Noisy Decent Graphics

Tangible digital

This is just an expression that I want to store here so that I don't forget it. That is all.

Sebastiao Salgado's Genesis comes to London

Sebastiao's incredible Genesis series is in London. For the last 4 years and for 4 more still, Salgado is "seeking out places that are still as pristine as they were in primeval times, places that provide hope." The results, as you might expect, take your breath away.

All images copyright Sebastiao Salgado / Amazonas / NB Pictures.

Sebastiao Salgado is my favourite photographer, with Martin Parr a close second. I hesitated about posting this next bit, but I think it's interesting.

Salgado didn't directly inspire the project below, but that style of photography did.

For several years now we've been working with The Omerta Group a financial services Executive Search firm. The identity we created involves us using a different, stunning, black and white landscape photograph every time we produce something. Since we started we've bought a collection of these images and we add the red flash in post production.

The identity works across printed materials a well as the web. This approach gives them a very powerful and strong image. It's also startlingly unique in the financial services arena.

Let me be very clear that under no circumstances do I want to be so gauche as to make any comparisons between us and Salgado, but I thought you might like to see how different things inspire us and the work that results.

The exhibition ends in January, but do yourself a favour and go now.

Tea, please

I've got a complaint to make.

I've been to lots of meetings recently. And in lots of those meetings I haven't been offered a cup of tea. Shocking isn't it?

Sometimes, if the meeting is going on a bit, I'll politely ask for a drink. Someone will then bring out some water.

Water?

I love tea, I could drink it all day. I tell them at work, "don't ask, just make a brew". Sometimes when I get in of a morning I make myself two cups of tea, just to get me started. Tea is the drink that built Britain. In fact Russell once told me that because tea uses boiling, and therefore pure water, it stopped factory workers getting cholera and such and therefore that's not just an aphorism, tea actually did build Britain.

So next time I'm in a meeting with you, I'll have a tea, please. Milk no sugar. Thanks. And next time you're hosting a meeting, please offer to brew up.

Some other points; Yorkshire Tea is easily the best and occasionally I'm partial to a latté.

Interesting South

You may have noticed that Emily is organising an Interesting South in Sydney.

We've helped out a little bit by designing the official platinum Interesting South logo shown above. Should you wish to you can use that jpeg and plaster it all over your walls. You could also use the .eps version which you can download by clicking this link.

If you're down that way you really should get a ticket and a tshirt. The speakers look great; you can hear Dan talk about "chucking social software at your local energy sources', Lauren explaining "How To Not Feel Like A Twat When Looking at Modern Art" and lots of other fun people.

CON-903

Round here we give everything a job number. That job number starts with a CON. So when Tom was looking to put some decals on his newly sprayed single speeder we gave it the job number CON-903 and, well, you can see the rest above.

It's still your fault

"Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen,  sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel and makes complex sugars as food, creates  microclimates, changes sugars with the seasons, and self  replicates... Why don't we knock that down and write on it?"

Makes you think doesn't it?

Quote from William McDonough at TED, read more at Howies.

More online stuff that is good and therefore makes me blog about it

Right then, round up.

1. Dan pointed out here that the Times have been using Typepad for some of their football coverage. The News Of The World (also part of the News International stable) have also been using Typepad for football, Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor and Showbiz coverage. Good, slightly odd and interesting.

2. Poke have launched a super thing for Orange. It's a never ending webpage. But more than that it's beautiful, good fun and they've been very clever about the sharing aspect. It's really easy to share (promote, pass round) the site on Facebook, blogs and emails.

3. Because I'm so damn far ahead of just about everything I blogged about the Pepys blog here. Lebowski even told me it was his favourite blog once. It's been nominated for an award and you should all vote for it because it's good, because it could only be done on the web (releasing a page a day not the actual diary, I'm aware of that) and because Phil Gyford is a very clever chap.

Look at that. I didn't say viral once.

Maybe I'm cool now?

I've never really been into MTV. I never watched it as a kid, in fact I don't think I've ever 'watched' it. It's been on a few times when I've been round other peoples houses.

The other night Marcus twittered that he was watching "probably the best MTV EMA ever" so I thought I'd have a look and see if it was streamed live online.

And blow me down it was.



So I watched it for a bit. Streaming. Big. Good quality. And I got to see Amy Winehouse sing 'Rehab' which was good because I'd actually quite fancied watching that bit.



And the graphics were pretty good too.



Ahhhhhh... the internet.

Good Design

Picture from UPPERCASE found via Russell's FFFFound! Usual stuff applies.

Is this the definitive description of good design?

Discuss.

Brand in good Web 2.0 project SHOCK

Lovely picture taken by Michael Walter/Troika , my usual photo policy applies.

