We just spotted this rather tasty set of posters on the Trailers page on the Apple site. They’re the handiwork of Olly Moss, and are promoting the Rolling Roadshow We are all Workers film season, which is screening movies in locations where the films where set or shot. Great stuff.
So, the much heralded Cycle Hire Scheme bikes have finally docked, and the city’s streets were awash this morning with bloggers, journalists and twitterers (and a few actual commuters) giving them the once over. The general consensus seems to be that they’re well built and easy to ride; that there have been some inevitable teething troubles with the docking stations; and that the absence of a lock and a proper basket is a mistake.
Over at The Guardian, Justin McGuirk has accused the city’s mayor, Boris Johnson, of selling out by allowing Barclays to plaster their branding all over the bikes, as well as all over the Cycle Superhighways, the first of which have also just launched.
Our first thought was, woah, yep, the bikes suffer from having a corporate brand all over them, making them feel like some sort of private company bike fleet rather than actual public transport. How much more elegant would it be if they were simply branded as London Bikes?
They feel like yet another part of the incessant corporatisation of our city, joining the O2 Brixton Academy, the HMV Hammersmith Apollo, Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and so on. We get that companies want maximum exposure for their sponsorship dollar… but a little subtlety and humility could go a very long way.
On the other hand, this scheme wouldn’t exist without external funding. And there’s a clean uniformity to having a single sponsor on the bikes, which isn’t a bad thing. Imagine each of them with a different advert screaming for your attention. Heck, look at our other forms of transport: the ‘iconic’ red London bus is pretty much a mobile advertising hoarding, as are most black cabs. And tube trains, though refreshingly minimal on the exterior, are bedecked with adverts on the interior, and travel round a underground system that is saturated with even more advertising.
Besides which, the Barclays brand will only stand out quite so starkly for a brief time – give it a few weeks and those frames and mudguards will have been treated to all manner of stickers and stencils.
We do think the front panels (above) are a step too far though. They feature the Barclays logo locked up with the new Cycle Hire roundel, which now joins TFL’s suite of other public transport roundels (below), but uses the official Barclays blue (100% Cyan as far as we can tell). Letting Barclays get their hands on that means they ‘own’ not just the bikes, but part of the city’s transport infrastructure, which is surely a step too far.
On the whole though, the Cycle Hire scheme feels like a very good thing, and it’s going to be interesting to see how it merges into the rest of the city’s moving parts. And we very much like the new information posts (part of the growing Legible London scheme) that accompany each docking station, and feature detailed maps of the local area.
The Cycle Superhighways are an entirely different kettle of fish though. A Superhighway – it sounds like a vast and gloriously uncluttered artery, whisking cyclists through London, unfettered by the fear of becoming roadkill under the wheels of a huge truck. The reality is so very different – it’s some blue paint. Yes, a few tricky road junctions have been altered, but basically, it’s just some blue paint. And more importantly, some blue paint that means nothing. Absolutely nothing. No new rules have been made to say that other vehicles aren’t allowed to drive on it. So as a cyclist, you feel like it’s your space, but none of the other road users really give a damn. It’s going to lead to a whole heap of full and frank discussions at the roadside…
In his article, McGuirk complains that the lane is painted Barclays blue, which means they’ve bought up the very land beneath our feet. But realistically, it was one of the few primary colours left that hadn’t already been used, and refreshingly, there’s very little sign of the Barclays branding on the roads themselves. Even the scheme’s branding (below left), which features the Barclays logo on leaflets and suchlike, appears untarnished on the information posts (below right).
With the Superhighways, we can’t help but feel that it’s a prime case of mismanaging expectations. It’s right up there with the woefully underwhelming River of Fire which we were promised along the Thames on the eve of the new Millennium. The crowds packed the banks of the river that night, full of wide eyed anticipation. They were rewarded with a few fireworks on a barge. If the Superhighways hadn’t been oversold with such a grand name, then perhaps we wouldn’t feel like we’d been given such a damp squib…
After ten fantastic years, the annual V&A Summer Fete has evolved, and its new incarnation, opening this Friday (30 July), is the V&A Summer Camp, “a free two-day celebration of the virtues of self-reliance and resourcefulness that can come through design and making”. It features a series of tents out in the V&A garden, where you can have a go at being a Foley artist (the sound effects guys in movies); create a handmade jumping toy; or submit some of your own typographic work for a critique courtesy of Fraser Muggeridge’s Typography Summer School.
