Less is More: Dieter Rams

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

I must to confess to not generally being a big fan of manifestos. Of course there's nothing wrong with having principles, or aspiration, but I have this impression that manifestos tend to be limit creativity rather than promote it, and usually lead the way to contradiction and hypocrisy. Still, Dieter Rams' 10 principles for good design (above) proved to be a very sound basis for a career spanning over 40 years at German home appliance manufacturer Braun. The current exhibition of Rams' work at the Design Museum features many of the products produced by Braun under Rams' tenure, which helped to make his name synonymous with the idea of functional, timeless, and beautiful design. Although well worth a visit for Rams' work alone, check out the impressive and thoughful exhibition graphics by London design studio Bibliotheque, which reproduces elements from the products, at large scale in giant wall panels. These images are from the Monograph supplement featured in the current issue of Creative Review.

DVD cover sketches

Here are some quick Illustrator sketches for the John Carpenter DVD cover project. I've been experimenting with using very simple illustrations, repeated to form patterns. I've attempted to sneak a twist relating to the film into each pattern, for example, a break in the razor wire on the cover of Escape From New York, a white-faced pumpkin (mimicking Michael Meyers' mask) among the jack'o'lanterns for Halloween, or, in a different version, a single blood stained kitchen knife, pointing upwards, while the others point down. The covers for Assault on Precinct 13 and They Live! feature type integrated into the illustration. For the type itself I've been trying a combination of slab-serif faces like Rockwell and Memphis to reflect the American Western character of the films, with several different European sans-serif faces, like Futura and Avenir, to reflect Carpenter's arthouse sensibilities. The next step is to nail-down which fonts to go with, and set about redrawing the elements for the illustrations.

Brown Smears

I found this on Johnson Banks' Review of The Year, (about which I'll post more soon) and it made me laugh out loud for so long that it deserves its own post here too. I don't know if it's a real headline or not, and frankly I don't care.

Book of the Film

Illustrator Spacesick has done a cracking job so far of re-imagining cult movies as pulp paperbacks with this series of fantastic vintage-style covers. Olly Moss employs a similar style in his remade film poster series Eight Films in Black and Red.

From the archives... Silent Madness (in 3D!)

The other day, in a search for illustrated film posters for John Carpenter films, I stumbled upon a site named Cover Browser. Maintained by Phillip Lenssen, the site features nearly half a million images from the covers of comics, pulp magazines, books, as well as movie posters, and unusually for an archive of this size, the quality remains pretty high throughout. The site also contains this helpful piechart, which explains how the contents shape-up.There are plenty of similar archives out there, such as B-Movie poster site Wrong Side of The Art, or the 100 posters featured on Andrew Lindstrom's Well Medicated blog (Andrew's site also features some great collections of vintage tobacco ads, gig posters, and vintage space-age scenes), and I'll try to get round to featuring something on them soon. For now though, these examples come from Cover Browser's horror movie posters archive. Some, like this Saul Bass poster for Otto Preminger's 1965 thriller, Bunny Lake Is Missing, are refreshingly understated. Even this poster for George Romero's Day Of The Dead (not a film known for holding back on the red stuff) is well considered and very unlike most horror movie posters.
...then again some others are, y'know, not quite so understated... but then what would you expect from film with titles such as Silent Madness (In 3D!) and, er... The Cauldron of Death? Hard-hitting stuff indeed.

Simon Page

Self-taught, maths-inspired designer Simon Page is interviewed in Grain Edit this month. It's a revealing read that introduced me to a designer I really think I should have noticed sooner. I have to admit that the portfolio section of Simon's website irks me a bit, with that unnecessary crazy perspective toggle thing it does, but there's no doubting the quality of the stuff within it. Both the self-initiated International Year of Astronomy, and Futurism series are spectacular (and from the looks of them, it's no surprise to learn that Simon's filling his pants about the new Tron film...)

There's also a nice post that details the working process of designing a designing a movie poster. Designers don't often divulge this sort of information (though sadly there aren't any half-baked or abandoned ideas transplanted from the sketchbook, that would be asking too much), so it's refreshing to see behind the curtain for once.

More Book Covers

The aptly named Book Cover Archive is a great place to look for inspiration. the archive includes over 1,100 contemporary book covers, which you can search for by author, title, designer, publisher, and even typeface (there are a whopping 66 covers which feature Futura, but only 2 that use Frutiger). Fine examples include this innovative series of A4 paper-based designs by Sanda Zahirovic, Jenny Grigg's covers for Peter Carey, or the consistently excellent Jonathan Gray.
Back on the vintage-theme, but also well worthy of attention is this collection of 30 Polish book covers featured

on A Journey Round My Skull, and while I'm at it, there's a feature on some excellent Dick Bruna Covers (he's not just for rabbits, y'know) on Grain Edit.