How tasty are these?
They're from Steven Hill's rather spectacular online collection of movie title screens. He's compiled a catalogue of over five thousand different titles, and they're a brilliant record of typographic stylings through the years. Definitely worth a browse.
via ffffound
Google (in the UK only) has slipped into a little black number today.
There was a lot of coverage when the search page Blackle was set up, allegedly saving power by leaving pixels ‘unlit’ in black instead of Google’s usual white, but it turned out that most modern computer displays use the same amount of power no matter what colour the background is.
So instead, Google are doing this to raise awareness of Earth Hour, which is taking place this evening at 8pm GMT. You can read more about it on this page from Google.
Mmm, Saul Bass goodness.
We’re just doing a bit of research ahead of a bit of work Alistair’s doing with some Central Saint Martins students over the next few weeks, and we need your help.
We’re looking for the best / most interesting bits of motion graphics we can find, whether they’re from television, film, music videos, online, wherever. The only important thing is that they’re principally typographic. Alistair’s started to put a few bits together on this You Tube page, and it would be fantastic if you could drop us any links or recommendations.
Thank you thank you.
The new Brit Insurance Designs of the Year show started last week at the Design Museum, taking over from where the old Designer of the Year show left off in 2006. We went along on Saturday to take a look, and we’ll tell you all about that in just a moment.
But first, a gentle rant.
The show is, as you can hardly have failed to notice, sponsored by Brit Insurance. They’ve stuck their name right in front of it. The awards that go with the show are sponsored by them too. They’re called the Brit Insurance Design Awards. And frankly, that’s just rubbish. Instead of being mutually beneficial, it’s mutually detrimental. It makes the Design Museum look cheap, happy to bend over, grab its ankles and get its elegantly shaped butt branded by its corporate master; and it makes Brit Insurance look greedy and egomaniacal. Instead of making the event and awards the most important thing, they’ve made their sponsorship the important thing. And that doesn’t make us like them much.
This is a grim trend that’s been happening wherever sponsorship occurs (Carling Academy anyone?). Don’t get us wrong, it’s a very good thing that corporate sponsorship exists. It makes stuff happen, in bigger and better ways than would otherwise be possible. But, please, let’s restore some sense of modesty, elegance and sophistication to the way it’s done. Wouldn’t the Designs of the Year show, as supported by Brit Insurance, sound far better? Patronage, not prostitution*.
Rant over.
The show itself is a great mix of work arranged by discipline: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport. You might question some of the entries, but it’s a really valuable opportunity to see what’s being going on across the design spectrum in the past year. It’s also great to be able to play with some of the entries, including the Nintendo Wii, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori’s TENORI-ON digital musical instrument, and Ross Phillips’ Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above, being used by some kids in a much looser way than intended).
In the graphics section, we were particularly pleased to see the Butt Book
Winners in each section, and one overall winner, will be announced in March.
* The fact that Peter Saville’s “THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES AT THIS ADDRESS” sticker is one of the graphics entries feels deeply ironic.
We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with the D&AD lectures. Sometimes they’re utterly brilliant, with compelling speakers who talk with passion and wit about their work. Other times they’re boring and banal displays of rampant self-love.
But it looks like the current president Simon Waterfall has done a bang-up job by inviting some really interesting speakers to come along for the 2008 series, and he gets extra points for nicking the Pecha Kucha format for one of the talks.
The line up is:
13 March
Nick Bell, graphic designer, and creative director of Eye magazine
17 April
The Pecha Kucha night, with speakers from Digit, Hi-Res!, Poke and AllofUs amongst others
30 April
Bob Greenberg from R/GA, creative genius behind the motion graphics for Se7en
22 May
Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art
5 June
Amsterdam based graphic design group Experimental Jetset
Apart from Nick Bell, who’s speaking in Manchester, the talks all take place at Logan Hall at the Institute of Education in London (near Russell Square).
So, cheerio to 2007, and hey there 2008, how you doing?
With the predictable glut of articles and features about the year ahead currently littering every magazine and newspaper you pick up, kudos to The Guardian for deciding to run with a pre-emptive review of the noughties, and particularly so for designing the article (in the G2 section) so beautifully. We highly recommend you nip out and pick up a copy.
We wanted to link out to the whole feature from here, but interestingly the Guardian Unlimited website has chopped it up into separate segments, and has also somehow forgotten to provide a link to it from their homepage.
Which is odd.
But as such, it rather neatly demonstrates how print media can still do some stuff far better than online media. Don’t get us wrong, we love the Guardian site; but it can’t (yet) present an article with the same pace and elegance as the newspaper.
For those of you who can’t get your hands on a copy, here are links to the elements of the feature:
The way we live now
The event
The face
The meal
The look
The soundtrack
The celebrity
The building
The fertility panic
The art
The book
The internet
The big Melt
The TV
The Superpower
And here’s hoping that the parts of the Guardian site still wearing their old clothes (as all the articles above are) soon switch into their shinier threads. (Compare and contrast: the soundtrack article above in old clothes and in new clothes.)
Like just about every other designer in town, we’ve been loving the image bookmarking site Ffffound! which started up this year. We’re not heavy users (you can see our meagre selection here), and there’s a fair amount of crossover with our blog; but we do love the way it seems to represent the visual zeitgeist.
Our favourite image so far is the shot above, taken by Flickr user Dubstyle (also known as the illustrator and designer Luke Worley) as part of his Whiskerino set.
Whiskerino is an annual beard growing competition, curated by web designer Michael Eades. The rules are that you start cleanly shaven on November 1 2007, and then grow your beard, agreeing not to shave in any way for the duration of the competition, which runs until at least February 29 2008. Contestants then post an image of their growth to the site at least once a week, with various themed image days to spice things up. It’s mainly happening stateside, with only six beards going on in the UK so far.
It might be a bit late for Blighty to catch up now, but how about next year gentlemen?
Just loving this from 9031.com. An old-school flip clock as a screen saver. Yum yum yum.
Via Design Observer and Viewers Like You
There’s a huge amount of incredible work being produced by designer-makers these days, but it can sometimes be tricky tracking it down. And if you’re one of those designer-makers, it can be equally problematic finding somewhere to sell your stuff.
No more.
Bouf is a rather wonderful design superboutique stocking work by designer-makers. It’s full of really tasty stuff, ranging from furniture to product design to technology and other loveliness; our particular favourite being these groovy Urban Gnomes from Vitamin.
The site only launched yesterday, so it’s early days yet, but it’s a fantastic idea brilliantly executed, and we’re expecting big things from them.
Go shop.