Swiss Typography

Entering Switzerland we hit a traffic jam. Normal, we thought, as it was the school holidays so lots of Swiss people will be returning home. Not so. the jam was uniquely foreigners entering Switzerland and being asked to pay the road tax. Some people say that Swiss people are money minded, others just plain boring but for me I think they're sticklers for rules and regulations. And this can be seen in their typography and graphic design.

I was in Switzerland purely for pleasure with no work commitments at all, but you can't switch your eyes off from the graphic design around you. Looking at the billboards, posters and magazines you can see the differences and in Switzerland the differences are remarkable. Clean use of type is to be expected but also a beautiful appreciation of white space and grids. This was not only present in cool magazines and shops but also for fairly mundane products such as car washes, local radio stations and the like. This sort of design is very often mistakenly called uninteresting by British clients who bemoan the simply sans serif mistaking most for Arial. Not even seeing the beauty involved in the relevant 'Helvetica' font. Sometimes our clients feel a nice twirly font might do the job. and sometimes they're right. Flouncy fonts are sometimes necessary but not nearly as much as the client might think or want it themselves. But can this argument be levelled at Swiss design? Is it boring? Are the lack of 'interesting' fonts creating an atmosphere of blandness? Certainly some of the designs I saw were rubbish; not every Swiss graphic design project I saw was intricate and delicate in its respect for simple design. And if I'm honest it did feel like *lots* of the ads and designs were following the same pattern of typography and layout but I don't think this is because the Swiss are boring. I think it has more to do with their respect of rules and regulations.

The Swiss have obviously settled on the essence of what makes good design for them: clear typography with bold sans serif (although they like some slab serif). Sometimes the typography is all of the design. I like this idea that the information within the piece also makes up the aesthetic. Form and function together. Sometimes this can get messy but see the examples here to see how it really can work.

Fireworks shortcuts

I enjoy using Fireworks as it very efficiently produces JPEGs and GIFs I can use for web design. If I really want to it can also produce HTML ready websites but I'm guessing that the code it produces is worse than that of Dreamweaver! But Fireworks is a good program to use as it enables me to quickly see how a website might look and preview its functions in a browser.

Today though I had a problem as the toolbox wasn't responding. Everything else was fine but I couldn't access the left hand toolbox. This is what I found as a quick workaround:

http://www.shortcutworld.com/en/win/Fireworks_MX.html

All the keyboard shortcuts for Fireworks which proved very useful and allowed me to get on with my work. Of course the real solution is getting the toolbox working again but these shortcuts are useful to know anytime and if you use a program often can speed up your work flow a lot.

2010 Brit Insurance Design Awards

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8536000/8536968.stm

"showing how design can move off into other areas....closer to art." Deyan Sudjic, Design Museum Director.

Showcasing some neat designs (like the folding plug by Korean designer Min-Kyu Choi) and some unconvincing ones (like plant lock: is it really heavy enough to stop it being lifted off somewhere?).

I do agree with Sudjic in his quote that design sometimes sways towards the world of art but many times this is its undoing: it sometimes is so close to art it fails in its functional spec. Design does a job and looks good. Or looks good and does a job: an old debate started by the form follows function lobby of the early part of the Twentieth Century.

Is it enough to ask, "Does the design fulfil the function set out in the specification?"? Is ornament crime?

Well, there's plenty in the designs of 2010 awards to give you food for though on this matter.

http://www.designsoftheyear.com

Mathieu Lehanneur's science based designs

Mathieu Lehanneur's talk for TED highlights some really fundamental principles of design. Is it colour theory? Typography? Is it perhaps the socio-economic impact of design?

Nope.

It's even more fundamental than that. It's about being human.

At a martial arts seminar once I heard a Systema guru speaking about styles and how to effectively make the techniques work. "Do you think this move is more like the crane style of kung fu or tiger style?" (referring to the idea that fighting systems have evolved after emulating certain animals in their habitat). The head honcho snorted and said, "Humans shouldn't need to imitate animals they should concentrate on being human".

In a similar way Lehanneur states in his opening part of this lecture how important science is to him: the science of being human because therein lies the answer to design solutions. He says,

"Science helps us understand how we see, how we hear, how we breathe, how our brain can inform or mislead us.

It's a great tool for me to understand what could be our real needs.

Marketing people have never been able to do that.

Marketing reduces things. Marketing simplifies.

Marketing creates user groups.

Scientists admit complexity, admits fluctuation and uniqueness."

Understanding how we perceive and interact with our world is essential for designing products or communications. What I find intriguing about his approach is that he looks at the real essence of the problem. Often designers talk about solving problems but really just create a make-over or 'paint it up' to look pretty (and in fairness often clients want this as a solution rather than any deep searching study into what is really needed!). This guy at least looks at the very heart of the problem and works in deep thought into the solution. Designing isn't about drawing pretty pictures it's about solving problems. Drawing helps us communicate ideas. Problem solution is about thinking. It's about seeing how we are as humans.

Zen and the art of animation

Richard Williams is a renowned animator who discloses below part one of the animator's survival kit. This approach works for lots of different aspects of life and is something I encountered early on in my relationship with art! I remember having a colleague confess that he lobed doing the dishes. This is something I loathe but do on a daily basis as we don't own a dishwasher. His claim was that this 10 or 15 minutes of the day gave him solitary time to think without distraction. The process of washing the dishes freed him from thought; the actions he needed to perform with his hands are automatic requiring no brain effort thus allowing him to take stock of the day.

