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Following on from the Atlas post, I happen to be idly flicking through the rather beautiful Revised Bible that my Mom was presented with in 1957 and gave to my wife soon after we got married when I was struck, again, by how lovely the maps are at the back.
Printed with just three colours (I think) the registration is a little off but just adds to their charm.
Better late than never: here's this week's stuff...
Alicia went on a font finding trip around Wapping:
This is what she says about her findings:
"[No Licence] This one made me smile because of the odd use of full stops and strange stenciled type. [Lowder]...some metal letters on the side of a housing estate. Made me think of lederhosen, and seemed quite charming in it's rusty, bent way. [21] I smiled when I saw the economy of these signs; I bet whoever thought of that was pretty proud of themselves. [nacap] I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an 'H' or not. It's part of some of that temporary fencing put around roadworks, though there weren't any around, so it was just leaning there, all by itself."
Meanwhile Andy in New York sent in these matchbooks, he says, "my favs are of course the 'You're no match...for V.D.'...LOVE the chicken matchsticks."
Many thanks to Alicia and Andy for going to the trouble.
All contributions gratefully embraced here.
That very nice man from here and now here has bought me a Flickr pro account (see his here). And he didn't even know that it was my birthday this weekend.
For the third time: Thanks Stephen!
Thought you'd seen the last of my bloody collection? Well, so did I. Then I found even more. They're all (and I mean ALL) on Flickr now. Really.
I think these two are ace, but they also disturb me: The pictorial bits are great, but the titles! Why oh why so much leading on Uses...? And, where have all the rules gone? Why is the title on Sense... centred?
We need answers and we need them now, damn it!
But I doubt that we're going to get them.
Over the weekend I bought an old copy of The Reader's Digest Great World Atlas. Originally published in 1961, this was a second edition printed in 1975 (that's the gold foil embossed cover design above).
I picked it up just thinking it might be handy to have in the house and it's funny, I've seen this book and similar atlases many many times, so many times, over years, that I wouldn't normally take much notice but flicking through it this time I was struck by what a monumental piece of graphic design is was.
First, of course, comes the maps, starting with relief maps or "how our world would appear to an observer at a point some hundred miles above the Earth's surface". Then the really beautiful stuff: conventional maps perhaps, but viewed up close the minute type and line screened colour areas are irresistible. The last map in this section, of Antarctica, is startling, thanks to its geographic position, i.e. where lines of longitude converge, and its barren land mass.
But it's Section Three, The World As We Know It, which is most fascinating. It's packed full of interesting facts about the planet and is lavishly illustrated. OK, it's all text book stuff but I wasn't paying much attention at school so now The Earth's Structure, Patterns of Climate, Life in the Sea, Bird Migration, The Spread of Mammals, Religions of the World and Human Migration since 1650 are all very interesting.
Loïc from Bureau L'Imprimante has got a new camera so, as he says himself, "the flat times are over". From now on we'll be seeing just stuff like this:
About which he says, "Here is the cover for Dino Buzatti's Le K. This pocked-sized edition was issued in France in 1969. It was published by Le Livre de Poche, french pioneer for this format of books.Of course the cover design is awesome, but I love all these significant details: the use of colour on the side's type, the all-black back (damn!!), and this gorgeous touch of red on the side of the pages. Unfortunatly I was not able to find out who was the designer of this great piece, so if any of your readers had a clue..."
Ian's sent me some stuff, including a Birdsall (I think) designed Penguin*, a snippet of reception sign from a hotel in Telford (ooooh, Clarendon), a fragment of a roadside cafe mural from down south and an old sign, re-discovered after the adjacent building was demolished.
* There's an interesting story connected to this cover I think, only I can't recall it accurately. It's about Penguin and Greene debating the necessity for an illustration on the front. Greene arguing that his name was enough. They tried it both ways. Of course, that could all me rubbish so if I come across the source again I'll come back and correct this.
Meanwhile, Callum's mate sent him this image of something being sold on ebay, "scoffing at the ridiculous things people attempt to sell". And yet, there's just something about those little stickers...
So big thanks to Loïc, Ian and Callum, and if you've anything knocking about that you'd like to send me, please email here.
Well it's only taken me about six months to sign up to Flickr but following Ben's suggestion I've actually gone and done it, and put all my Pelicans on. Enjoy.
The third and (you may be relieved to know) final instalment of All My Pelicans and it's a big one, the biggest. I made a mistake in Part 1 in that I said (and thought at the time) that that was nearly half of the collection. Then I found this lot, so it was actually less than a third.
There's too many to go into very much detail but, for me at least, the stand out covers are most obviously Romek Marber's cover for Language in the Modern World, Bruce Robertson's design for The Comprehensive School, Lewin Bassingthwaighte's cover for Yoga and the two Fletcher covers: The Theory of Evolution and The Simplicity of Science. The latter design, I feel, could have been better rendered but I really like the idea which reminds me of these.
Other designers include (in no particular order) Hans Unger, Ole Vedel, Alan Spain, Derek Birdsall, Herbert Spencer, Colin Forbes, Barry Trengove, Larry Carter, Frederick Price, Richard Hollis, Gerald Cinamon and Tony Anderson.
So that's that. All my (Marber Grid) Pelicans. Well, except for this one, which I've "filed away" somewhere and can't lay my hand's on right now. If anyone's interested in knowing who designed what, just drop me a comment.
