Blip is a fairly regular commentator on this blog, which is more than can be said for most of you.
As Russell would say, through the serendipity of the web I've found Blip's Flickr page. There's some lovely stuff on there. Like this
and this
"Trying to do one continuous doodle over I don't know how many pages."
Blip, explain yourself! Tell us about your drawings!
Nice looking website too.
Further to your comments, British Rail did actually make one that looked like a plane! I've spent all week looking for this and I've finally found it. There's also a decent TV ad for the service here. The picture is from the excellent, must have book, Smile In The Mind.
You see how nice I am to my listeners? You don't get that kinda service with other design blogs...
1. Record Covers, CD covers, anything musical
I hate the music industry.
First off, they (still) really haven't got the "digital" thing. They're still unit shifters and this is years and years after people started saying things like 'The only CD's I've bought since 1998 have been blank'.
Secondly, I know people who work in the industry and whilst it is good fun and it is cool and you will get to do and see things that your mates won't, there is a downside. At a junior level that downside is normally cash. Or lack of. It tends to work like this, because you got to see XYZ band play a secret gig we won't pay you very much. Because you have to drive to Cardiff on Wednesday night to see ZYX band, we won't pay you very much. Because we got you back stage at Glastonbury (don't get me started on Glastonbury) we won't pay you very much.
Perceived glamour in return for long, hard hours.
It's kind of the same for designers, the budgets for designing album artwork are very, very, very slim. Which is why albums tend to be done by friends or small music dedicated one man bands. Which is fine, you takes your money and all that.
The problem is that any creative equity in sleeve artwork has long, long gone. The days of Sgt Pepper or even Blue Note are over.
(Picture taken from Blue Note Records and Thomas Hawk with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
Sure, every once in a while a Beck comes along, but as the 'unit' gets distilled down to effectively this:
less and less time, money and care is being put into artwork.
I've designed album covers and I may do it again. I'm not saying everything is rubbish, I'm saying you thought they would be fun / good / cool / glamorous to design but actually they aren't.
2. Film Posters
I imagine the movie industry is much the same as the music industry, and probably fashion too. They almost expect you to be grateful to be working for them.
Take a look at this brilliant link from CR Blog it's a list of companies that design film posters. Let's have a look at some of them.
(Picture taken from IMP Awards with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
OK, I'm not saying anything radical here - they all look the same.
You think that's fun? I imagine that people are thinking, 'I'd love to do a film poster, I'd do it all differently. I'll be like Saul Bass for the Noughties.'
(Picture taken from Design Museum with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
You won't be the next Saul Bass. You'll have the lead front centre, cos we paid him (and it will be a him) $20M. We'll have both female supports on either side of him. We'll have the title big. No bigger. No bigger. Bigger! And so on and so on.
There's a reason they all look the same. They all want to look the same.
I have designed some small film posters but nothing big. I did have an interview once with a large, respected (and good) agency that did film posters. Essentially all they did was resize the artwork from the US. Think that sounds like fun? That sounds like something you thought would be fun / good / cool / glamorous to design but actually they isn't.
OK, I've offended the entire music and film industry, who's next?
3. Start ups.
Remember I'm not slagging start ups off at all (we were one once) I'm saying you think it will be fun / good / cool / glamorous to design the identity for the next big start up, and it won't.
Here's the problem. How do you know which one of the 400,000 new businesses started each year in the UK is going to be the next Apple or Coke or Google? It's simple, you don't.
Most (actually every) start up is frantic, short of cash, short of time and run by people who really care what they're doing. Care so much that they'll stay up all night arguing about font size. And you don't want that, that's your job.
To put it another blunt way, start ups are often too close to the cash. This makes them unable to stand back and make rational decisions about something quite intangible and often irrational. Again, remember, start ups aren't bad, it's just that you think it would be fun / good / cool / glamorous to come up with the next swoosh. It won't be.
Anyone got any experience of designing in those situations?
Wet Paint Management - do you think this is what Alan Fletcher was wary of?
The next few posts are gonna be about cool stuff that you may or may not know about.
I've mentioned Swissmiss before but none of you were paying attention.
So, one more time... Swissmiss is a brilliant website. Mainly a collection of stuff found on the web, but don't let that but you off.
Tina finds great stuff everywhere like these great Lego ice bricks. By the way, do Lego have a blog? Surely they would be the perfect brand for blogging?
This hilarious palette of web 2.0 colours.
This post about a forthcoming Sticker Safari in Hamburg, which is sort of like some stenciling we saw in Romania.
