Archive for January, 2010

A brilliant animation entitled ‘Outside the box’ from Joseph Pelling. Oh how it made me chuckle, enjoy.

Via Dion Star

I made you look!* But now that you’re here why not take a look around.

Here’s one of the reasons I came up with that make me ever so slightly different. A good old business card and hand written note sent via the heroic royal mail (Letter beats email any day.)

Emily Gosden’s defamatory article for the Times Online has ruffled more than a few feathers in the design world, prompting this response and enlightening discussion from Design Assembly. A great response and one that probably took a lot longer to write than Gosden’s article.

Personally I find her article ill informed, poorly written and hypocritical relying heavily on mostly irrelevant figures seemingly  plucked from the air with no real breakdown of what exactly said costs covered. It’s funny that the same ‘average brained’ civil servants that could easily do the job of an experienced designer were probably the same ones that accepted these large design budgets?

Here’s some of the highlights.

“…yet one department admitted that it could produce logos in-house for £648….” & “…Last year it spent £14,000 on a new logo that, when viewed sideways, resembled a sexually aroused man.”

Clearly, you don’t get ’sideways sexually aroused man’ for just £648.

The Tory MP Greg Hands said: “Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”

Yes Greg Hands, surely any civil servant with an average brain can do all the jobs they currently outsource, equally well if not better, despite their complete lack of knowledge and training in those fields. In fact, the arrival of these above average brained ‘Super Civil Servants’ will surely bring about the demise of our industry (and just about every other one too) heralding the end of society as we know it.

I was asked by AKG Promotions to design a poster for an upcoming silent disco event, here’s what I came up with. I think we can all agree it’s extremely orange.

Check them out http://akgpromotions.com/ alternatively obey the poster and join them on facebook

Language is a strange beast, I’ve recently attempted to learn some basic Japanese Kanji as I’m very interested in other languages that use entirely different written systems from the latin alphabet, such as Kanji and Cyrillic, why you say? Well because of the interesting graphic opportunities that can occur between languages.

For a good example of this take a look at the UK Japan 2008 project on Johnsonbanks website or this eye article. Michael Johnson’s project to make a ‘phonetic typeface’ that English speakers can understand.

http://www.johnsonbanks.co.uk/

I came across a Japanese website which had this Kanji symbol for hito meaning person (correct me if I’m wrong) twice underlined as a hyperlink, which I saw as meaning bikini. I don’t think it can really be counted as one of the interesting graphic opportunities I was talking about but hey.

Here’s how this ridiculous misuse of an ancient typographic system might look on a T-shirt.

Now available to order from teepay click here.