There's a lot of talk about Web 2.0, to the extent that companies ring up and say, "Hello, can we have some Web 2.0 please?". We get asked a lot for "X, Y and Z and can it have a social networking element?". All very strange.

For a brand to really understand Web 2.0 (and I apologise for using that term but you all know what I mean) what it takes is someone in the organisation who already understands Web 2.0. Someone who is already blogging, someone who has a Flickr account. Etc etc.

And I reckon that's what's happening at Eurostar.

Eurostar are blogging the big move from Waterloo to St Pancras. The blog is good, updated regularly and the writers respond to all comments. But it's the Flickr stuff that has impressed me.

They've set up a Flickr photostream and they're putting all sorts of (gorgeous) behind the scenes shots up there. But they've also collected a whole bunch of Eurostar pictures that have been taken by other people and saved them as their favourites; creating a instant Web 2.0, user generated, good looking, relevant, gem. So simple my friends, so simple.

Ivan Chermayeff

To end Beauty Week here's some pictures of the wonderful work of Ivan Chermayeff who spoke at the D&AD lecture on Wednesday night.

No words, just amazing work.

Normal, normal service will return next week.

FFFFOUND!

There's a new site in town. It's called FFFFOUND! and it's lovely. Really I have no idea what it's about, who it's by etc, but I love it.

You sign up (obviously) and then every time you see a nice image on the web you bookmark it to your FFFFOUND! Very quickly you build up a huge collection of really gorgeous images. A long list of visual inspiration. There isn't some big scheme behind it, it's just a really nice collection of great images.

It's blissfully simple and easy.

It also recommends images for you which in a nice, unobtrusive way. All the images in this post I've found through FFFFOUND! Gorgeous aren't they?

Disney Christmas 1947

Also known as: proof that a Christmas card doesn't have to be shit, clichéd, tacky, over thought or over engineered. Many more here.

Website Craft

The lovely thing above constructed by Cookie.

One thing is I hate about web designs is that generally, they all look like web designs. In the same way I was disappointed all Matthew Williamson's inspiration appears to come from fashion, it often seems as though all web designers inspiration comes from web designs.

Poke are one company that tend to avoid this and their latest site Get On Board is a shining example of beautiful craft that happens to be on a website. Sure it's a brilliant idea and a great cause, but the craft that's gone into little things like buttons is lovely. And it's managed to look nice and good and hand made without looking twee and shit and like it was done by Swampy.

Just look at the picture / illustration / graphic above. Gorgeous isn't it? And that's what this week is all about.

Pantone Manet

Mike of Surrey is a frequent contributor to The Design Disease Flickr pool (a constant source of inspiration for me, err The Pool not Mike) and he alerts us to this cool picture in the reception of The Partners. A Manet made entirely of Pantones.

Looks great, doesn't it?

Beauty Week: Autumn has all the best colours

Thank You Henrietta and introducing Beauty Week

That was pretty good, wasn't it?

I'd like to say a really big thank you to Henrietta, you guys seem to agree that she did a grand job.

Personally it was weird and exciting to log on every day and see someone else writing on here. As an experiment I think it worked well. It gave you all a rest from me and it added a slightly different flavour to the blog. Hits went up (not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing) and I noticed a few different faces around the place.

I really liked the 7 Rules of Showcasing Architecture in Print post, I'm in love with the Magnum book (more on that soon) and I'm really glad she saved me the trouble of posting about the Matthew Williamson exhibition. (There are a few more pictures of that on Flickr and the picture above is also from the show, well worth a visit.) The death of Barcelona street art post has been linked to all over the place. Let me know in the comments what you thought.

And now back to normal.

Well not quite. Speaking in the broadest sense possible most designers fall into two camps; Form or Function. Hopefully you've already noticed, but I'm very firmly in the Function camp. It's quite not as simple as that of course, as Michael Bierut is often pointing out.

There's a lot of Function on this blog and (maybe) not enough Form. So welcome to Beauty Week. A whole week of stuff that, well, stuff that just looks beautiful. No big theory, no grand ideas, just great looking stuff.

But before that, last night was the final episode of the amazing, Shakespearian, Sopranos. It was stunning. And that's as good a reason as any to direct you to Michael Bierut's Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos.

The Making of Magnum Magnum

Magnum Magnum comes out in November. Published by Thames & Hudson it is – as noted in the blurb – a book of unparalleled scale and ambition. It is a category killer, which is to say that this is the photography book of 2007.

