Periodic Table of Type

I found these images of a periodic table of type at Steven Heller's The Daily Heller blog. Produced by a guy who calls himself Screenprintedbymatt, there are larger images available here. Matt had planned to produce and sell them as a limited run, but discovered someone else had beaten him to the idea.

Matt's table certainly looks better than the one by the Squidspot guys (in fact most of their work is pretty hideous) but theirs is at least more informative, with the inclusion of designer and year of production. The ranking system is based upon surveys conducted by several other websites, more information on that here.

Wordle + $19 Dollar Logos: The End of Graphic Design

Wordle is a website that creates automatic "word clouds" from your own text, a bit like how with Bablefish you can translate text into a different language. Above is one I made using the lyrics to Prince's Gett Off (though the little fella refuses to allow his music onto youtube, so this link is to a clip of Hilary Swank doing a karaoke version in the film P.S. I Love You. Don't rush out to see it.) Wordle reduces the creative process to the push of a button, just as Bablefish reduces entire languages in the same way. Of course, just because you can "translate", doesn't mean you can actually speak another language. And Bablefish's translations are notoriously, er, bad.

Here's that first paragraph translated into French and back again:

Wordle is a Web site which creates the " automatic; clouds" of word; of your own text, a little as the way in which with Bablefish you can translate the text in a different language. In top one is that j' made using the texts with Prince' ; S Gett with far (although the small type refuses to allow its music on the youtube, thus this bond is with staples of Hilary Swank making a version of karaoke in l' love of book per square inch of film you. Don' ; T precipitate outside to see it.) Wordle brings back the creative process to thorough the d' a button, just like reduced Bablefish of the whole languages in the same way. Naturally, just because you can " ; translate" ; , doesn' ; T mean that you can really speak another language. And Bablefish' ; the translations of S are manifestly, heu, bad.

See what I mean?! Now imagine the same thing happening when translating text into visuals. Wordle seems to provide a way of being "Creative" and "Visual", without having to understand or be either. I can imagine this kind of thing would be very popular in pitches within the boardroom...

Here's one from the Tory-blogging-hub that is Conservative Home, and another (taking the Bible as its subject!) from from St Mary's United Methodist Youth, or SMUMCYOUTH:

Perhaps the boardroom exec's (or their flunkies) is exactly who Wordle is designed for, and I shouldn't get upset about it. But then I can't escape the feeling that it, or other online tools like it, will eventually be harmful to the Graphic Design Industry. We had a discussion in VCT a couple of weeks ago about the recognition and acknowledgement of expertise that Graphic Designs receive as professionals. Not nearly enough, we agreed! The problem being that "Graphic Designer" is a job title that only emerged fairly recently (1950s, or there abouts), so the role doesn't have the heritage possessed by, say, silversmiths or architects. There's no Guild of Graphic Designers to hand-out licenses or certificates of competence.

So, give people the power to create something quickly and without any thought or expense and will they run wild with it, ruining the party for everyone else? Maybe not. Look at the proliferation of £10 logo websites, such as the very straight-forward 19DollarLogos.com:

Would you buy a logo from a company who's own logo looks like that? Credit to them at least for standing by their product. Perhaps someone with not much money and no sense of pride in their own company would be persuaded by arguments as compelling as this -

"FACT 1: In majority of cases the initial logo idea is usually the best.

FACT 2: The more revisions you make, the less professional result is."

...er, okay. Well, at least their work is consistent. In fact, many of their logos look like they could have been automatically generated using drop-down menu parameters. Take a look at this one, where they appear to have spelt "mom" wrong:

Anyway, the point I was eventually getting round to is that plenty if these websites exist quite happily alongside the likes of Wolff Olins. They're at different ends of the food-chain. VERY different ends.

100 Bill Murrays: Part 2.

Okay, another 30 if these damn things out of the way. Less than half left to complete. I've cheated a bit this week and printed off some cut-out element sheets, from images I looked for online. Actually, I thought about this for quite a while and I don't think it is cheating, I'm just "using the available resources". So what do we have?

Rhythm: employing the old fold'n'cut technique.

Humour, perhaps? This is not just because I like Garfield. Bill Murray actually provided the voice of Garfield in the live action/CGI film and it's sequel, Garfield 2.

Texture (though it's not real wood. You have to imagine it is.)
Repurposing? I don't think I've done any of those yet.
This could be Editing, or Composition. Jack Nicholson, of course, from the famous bar scene in The Shining. By this point in the film he had long ago started talking to himself, so it's no surprise to see three Jacks lined-up for a drink here.
Same scene, different cast. Look how similar they are!
...and same guy, different movie. This is Bill Murray as Steve Zissou in Wes Anderson's film of the same name.
Is this wearing thin yet? Bill Murray again, in the same set-up this time, but with better company, in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. I think I've given up for now on deciding which theme to put these under.
Like a well-oiled machine...
Okay, I know this one, this is definitely REPURPOSING!