(Pictures all taken from Swissmiss but she's grabbed them from elsewhere, usual stuff applies.)
The next few posts are gonna be about cool stuff that you may or may not know about.
(Picture taken from Design Boom with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
The man above is called Milton. Everyone say 'Hello Milton'.
Milton Glaser is a genius. He designed this, for example.
Design Boom have a brilliant interview with him which includes this advice for young designers:
"it's a tough business,
you have to be amazingly consistent and persistent.
you have to work like hell.
you cannot become an excellent practioneer without constantly
working hard all your life. it is not an easy way to earn your money.
and... you have to be well trained and you have not to be narrow to
references, because everybody else is doing that at the same time."
Which, in my humble opinion, is invaluable.
The next few posts are gonna be about cool stuff that you may or may not know about.
On the Creative Review Blog they have a very interesting interview with the chaps from Design Project. The first ever non-London firm to design the D&AD book. I don't actually believe that they are the first non-London firm to design the D&AD book, but there you go.
It's a facinating interview and testimony to the success of the CR Blog. it's also proof that publishing can exist on the web and in print etc etc blah blah blah. Creative Review is very good, the blog is even better.
(Picture taken from CR Blog with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
Oh, and they have better photography than me.
I've spent the last couple of hours trying to collate the information I need to finish a post I'd like to write.
Except that I haven't found what I was looking for, instead I've found a whole bunch of really interesting stuff that only hangs together by the fact that I stumbled across it all one autumnal evening.
So to share all this with you, I'm going to bundle it all up in a little package called 'The Story Of A Blog Post'.
On Saturday we went to see Thomas.
It was brilliant, of course, really good fun and exactly the kind of thing you should be doing at the weekend.
And because I have the graphic design disease (more about that later) I kept spotting things like this:
Which reminded me of several things. How brilliant British information design is and was.
How nice it is when people bother to lovingly paint type and how nice some of the British Rail graphics used to be. This got me thinking about the British Rail train identification system that won loads of awards and they always used to go on about when I was at college. It looked like this:
I remember that it came in a big, big corporate identity manual in the days when big, big corporate identity manuals were de rigour. And because I've also got the blogging disease I instantly thought, 'ah ha blog post!' Hence my quest to find more information about this graphic information system.
First off I found this:
Which was designed by Design Research Unit who started trading in 1943 and in 2004 merged with Scott Brownrigg. That's a hell of a long time for a design company to be around. Most of them go to the wall within 3 years. DRU also designed a generic wayfinding signage manual for train stations in 2000, which in turn is remarkable as they were also asked to do one in the 60's.
I've always really liked this symbol. It's graphic, simple, elegant. It's got movement, it has two arrows, it looks like train tracks. It does the job of a logo well. No complaints.
Which of these is the correct version?
It's the first one. The top arrow points left because trains always keep to the left.
On the logo for Sealink the symbol is reversed because it looks like an S. Interesting eh?
Next up I stumbled across this:
Did you know that in the 1970's British Rail actually designed and patented a design for a flying saucer?
The flying saucer originally started as a proposal for a raiseable platform. However, the project was revised and edited, and by the time the patent was filed had become a large passenger craft for interplanetary travel. It was to be nuclear fusion powered, utilising laser beams to produce pulses of nuclear energy in a generator in the centre of the craft. Pardon my language, but how fucking brilliant is that? You don't get that under privatisation.
Then I rediscovered Jock Kinneir & Margaret Calvert. Two brilliant designers who designed the current signage on Britain's roads in the mid 60s.
At the start of the 60s, determined to illustrate the haphazard state of British road signage a chap called Herbert Spencer drove from central London to the recently opened Heathrow London Airport and photographed each of the road signs that he came across along the way.
He then published the result in two photographic essays in a magazine called Typographica. This provoked the government to redesign the system. It ain't that simple these days.
(Picture taken from Gaetan Lee with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
The British system is now copied round the world as was pointed out to me the other week by a colleague who's just returned from Dubai.
(Picture taken from Greg Valiquette with huge thanks, usual stuff applies. Greg isn't my colleague by the way.)
Next up this random list of links about design.
Just hundreds of interesting design links.
Then the web took me on a visit to the National Rail Museum in York. I've been there in real life to talk about a project that sadly never happened. It's an absolute treasure of graphics, posters and signs. They even have a real sign for Platform 9 3/4.
(Picture taken from Neil T with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
It's better than this one.