Maybe, as Williams alludes to in this video, to do something well we need to immerse ourselves in the task at hand. If we do, he says, the quality increases.

Interaction at the museum

Saw a quite interesting interactive display at the Fitzwilliam museum recently. Not the interactive we usually think of, you know...push this button, prod that, watch this film, walk over there... This was much better: a bank of screens showing marvellous images of nature, celebrating the diversity in life which Darwin spent his life trying to understand. the neat 'interaction' was that you could add your own colourful nature photos to the display via flickr. So it's not instantly gratifying in terms of interaction but I'd wager this was a bit better in some ways. If you submit, you need to come back to the museum to see if it was accepted! Encourages re-visits and a great feeling of connection with the exhibition! Two for the price of one.

New distorted world view

Check out this interesting but distorted view of the UK based on the density of where people live...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8280657.stm

Microsoft's power of advertising

...or "Let's make a really crap advert and get people talking about it"...

Well that's one way I guess. I just thought this was eye wateringly cheesey. I was waiting for the punchline to arrive but it never came. It seems that this really is the advert pushing a Microsoft product which I, frankly, couldn't care less about mostly based on watching this ad!

Ha, ha, ha! It's so much FUN using Microsoft products! Ho, ho, ho!

Thanks to PR.

How are your Photoshop skills?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/12/philippe-ramette-interview

The Eight Principles of Success

Very neat, short film by Richard St. John outlining his ideas about the journey through to success.

Only 3mins 55-worth a look as it's straight-talking and inspiring.

Verdana is the new futura then?

What were IKEA thinking of? Using a font like Verdana, which is primarily a screen font, across all their media is bonkers. I know that often there is a dynamic that needs addressing between the main corporate font which is used in printed matter and a 'replacement' font to be used globally in Powerpoint slides, Word processing and the like and particularly websites which really can only display a small number of font styles. So what to do? Often a similar type of font is chosen for the online use/Office use which either closely resembles the corporate font or complements it nicely. That's one way.

The other way is to blanket use one monolithic font across everything, like this use of Verdana by IKEA. The great advantage, of course, is that it's cheap. Times are hard for IKEA too after all. The down side is that we, the consumer, know it's cheap.

Is this a wise, functional choice based on sensible cost cutting in a tough economic climate or the easy way out?

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1919127,00.html

Are you fired up...?

...ask a silly question!

Systemising knowledge with Wolfram|Alpha

Is this a new way of bringing together all that information out there?

Does this fill in what wikipedia and google seem to leave out?

I don't know to be honest but this seems like a powerful way of systemising knowledge.

Suck it and see.

CSS stuff

Just a CSS snippet to help me on my way...

p {margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 80px; margin-right: 45px; margin-bottom: -5px; }

a.nav:link {color: red; text-decoration: none; }
a.nav:visited {color: purple; text-decoration: none; }
a.nav:hover {color: orange; text-decoration: underline; }
a.nav:active {color: blue; }

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/stylesheets/

Chat box

Ok so here's a widget for blogs or small-scale wannabe interactive websites: chat box.

Looks interesting but I guess is only really useful for a dedicated community which you know is going to be logging on frequently. Otherwise it might be like having a website counter on your page-fine but not if it shows 58 hits since 1998!

Check it:

http://www.cbox.ws/

Art or Information?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8130554.stm

http://stats.oecd.org/oecdfactbook/

Creating creativity

Radio 4 show tonight explores whether scientific research can be creative.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kvr9l

I was struck with Anne Miller speaking about her experience of creating products in a scientific arena. She said when she first started creating ideas and products she thought there must have been something wrong with her ideas as so many scientists were creating barriers to her theses.

Even when creating graphic design I come across barriers to great ideas. I'm not being precious here, I do realise that design is led by marketing and business and as such responds to criteria set out by the client. To a certain degree the 'blue sky' research spoken about in the radio show doesn't operate to criteria, but some clients just don't get the idea of inputting 'research' into designs. I've spoken to clients who have come to me wanting cutting edge contemporary designs and ideas but really they already have preconceived ideas about what they themselves desire. This is somewhat dangerous. In this sort of project we usually end up pandering to the client's personal desires. The client has confused business and marketing criteria with their own taste. Very often I'm asked to try it in orange "because the wife wants to see it like that". On the other hand these guys are paying for it but it must be designer's responsibility to check the client and make sure they realise that this deviates from the design specification laid out initially which responds accurately to the target marketing.

Shall we try it in pink?

So you think you've got a creative website? Think again...

Your business card is crap

I'm not quite sure if this is for real or not but it's damn funny.

I like the way he actually claims that it doesn't fit into the rolodex. Pardon? Isn't that ...the point? If it doesn't fit in it'll get chucked out in my experience. 

He may not have the best business card in the world but he is a brand. For sure.

Check out this link for more business card laughs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y

Santander takes over

"The bank says that rebranding will cost it £12m, although this does not include any of the cost of advertising or expenses. The savings by integrating the businesses has been estimated by the bank as £180m."

So Santander wants to bowl over Bradford and Bingley, Alliance and Leicester and Abbey and there's much talk about why and will it pay off? For me it has to be a no-brainer. Santander wants to consolidate (ok) and I think they realise now is the time as people have lost faith in bank names all over but especially the UK. I'm sure there are high level strategic reasons for repositioning services and products and giving a Europe-wide portfolio for customers but really, are they risking anything? This article says some customers will be lost but to which other trustworthy bank? Are there any?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8070335.stm