The camp runs from 6.30pm-10pm on Friday 30 July, and 1pm-5pm on Saturday 31. On the Friday evening there’s also a sleepover, with a range of talks, films and events lasting right through the night – you’ll need tickets for that though.
Well heck, it seems like only yesterday we were sitting down to design the cover for Why I Write for the first Great Ideas Series, but it was actually five years ago…
The latest series is just about to be published, and we were asked to design a cover for a collection of essays by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, under the title The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise (above). The essays discuss, amongst other things, the existence of hell and the philosophy of contradictions.
We did a bit of research into Borges’ writings, and learnt that he’d been one of the founding contributors to the Argentine literary journal Sur, which was published regularly from 1931 until around 1966.
The covers of the earlier issues of the magazine are a single colour decorated with a just a white arrow, the issue number and the masthead, while the later issues also feature a full list of contributors.
The magazine has a very distinctive (and typographically bonkers) masthead, and fortunately the name ‘Sur’ isn’t a million miles from the name ‘Borges’, so basing our design on it felt like a rather tasty solution.
We managed to pick up a couple of copies of the magazine from Lirolay Books in the USA; and set to work drawing the new title. We also scanned in a blank page of the magazine to use as a tonal background for the cover, emphasising the ephemeral nature of the source.
The rest of the covers, as with all the previous series, are principally designed by David Pearson, with additional designs by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon.
We’re entirely biased, but we think they’re one of the best sets yet. David has uploaded most of the covers to this Great Ideas Volume V Flickr set, and will be posting the final few imminently.
The new iPhone 4 has a lush high resolution screen which is 640 x 960 pixels, so we figured the time was right to create a few new wallpapers to add to the existing set we created for the iPhone 3. These ones are designed for the Lock Screen, rather than as background images for the Home Screen. If we get a bit of time, we’ll add a few more in the coming weeks… And in the meantime, check out Poolga for many more (you can specify which model you’re looking for at the top of the screen).
So, the attentive amongst you may have noticed we’ve been more than a tad quiet of late, and this is why.
We’ve been tinkering around under the bonnet of We Made This, creating an entirely new site, built by the good folks at Position Absolute. It’s got a whole heap of our latest work on it, as well as an Archive section which we’ll be steadily filling up.
Here’s Tom from Position Absolute on some aspects of the build, which was all done in WordPress:
“We’re believers in web standards so we’ve taken care to mark up We Made This to give the content the semantic love it deserves. The main logo is an image, but turn off CSS (or take a look at the mark up) and you can see that behind it there’s an H1 tag, noting to SEO bots out there that this is the most important heading on the page. Subtitles are H2s and denote the title of their particular pages.”
We’ve decided to officially call this our Beta stage, so why not have a click around, and if you see anything that’s not behaving itself, drop us a line.
We’re still adding features to the blog one at a time so that we can make sure they work smoothly. We’ve also imported all our old blog’s content, but we’ll leave the old blog running as a dusty archive for a while yet. (If you do have any direct links to We Made This, it’d be great if you could update them to either our home page, or to our blog home page.)
If you’re a subscriber of our RSS feed, it should hopefully still be coming through loud and clear, but if not, do let us know!
Ah, lovely – our customised issue of Wallpaper* hit our doormat this morning, and damn fine it looks too. Big congratulations to Meirion and the design team there for pulling off an immense technical challenge with such finesse.
A few more bits of ephemera for your viewing pleasure, all from the days when people used to take photos using something called ‘film’. It came in small ‘rolls’ which you put into your camera, and generally allowed you to take 24 or 36 ‘exposures’. You would then take the film to a chemist, or specialist ‘photo lab’ to be ‘developed’, which could take between 1 hour and 1 week, and you would then get back a pack of ‘prints’. Happy days.
