Noisy Decent Graphics

Darwin logo

Noticings

Seeing as none of you liked the Newspaper Club logo I'd like to show one you will like.

 

Noticings is a casual Flickr game built by RIG's very own Tom Taylor and BERG's Tom Armitage. It's a game about learning to look at the world around you. You take a picture, upload it to Flickr, tag it with noticings, geotag it and you're in.

 

Noticings' rules are always in flux, but for example you get 10 points for noticing something and 70 for noticing something every day for a week. There are other short lived rules, so one week you may get x2 for noticing something that is lost or something that is red.

There's a score table, but it's weekly, so new players can very easily get to the top of the league.

 

Anyway. Seeing as it's a game on Flickr I thought the logo ought to be pink and blue. And seeing as Flickr is more blue than pink i thought we'd flip that. And then crucially the 'o' in the name gave me the chance to put a little eye in there which becomes the Noticings icon.

 

Seeing as Noticings is a game played on your mobile phone and on the web this is more important than the logo. It's certainly used more. Here's the Twitter stream,

 

the App Store,

  

 

the App icon,

 

the laptop stickers,

 
the favicon (etc, etc)

 

and in possibly the best moment of my career so far the Flickr machine tag.

 
Yes! Something I designed made it into the official Flickr code!

Look how small that Flickr machine tag icon is. Teeny tiny. And yet the symbol still works as a logo and as a cheeky little eye. I'm pretty pleased with that.

You can play noticings here, you can follow them on Twitter here and you can buy the app here. It's worth getting the app just for the ability to upload photos with the correct geo tag from your iPhone.

The Lazy Designer’s Guide to Success

Michael Bierut has written a brilliant article over on azuremagazine.com called The Lazy Designer’s Guide to Success.

  

Brilliant because it's funny, true and correct. And because it reinforces what I've thought for a long time and what Dietar Rams said once, "Good design is as little design as possible".

I'd like to reproduce the article in full to ensure you read it. But that's probably wrong. So instead I'll list the headings and ask you all to FOLLOW THIS LINK and read the article.

1. Keep it simple.
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel [Part 1].
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel [Part 2]: Rotate the tires instead.
4. Do as you’re told.
5. Steal.
6. Once you come up with something, never let it go.
7. Make other people do the work.

All this from the man who last month gave us “Seven Dead Brands of Sleepy Hollow".

Enter the D&AD Awards

The D&AD Awards are open for entry. You should enter.

There's a really good category finder thing which helps you work out where to enter your stuff.

  And look, it's only £95 to enter Graphic Design. I know there's a massive recession on but if you done some work you think is good enough to win, work your proud of, work you think is the best in its category, you should enter. I've seen you all wandering round in Diesel jeans. They cost more than £95.

I'm really pleased to be judging again this year. I really enjoying judging. I sitting on the Typography panel with a pretty amazing bunch of judges.

  Yep, David Carson will be judging too. Should be great fun. Looking forward to that.

Michael Bierut is this years Graphics Foreman which is great news. It will be nice to see him again. And it helpfully leads me straight into my next post...

Smokescreen in the Metro

I wrote a little thing for the Metro about Smokescreen, commissioned by C4 Education and made by Six to Start. Read the article here.

Nice Mash Up

 

Interesting mash up created this afternoon by a bit of haphazard tidying.

 
It's Nice That and Where's Wally?

Pentagram

I went to Pentagram this morning. What a lovely office / studio / building they have. And so nice that they take the small stuff seriously, like archiving and lunch for everyone.

And like Matt said a while ago, KPI: Having a street sign.

Although...

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Irony Candy

PSSSSST

The tone of the writing doesn't fit the tone of the media.

Blogging: The Lowdown

I found and old copy of Blueprint today. It was from 2003. Six years ago.

It talks about blogging.

Russell has posted an old copy of some magazine (Wired, I think) which spoke of mp3 players and ebooks. It's quaint all this stuff and I guess we'll see more of it as stuff becomes more out of date and looks funnier in retrospect.

Me? I'm still blogging via this shit Typepad app. I hate the app, it particularly troubles me that I can't post links. Links! Links! The corner stone of a weblog!

But there's something nice and immediate about about blogging from my phone.

Anyway.

Desire path crossing

A new pedestrian crossing was launched to much acclaim in London today. I would insert a link here, but this Typepad doesn't seem to let me, which is pretty crazy for a blogging app.

Anyhow. I love this new crossing. Finally someone, somewhere has designed a piece of public infrastructure around the actual behavior of the human. Rather than a preconceived idea of that behaviour.

In other words, I've walked diagonally across that crossing many times, now you can do it legitimately.

Google "London new crossing" and "desire paths" and you'll be able to finish this post yourself, seeing as this app won't let me

Nice painting? Photo? Graf?

I'm not really sure what this is. I'm aware it's an image of a lady, possibly naked, with her arm behind her head. But I'm not sure if it's a painting. Maybe it's some kind of photo-silver-chemical solution on the wall? Maybe it's graf, which is what people call graffiti nowadays.

Either way, it's very cool.

I'm writing all this from my phone as an experiment. It might look shit.