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It's short but sweet this week. Loïc form Bureau L'Imprimante has sent me more lovely French labels.
Thanks Loïc!
Way way back at the beginning of all this, I blogged my love of the cigar box. Here's another one I re-discovered gathering a fuzzy coating in our garage:
If anyone else would like to contribute you can email me here.
Lovely new ads for The Guardian from Wieden + Kennedy London.
Via Beeker.
Read a bit about them here.
That last post reminds me of something that might be interesting. It's something that's definitely been a source of inspiration for me and it is that when you look at what people like Spencer did and very notably Jan Tschichold (and other great figures from graphic design history) you'll notice that they didn't just make major, ground breaking graphic design work but took fanatical interest in the details. Both men, for example, devised composition rules for publishers (Tschichold for Penguin). I've seen many portfolios of very good design work let down badly by little attention to such details. Blah, blah, blah, yadder, yadder yadder...
I could go on, but won't.
The reason I set up Ace Jet 170 was because I have stuff stashed all over the house. Tucked at the bottom of a wardrobe, gathering dust on top, getting damp in the garage or (mostly) relatively unreachable in the loft. Ace Jet gives me a place to put it all, one place.
Of course, what's nice about having these little stashes all over the place is that every now and then I stumble across something forgotten. Like these two little booklets from Lund Humphries. The first being their type specimen booklet (the photos of that bit of type on the cover came out so well I felt the need to include all three).
There's no date in the booklets but I'd guess they'd be from the late 50s. Hot Metal days of course so fonts/sizes would be limited. A number of matrices give an overview of what was available.
The second booklet is their composition rules, compiled by the very great Herbert Spencer (which reminds me that I have Penrose Annuals to blog) who was responsible for these and this essential book for anyone interested in typography, amongst other things.
Read more about him here.
The booklet deserves close examination and, thankfully, backs up this.
This is a small one but I was reminded of it today when a friend asked me to cast my eyes over some ad layouts he was working on.
Unless you're doing it for a specific effect or are referencing an historic style like these:
it has a tendency to look just plain boring. These, of course, look stunning.
Last week's release of the much anticipated Helvetica film reminded me that I haven't yet blogged these Cartlidge Levene designed issues of Issue, the Design Museum's quarterly, from the early 90s.
(Incidentally, Chris from Fallt and Fehler is trying to get the film to Belfast, which would be brilliant).
Issue specifically, and more generally the work of Cartlidge Levene, had a big effect on me as a novice designer. You see, I had originally set out to become a technical illustrator but, after a while, realised that that career wouldn't offer the creative opportunities that I craved. So I diverted towards graphic design but retained a liking for construction, mathematics and draughtsmanship.
I think these disciplines are evident in much of Cartlidge Levene's work, which is often very structured, constructivist (in the broader sense of the word), dynamic and very beautiful.
Issue shows how a strict grid system, limited use of color, Helvetica and economic use of photography can still mean surprising, exciting and dramatic page layout.
This one should be common knowledge and in a way I feel like I'm stating the obvious. But then I'm also aware that many designers still don't do this, so for what it's worth, here goes...
You see, whether we like it or not, most designers are accidental typesetters. Few of us ever set out to be typesetters, but we find ourselves in a time when as part of our daily work we're knocking out text on our Macs. It can be a big part of our day.
Problem is, lots of us are still doing just that, knocking it out. What do we know about the details of good typography/typesetting? In the old days (ah, the old days...cow gum for goal posts...) we had typesetters to take care of the details for us, details like this:
Of course, if you're from the US you might have a liking for the em-rule, but that's another story.
If you want to find out more about doing it the right way, buy a copy of Hart's Rules or Copy-editing, or both!
This kind of stuff reminds me of the Fletcher quote, "You can only muck about with language if you know what you're doing. Otherwise you're just being sloppy". I think the same goes for typography.
David's found a brilliant Flickr set of Hotel Labels (via Serif).
Now I don't know if anyone reading this is familiar with James Webb-Young's little book, perhaps lots of you know it. For that matter I don't know whether the technique he describes is taught in college. I didn't discover the book until I'd been working for years, which is a shame because it's ace. And here's the fundamental principle around which he presents his technique:
JWY goes on to suggest a system for collecting and ordering the stuff you collect. I found adopting it, a) encouraged a more systematic and varied collection, and b) keeps it all together so it's easier to find later. His Technique for Producing Ideas goes further and has proved invaluable.
The combinations thing goes for everything we do: On one level we combine colours with shapes and typefaces and words, and end up with logos. On another level we take an airmail letter and the idea of love songs and think about love letters, and end up with things like this, despite who the client is.
In amongst the images that Nin sent me a couple of weeks ago was a scan of one of these. It was one of the very few labels I already had. Actually, there's more to the set (don't know why I didn't snap them all).