Don’t call it a coffee table book – it’s bigger than that in every way. Showcasing no less than six works from each of every Magnum member there ever was, the resulting 400 or so photographs and accompanying texts make up a product of epic (390 x 320mm, 568 pages) proportions. It weighs 6.5kg and comes in a special carrycase with a handle. It is absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

Andrew Sanigar is commissioning editor at Thames & Hudson, and Magnum Magnum was all his idea. I know for a fact he’s been pretty busy with this over the last year or so, and I thought it would be interesting to ask him what is involved in putting a book like this together.

(Also, seeing as this is likely to be my last post before the return of NDG’s resident editor Ben I’m taking the opportunity to make it really really long…)

Henrietta Thompson for NDG: Why does the world need another book of Magnum photography?
Andrew Sanigar: This year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of Magnum by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David 'Chim' Seymour and George Rodger – the book celebrates the great photography created by Magnum during that time. The book is also the first and only time all the Magnum members, associate members (and the Estates of those who died while still Magnum members) have featured in one book – previous 'group' books don't have all of them. There is no group exhibition to celebrate the anniversary and Magnum very much see the book, particularly because of its size, scale and quality, as an exhibition you can keep at home.

HT: What makes it different from all the rest?
AS: Apart from featuring the full complement of photographers, as mentioned above, the six photographs by each photographer have been selected by another Magnum photographer and each set of six photographs is accompanied with a short commentary, written by the selecting photographer, about six photographs shown and the photographer who created them. It is a book with the voices of and insights from all the current members, so it is quite unlike any other photography book which might have one, two, possibly three author's voices and picture selections combined in the book. As a result, the book provides an exceptional insight into what makes a great photograph in the eyes and minds of photographers who are members of the world's greatest photographic collective. The idea of being reviewed/criticised/judged by one's peers is at the heart of the book and is what makes joining Magnum such a demanding exercise. Such high standards are what has largely driven the exceptional quality of Magnum photography, in both aesthetic and journalistic senses, over the last 60 years. It's very different from the rest in every sense.

HT: Is it difficult to produce a book of this size?
AS: Yes, it is not only physically difficult to print and bind, but relied on using the very, very best material to repro from – original prints supplied by the photographers and estates. It is also the largest and heaviest (and I think, most expensive book) Thames & Hudson has ever published.

HT: Who designed it, and why did he get the job?
AS: The designer was Martin Andersen, a freelance designer in partnership with his sister, Line, as AndersenM Studio. Martin has worked with us a number of times before, most notably on Magnum Ireland and Cartier. Martin has an exceptional sensitivity to photography books, a proven ability to make them look and feel amazing and has the best eyes and mind, in photo editing terms, of any book designer I know. We all worked closely with Brigitte Lardinois, who was the editor for the book, paired the photographers up, co-ordinated all the photographers in terms of their sending their selections and texts and Johanna Neurath, the Design Director.

HT: What challenges are involved with designing a photography book on this scale?
AS: Martin faced several challenges when making the design: a) How to make a coherent sequence/picture edit when only supplied with six photographs by a selecting photographer; b) how to achieve the same when a photographer selected more than six (sometimes we got eight, sometimes ten); and c) how to make sure the rhythm, pace and emphasis (which is crucial in getting photography books to work in the right way) was sufficiently varied (but without looking really whacky) when different people selected different photographers and each selecting photographer had their own criteria (i.e we didn't advise the photographers up front) when making their selections.
In 'normal' photography books, the designer either works with an author (or a single photographer) and therefore 'co-curates' the selection, or sometimes is presented with a larger edit, which the designer can edit down from when creating the layout, deciding on juxtapositions, rhythm, pace, etc. To have the work of 69 individuals, all in sequence, each of whom has been selected by 55 individuals (the balance is either estates or those too unwell to make selections), presents a huge challenge, not only in organizing everyone, getting their approval of the selections, etc, but in making it all stick as a coherent layout.

HT: What to your mind was the hardest sequence to put together and why?
AS: I'm not going to single any examples out, but generally the hardest ones were those where the photographer's output has a great deal of variety in terms of black and white or colour, and in terms of subject matter – with six photographs which has a lot of variation along those lines, it can prove challenging to get the layout to hold together. Martin did a great job in getting such harmony in those layouts.

HT: What do you feel is the most successful sequence?
AS: The ones with the most surprising selections, which didn’t show familiar work. There are a good number of younger Magnum photographers whose work is excellent and is brilliantly showcased in the book. That said, the sheer size of the book means, even if a photograph is very well known, you see it at a scale never seen before and that makes it fresh.