And the final one for now, the three characters and the beer reduced to RGB blobs.

www: the basics

The other day David gave a tutorial in the basics of web design. We used Freeway and Dreamweaver to set up files and create two pages, with buttons to navigate between them. There are short instructional films on setting up a domain name, as well as basic tutorials in both programmes, on his Doing Graphics site.

I'm also starting a short course in Dreamweaver at City Lit in a couple of weeks. I've got absolutely ZERO experience in web design (I'm at the same stage as your dad, when the new video player has just arrived arrived, and he's trying to feed the cassette in sideways), so David's workshop was a timely introduction. Everyone* keeps saying how important it is to have examples of work online already, so I'm going to bring forward my own deadline for setting up a portfolio site to the New Year.

*The latest person being Toby Leigh, a freelance illustrator who gave a talk today about his experiences in business. His work's very professional-looking, and certainly commercial, but I'm far keener on the info-graphic-parodies he produces under his alter-ego guise of Tobatron:

Erik Spiekermann Arial/Microsoft rant

Here's a clip from the extras section of the DVD of Gary Hustwit's film Helvetica, with typographer Erik Spiekermann ranting about how much he hates Arial and those "mean bastards" Microsoft...

What a legend.

Saul Bass: Alive and Well

So what is it with the exclamation mark in the title of Steven Soderbergh's new film, The Informant!..? Anna Pickard complains in The Guardian of the unnecessary deployment of such superlative punctuation, but personally I think it's spot-on. The listing of all three films from the Ocean's series - "From the Director of Ocean's 11, 12 and 13" - is similarly over-done, but to great effect. Combine these details with a

Saul Bass homage poster, in which

a middle-aged-looking Matt Damon is ridiculed by his own shadow, and the film sits neatly within the

current retro-screwball-comedy-revival, as spearheaded by George Clooney and showcased by the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading.

Upcoming Oscar-contender Precious uses the same aesthetic to darker means, while Spike Lee's Clockers took Bass' image from Anatomy Of A Murder and ran with it, right out the door.

James Houston video good mmm.

Here are a couple of great films by recent Glasgow School of Art graduate James Houston. James has also recently made a bigger budget promo for Frightened Rabbit's Swim Until You Can't See Land, but while that features a innovative use of the humble maglite, it lacks the low-budget retro charm of this earlier effort for Official Secrets Act, or the effective huh??!-factor of this MTV promo. Enjoy.

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Spin: branding the LOGO book

Patrick Eley and Ian Macfarlane of Spin gave a talk last week on some of their recent studio projects, including work for West-end gallery Haunch of Venison, and new self-initiated publishing project Unit Editions. The project that particularly stood out for me though was their design of Michael Evamy's book on logo branding for publisher Laurence King. Their approach was to reflect the content of the book by creating a brand identity for it. Early ideas included a cover spread of small reproductions of featured logos, much like the that which appears inside the dust jacket of the finished design, and a more detailed logo derived from the title of the book, which was rejected for looking too plausible and generic.
Black and white reproduction throughout most of the book, enables the reader to concentrate upon differences in form without the distraction of brightly-coloured logos leaping off the page. The use of a tight grid complements a navigational system that allows the 1,300+ logos to be divided into 75 categories without appearing cluttered or fussy. And the logo chosen for the title itself performs extremly well - the blacked-out shapes suggest an interchangeable identity, which represents potentially all and yet none of those contained within, and a black dot performing as a stand-in for the trademark symbol, itself a logo indicating the legality of brand ownership.

Hand-painted signs of Guatemala

This summer I took the opportunity to visit Guatemala, as my last proper holiday in advance of the impending poverty of studenthood. Guatemala is an incredible place, rich in natural beauty and indigenous tradition, with relatively little influence of US culture, compared to some central American countries.
One particular thing I noticed there was the abundance of these hand-painted signs. They were all over the place! Even the large road-side adverts for multi-national brands such as Coca-Cola are hand-painted. I was unable to get photographs of many of them though, as some of the best examples I saw only from the window of the bus as we sped through rural towns. After graduation (and once I'm out of debt) I plan to go back with take a stock of memory cards and a rented car, and do the job properly.Finally, here's a weird baby-chicken-man mural from the side of a shack in the Caribbean coastal town of Livingston. Livingston is generally quite an odd place - with a crocodile in a swimming pool next to the dock, and one guesthouse built to look like a castle (though it actually resembles a big concrete prison) - but I've no idea what this is all about...

Mr. W

Nordpol + Hamburg won a Gold Lion Award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards for this film promoting the use of wind-power for German company Epuron. Well done Nordpol + Hamburg!