At the beginning of the year we all got nice shiney new Macs, complete with spanking new copies of Adobe Creative Suite. You see, we've decided, in the interests of intra-studio harmony, to ditch Freehand (hooray!) and Quark (sniff, sob!) and embrace Illustrator (yeeha!) and InDesign (!**?!!); and for the first time in countless years have signed up for some formal training.
As it happened, it turned out to be about the best bit of formal Mac-related training I've had and while the trainer was a patronising smart-arse he displayed extensive and useful knowledge, so by the end of the day I had warmed to him.
But there was a moment at the end of the morning session when I suddenly felt a welcome moment of superiority, when he displayed a gaping hole in his apparent knowledge. He was explaining the Slug feature in InDesign and for some reason felt the need to explain where the term came from. He explained how it was a throw-back to the days of "Letraset" and then patronised us a little when we looked baffled at the reference (he actually meant letterpress). He then held up a small collection of brass letterpress matrices and, calling them "slugs", tried to explain how they were used to print from (he meant be used to press ink onto paper, not be used to cast lead type). Too busy scratching my head to challenge him, I started to think about Cal Swann's book.
This was the first bit I wanted to check:
But flicking through the book, I remembered what a classic it is and that's the real purpose of this post.
Written with great economy, it's full of wisdom as important today as it was when it was published in 1969.
Tucked inside my copy is a promotional flyer/order form for the book.
...
Incidentally, and back to the training, amongst the stuff we learned was how to alter the justification method. This is what our trainer suggested was the prefered setting:
Now I must admit that the letterspacing and glyph scaling bits troubled me but I have to admit that, a) it wasn't a million miles off the setting I would use in Quark, and b) in the before and after example he gave us the after did look much better with these settings applied. Has anyone got anything to say about this? Stephen?
Miranda July's got a brilliant website and something important to say about the book cover:clothing relationship. Via Design Observer.
Following on from the critically aclaimed All My Pelicans: Part 1, here are the rest of them:
By chance rather than design, I actually think Part 2 is even better and not just because it's bigger. If my memory serves me well (and do correct me if you know better) then the first two are by Germano Facetti. The next two are by Fletcher while Electronic Computers is Fletcher/Forbes/Gill.
The next three are Bruce Robertson's, who I've mentioned before. I have a feeling that Islam (exceptional!) and The Queen's Governement are by Lewis Bassingthwaighte.
I remember picking up The Liberal Hour and knowing instinctively it was a Birdsall, as are the previous three. Education looks like it could have been Birdsall but I know it's not (can't remember who though) while The Normal Child (also Birdsallesque) is, as I've mentioned before, Edwin Taylor along with Relativity… and I think John Citizen…
With special thanks to Ben, David and Michael for linking to Part 1.
There are some very lovely things in Martellen's Flickr set.
(Via I Like/City of Sound)
Most of what I know about what I do has come from books I've read, as opposed to being taught formally. Over the years I've noticed that the things that I've learned fall into one of two categories: The first being stuff that I didn't know and was subsequently able to apply in some practical way; the second being confirmation that at least some of the techniques that I've managed to work out for myself or with colleagues were actually correct and worthwhile.
This "Rule" falls very much into the latter category; the reassurance coming straight out of the Paul Arden book that my brother-in-law bought me one christmas. Now I'm not saying this approach is always appropriate but, as I'll try to explain, sometimes it's just right.
Like many of our contemporaries, we kind of fell in love with the Mac when it first appeared in the studio all those years ago. It allowed us to realise our ideas so quickly and output highly finished visuals. Our clients, in turn, loved our visuals, we'd taken all the guess work away. No more marker visuals, no more ambiguity; what we showed them was what they were going to get.
But as time went by the nature of our work shifted from pure design/style-lead to marketing-focused/ideas-lead design and we started to realise that we were having to labour for hours, sometimes days, to get our ideas to look just right on the Mac. On top of the problem of the sheer man-hours involved, our new clients could and often would reject concepts in seconds; the effort:results ratio was way out of kilter.
So we literally went back to the drawing board, employing some brilliant "old school" visualisers to hand render, often intentionally roughly, our concepts. And a few great things happened: the visuals took a fraction of the time to render; we were able to explore more creative routes (meaning "more" as in a greater variety and "more creative" as in more adventurous); and our clients focused solely on our ideas, didn't get hung up on details and almost invariably approved a concept.
Interesting new ID for Maryland Institute College of Art by Abbott Miller.
Read about it over on the Pentagram blog.
Every now and then I mention my loft-based Pelican collection and make an empty promise to get them online. Well here they are, or at least nearly half of them. You may have seen some of them before but I'm trying to get them all together and present them in a consistent way (on a knackered old box).
Stand out covers include Jock Kinnier's startlingly contemporary design for Sex in Society, the brilliant David Gentleman's cover for Aspects of the Novel and Herbert Spencer's cunning solution for A Short History of Religion.
A very small one to start the week and it's only good for some people:
I'd been working for years, really years, before this occured to me. I don't know anyone else who does it but on a purely practical, everyday level, it's dead useful. It's also so bleedin' obvious...
Incidentally, I've tried something with this entry. Someone told me to include a microscopic bit of code along with the text from the card so you get that if you don't want/can't get the image. Don't know if I've done it right though so if anyone can tell, please let me know.
P.S. Thanks to Alistair for proof reading this entry.