HT: I remember you mentioning something very interesting about the stock being an entirely new colour that was developed especially?
AS: The colour I think you're remembering is the spot colour used in the duotones and as the 'fifth' colour throughout the book. It isn't a colour you'll find in any Pantone book (or similar system) as it is a 'special' created by the printers, Steidl. The reason for using it was that we weren't getting a satisfactory result across the board with the duotone photographs – they looked perfectly good using standard Pantones, but they needed something extra special. The 'special' colour brought all of the duotones to life – some photographers have very intense, deep blacks in their black and white work, others have much more open, highlight detail-driven feel – the 'special' worked with all of them. It's down to our Production Director, Neil Palfreyman, and Gerhard Steidl and his team, that this worked so successfully.

HT: How is the typography organized?
AS: Inevitably, there's always a 'kit of parts' in terms of type sizes, hierarchy, etc, which one has in mind for the typography of a book. With such a page size, that notion, gets turned on its head. Suddenly, your running feet and folios aren't 7 point, they're 10 point, and 16 point becomes a comfortable and correct size for the text setting. Martin did a great job with the typography – it has all the attributes great typography in a photography book should have: It is modern and fresh, but is timeless – it won't date. Oh, and for the keen typespotters out there, all headings are in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and everything else (text setting, folios, running feet) is in ITC Garamond.

HT: What is the market like for a book such as this?
AS: Those with a love and appreciation of great photography primarily, but ultimately, given the range and exceptional quality of the material and the subjects represented, anyone with an interest in the last 60 years of human history and how that has been documented and represented.

HT: The images are so compelling and fascinating that often you are left wanting to know much more. How do you begin to caption a photography book such as this?
AS: With difficulty. The captions as created by the photographers are all of varying length, for a start, which makes the editing of them a challenge, and I do think that the reader should not be burdened with too much information – just enough. The book, as with many photography books, has very elegant, pared down captions. The fact that you want to know more having looked at a wonderfully evocative photograph is a very good thing – that simply demonstrates the power of a great photograph.

Matthew Williamson at the Design Museum

When she was director of London’s Design Museum Alice Rawsthorne got a lot of flack for putting on exhibitions about frivolous subjects such as Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik, and nominating the Gorrilaz for Designer of the Year. Her overly populist decisions had, if I remember rightly, something (although not everything) to do with her departure.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that – under Rawsthorne’s successor Dejan Sudjic – the Design Museum was putting on a Matthew Williamson exhibition.

Sudjic clearly understands design and its audience, and I suspect he may be trying to make that point with Williamson. (Oh, and here - but that was a while back). I’m not sure you could get a more frivolous and populist fashion designer than Matthew Williamson. This is not an intellectual, fashion/architecture-fusion label like Hussein Chalayan or Issey Miyake. Williamson is all handpainted peacock feathers, georgette, frills and sequins – it’s pure, unadulterated, fashion fashion fashion. 

I went along last week. I'm not sure if I was allowed to take these pics, but noone stopped me, so here they are. Exhibiting fashion in a way that ends up looking like an exhibition and not a posh shop is a skill that noone bar the V&A seems to have mastered yet. I think the Design Museum could have done better on this front, but it's nearly there. This is a sweet, compact exhibition, and I am so thrilled that it’s actually on that I’m not about to criticise it. (Much).

Fashion is one of the more accessible faces of design, and if it brings people to the end of Shad Thames to see it, therefore keeping the museum going, so much the better. I’d like to have seen a little more of Williamson’s processes and inspirations – more behind the scenes stuff, maybe take the intellectual content up a teensy bit at least... but the couture on display is impossibly intricate and lovely and provides more than enough eye candy to satisfy. And I believe that if the Design Museum is to really engage people, its directors need to know what people want to engage with.

Leftover interiors

Barcelona is a city full of the most surreal scenes. Just today I met a woman who kept a live white rabbit in her handbag, for example. Yesterday I saw – defiantly flouting the new extra harsh cycling laws – a little boy cycling along Rambla de Catalunya with a man who must have been in his 70s standing up on the basket rack behind him – Castellers style. I wish I’d got photos of both but I was too busy laughing.

Another Barcelona twist on the everyday, however, can be seen in the architecture. Often, when a building has been demolished a collage of leftover bathroom, kitchen and bedroom walls is left, forming an odd façade to the neighbouring block. I know you see this in other cities as well, but in Barcelona it really is part of the landscape – perhaps because of the rate of demolition going on. The Raval district, needless to say, is a veritable exhibition of it.

It can be funny (especially when sinks and shower heads are still attached) and sad, ugly and strangely beautiful all at the same time. There is apparently a word for the phenomenon in Catalan - but I'm still trying to find out what it is... if anyone knows, please tell me. There are also whole Flickr groups devoted to the phenomenon, although without knowing the name for it, I've only found a couple of images: here's one.