seem to go together very well anymore. But still, the principle holds - things need to look like what we expect them to look like; there’s a contract of trust associated with brands and you break that contract at your peril.
What does the McDonald’s logo look like in Arabic? Or Yves Saint Laurent? Burger King? Rolex? Baskin Robbins? Well, now you can find out because Brand New linked to these two articles by Jason of Graphicology showing Arabic language versions of international brands: one for logos and another for packaging.
The ones that are really faithful interpretations are fascinating, they really highlight what it is about the logo and packaging that identifies the brand - the Mountain Dew, Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins ones are particularly successful in this regard. The Subway one is so close to the original that at a glance you could miss the fact that it’s in Arabic. Others bear no apparent relation to the original logo, even though you’d think they could be easily redone in Arabic. The Calvin Klein one in particular is baffling - surely it would be a straightforward exercise to letter a short name in Arabic to look like Futura Book? Indeed, there is a version of the face called Bukra, which so far only exists in an extra bold weight, but still, it shows it can be done, and very well too. The Yves Saint Laurent one is a little closer to the parent, but again, not so much.
Comparing the originals to the Arabic versions, it’s the luxury clothing brands where the logos diverge the most, and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) that are the most faithful. This might be because the luxury brand customers are nearer the top of the social scale, are more international and therefore more likely to recognise the Latin logo than those who buy washing powder and groceries. With that assumption, it would therefore be more important to accurately translate the brand image for the FMCG market than for luxuries. Perhaps. Having said that, it’s the Tide packaging that got my attention, and given that Brand New also used a picture of it I’m not alone in thinking that it’s one of the best, design-wise. It’s great in English, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen Arabic lettering quite so exuberant; artistic, inspiring, beautiful, yes, but this is pure teeth-jarring kitsch. Fab. I have of course redrawn my own version of it. Click the image for a wallpaper-sized version.
You know when you see something mundane and everyday in a completely new light? When you see something afresh that you’ve never paid attention to? Well last week I got this envelope and for some reason the franking mark caught my eye. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s so crisp and sharp or whether it’s the neat alignment to the edges of the envelope, but it just made me look again.
One thing that’s a bit special is how the printed “Great Britain” on one side of the square balances the “Postage Paid” on the other. I’ve found (often to my professional disappointment) that it’s rare for two phrases to be similar enough in length that you can do that, so it’s a nice little detail. The roundel with ‘Newton Abbot’ in it is rather pleasant too, and I’m trying to think back but I’m sure the normal Post Office frank is considerably plainer than that. Anyway, it’s just a pleasant little thing that caught my eye the other day - a nice bit of purely functional design, and part of the iconography of the state.
One of these days I’ll write about this tracing things compulsion I seem to have. A few people have asked me to elaborate on it, and I will. Thing is, I fear it’ll end up being a mammoth article and I want to give it proper attention, so until then, I procrastinate, by tracing more things. One thing that I’m sure I’ll write about is the temptation to ‘improve’ the original design and lettering. I normally avoid it just so that I can understand the original more clearly, but as I describe below, sometimes I have the impulse to re-imagine the design.
Coudal (I think) linked to this great collection of travel-related designs, which is full of beautiful and inspiring examples of lettering and illustration. I’m still working on a couple more, but I’ve just completed these two. The first is a brochure in Czech advertising Vienna. The text, very loosely interpreted, comes across as, “Vienna, for any season” (you could also say “Visit Vienna, in any season”, perhaps).
“Travel brochure to Vienna (Vídnĕ in Czech), circa 1934. Signed Steyrermühl, Wien. Published by the Foreign Tourism Bureau, City of Vienna”. Description and original courtesy of David Levine, from here, my tracing on the right.
The re-imagined design, for a possible poster.
I love the atmosphere of the image; the street shaded and dark, with St Stephen’s Cathedral bathed in warm evening sunlight. It’s just the kind of scene that would enthrall any tourist, and because it’s an illustration it can be happily idealised and stylised to perfection. I love also the way that the heavy traffic is shown too, perhaps as an indication that this is a up-to-date bustling city with all the conveniences the modern tourist of yesterday would require? Tourist brochures today avoid showing traffic at all if they can help it, instead you see ancient buildings connected by gardens, or, say, an open pedestrianised plaza. Funnily enough, this is exactly what is in front of the cathedral today.
After I traced the brochure, I realised that I would like to modify it a bit to create a poster, or at least something less like a brochure, while keeping the same sense of the era and original intention of the design. I trimmed the red border and rearranged the type, being careful not to ‘over-perfect’ it - there is something special and arresting about the slight wonkiness of the type on these old prints, something I’m trying to keep. The new design is just to the right here. Click it for a larger version.
The second one I’ve traced is this odd, but appealing, brochure for the Deutsche Luftpost. It shows three planes in front of the German heraldic eagle against a strangely flat but stormy-looking sky. The planes interest me by having no apparent means of propulsion - normally in illustrations there is a sketchy circle to show where the propellors are, but here, nothing. The eagle is also interesting by having such a prominent tongue. I looked up other examples of the emblem, and unsurprisingly I ended up with a set of images very similar to the ones I saw while researching the coat of arms of Vienna (at the top of this article). None had such a dramatically large tongue though…
“Brochure for ‘Deutsche Luftpost Das Schnellste Verkehrsmittel auf Weite Entfernungen’, circa 1930”. Description and original courtesy of David Levine, from here, my tracing on the right.
