Noisy Decent Graphics

12 Posts of Christmas - 1. The Funnies

I've been a bit slow with the 12 Posts of Christmas. I know, I know, please stop emailing in. All back on track now. First up, The Funnies.

Right at the start of the year were these Poster Hacks which made me smile.

  

Then the EU started a competition to create "a fresh new logo for organic products". The winner got €6,000. And now, a year later you can vote from a shortlist of three.

The Sun blocked Bob Crow's driveway with a bus so he could see how it felt not being able to get to work. TechCrunch wrote about Newspaper Club and called the blog "hilariously frank".

WW2 propaganda posters got reworked with a modern twist.

  

Pete Dungey's Alan Keys. Student project of the year.

  

Stephen Fry gave a speech at Lords and demonstrates how to be brilliant, funny, warm and touching about nothing much. Brilliant and hilarious.

“Now, many of you will be wondering by what right I presume to stand and speak in front of this assembly of all that is high and fine and grand and noble and talented in the world of cricket, and to speak too in this very temple of all that is historic, majestic and ever so slightly preposterous and silly in that world? I certainly can’t lay claim to any great cricketing achievements. I can’t bat, I can’t field, I bowl off the wrong foot. That sounds like a euphemism for something else, doesn’t it? “They say he bowls off the wrong foot, know what I mean? He enters stage left. Let me put it this way, he poles from the Cambridge end of the punt.”

Graeme and Paul in Romania, or rather, in Romanian. The Michael Jackson Pantone swatches.

Never got enough plug sockets? Make a whole wall of them.

  

Planner Russell Davies invents the term "gleeful emo collapsism" and Corporate Blogger of the Year, Neil Christie rates Campaign's digital efforts.

You must read this APG paper written by a monkey. And you must read CampbellLaceBeta discovering Skype. Both very funny for different reasons.

Boris wades into the missing Thames debacle via Twitter and Kraft launch a Vegemite product called iSnack2.0. Seriously.

Everyone's parents were awesome.

And Hey Jude, the info graphic.

  

Sorry for not crediting everyone, it would simply take too long. I have included full instead. Hope that's OK.

12 Posts of Christmas

 

On Wednesday there will be twelve working days left until Christmas Day. Therefore, without any regard for tradition, the Noisy Decent Graphics editorial team have put together a little blog series called 12 Posts of Christmas. There will be reviews of work from 2009, personal highlights, the best links, quotes, funny bits, free mince pies, Last Christmas on repeat and maybe a whole section on Rory Sutherland.

12 Posts of Christmas - starts Wednesday, finishes Christmas Eve.

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...

View Larger Map

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.

Newspaper Club on Radio 4

In case you missed Saturday's PM programme, click here to listen to the short feature they did on Newspaper Club.

Literally unbelievable

I used to think this was the biggest marketing overclaim I'd ever seen.

Until I spotted this.

 
How about that for a brand truth. "As useful as a 3rd hand".

Let them eat bread

Yesterday Hovis were handing out loaves of bread at Liverpool Street station. Standard sampling procedure.

I saw lots of people wandering round carrying loaves of bread, so you could assume it was a success from Hovis' point of view.

I like to think of myself as a fully compromised grown up. I know the pros and cons of the marketing industry. My clothes have logos in them.

But I saw this and I felt sick.

 
This food staple was being handed out at Liverpool St. home of London's finance industry. I know there's been a banking crisis, but I'm confident the commuters rushing through that station can afford a loaf of bread.

There are people in the world, indeed in this city, who aren't in the same position. There are people who are in need of free bread. Hovis didn't choose to give this bread to a homeless shelter, or even to let commuters sample a slice of bread, or a free sandwich. They chose to hand out loaves of bread in one of the richest districts in the world, which inevitably got thrown away like the marketing collateral they were being treated as.

I find that disgusting.

HP

 

Does anyone know anyone who works at HP? Particularly in the print-on-demand bit. Either in Europe or in the US? Can you drop me a line?

Thanks.

Best client letter ever

You might have already seen this, but in case you haven't.

  

I especially like, "the more complicated the format of the album... the more fucked-up the reproduction and agonising the delays" and I like "he will probably look nervous and say "Hurry up" but take little notice."

But the best bit by miles is "please write back saying how much money you would like."

Wonderful.

Cheddar Italic

 
Fantastic. Cheese or font.