(Picture taken from Steve and Brooke with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
Although that one is brilliant too.
Look at this stuff.
Isn't it brilliant? Even this is good.
Last and by no means least I found this.
A typographic walk through London by Phil Baines.
I must do one of those myself, one day.
Still no info about the British Rail train identification system that won loads of awards and they always used to go on about when I was at college, but isn't the web the best thing ever?
Has anyone bought the new Beck album yet?
(Picture taken from Design Observer with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
Forget the music, is the cover design thingy as good as people say it is?
I don't think I've ever said that in my life before.
Like most trade mags Design Week isn't normally the most exciting read, but this week is different. I even took it home to read.
There's a decent tribute to Alan Fletcher. I sort of feel that you non designers out there aren't understanding why we graphic designers loved Fletcher so much. This collection of his drawings might go some way to solving that.
There's a good piece about The Sun's front pages. I don't think there's enough said about newspapers and graphic design, although I've mentioned it here and here. There's currently an exhibition of The Sun front pages on at the Proud Galleries. That looks worth a visit.
Last but not least, 'The benefits of going global'. Ahh China. You all thought I'd forgotten about that didn't you?
Last Thursday I was speaking at Imperial College's Tanaka Business School.
We were debating this, "Computers have become indispensable tools to designers of all kinds and have transformed the practice of design. With advances in computing power and artificial intelligence theory, we can begin to envisage computers taking on some of the creative act of design. What potential advantages or drawbacks would this have for designers? Should we fear that creative software is a threat to the design craft or industry?"
The lecture room (is that what they're called?) was fantastic. Tanaka is brand new and designed by Foster (click on project and then Imperial College to see more pics).
(Picture taken from Foster & Partners with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
From the reception it looks like a huge slinky or a baked bean tin with the label taken off. This houses a lecture room for each floor. Inside it's all cool blacks and greys. What really impressed me is that the lecture room had WiFi. And each chair has a broadband point and a power point. At the front there was a PC all hooked up and ready to go with the sound all wired up to the speaker system. In short everything a speaker could want.
There were three speakers before me, Geraint who's Professor of Computational Creativity at Goldsmiths, Simon who's written his PhD about this stuff and an architect whose name I can't remember (which is bad, sorry about that). They were all pro computational creativity, I was the anti view. I won't go through their presentations mainly because I'll forget something and secondly because I won't do them justice.
Simon and Geraint both had examples of where computers had been creative. Geraint had some music that had been generated by computer, Simon showed us work from this exhibition and showed some phrases a computer had generated too.
So far so good.
The architect showed model (after model, after model) of structures the computer had helped construct. Or something, I didn't really get his presentation to be honest.
And then it was me.
I had 10 minutes and I had to say why I thought computers couldn't be creative.
I started the same way Russell started his presentation here. The same black slide, the same music (it's OK, I asked him first).
I started like that for two reasons. Firstly, because it's a bloody good way to start a presentation and secondly because I believe a computer couldn't generate a piece of music that could generate the feeling of expectation, of excitement that that piece of music gives. That was my statement of intent, if you like. The audience seemed to like it.
Then I moved on to some fairly obvious stuff, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare etc
and then this:
(Heads nodding in the audience) you can guess what people are thinking, "but that's a computer generated film".
Yes, a computer can help, but that's all it can do. It can't actually create. The computer is not Walt Disney.
It couldn't come up with a story like this.
Why? I think the main reason is that creativity isn't linear. As Michael points out here, creativity does not happen like this:
Computers do think in a linear fashion (we can argue what linear means another time) and therefore they can only produce versions of things. You'll never get that spark of genius.
And talking of geniuses. These people are all considered creative geniuses.
Round pegs in square holes. What concerns me is that if we tell a computer to think like Einstein we'll get this:
Which isn't creative at all. What was creative will now be the norm and something new will have to emerge. With computers we would never have gotten from Glenn Miller to The Beatles. If you see what I mean.
In the week Alan Fletcher passed away it seemed appropriate to hold this up as a great example of creativity.
Then I showed this
and asked who could see the arrow. Most of them couldn't. When I pointed it out, someone actually gasped (I was pleased with that). You see, whilst we could probably get to the stage where a computer could produce a logo, there is no way it could create the added value you get when you see that arrow.
And I finished with this.
Next up there was a panel session and a lot of the questions were for me. We kind of agreed that a computer may be able to produce something that we could apply the word creative to, it's just that it wouldn't be very good. It's a question of scale.
Considering I had two days to put that presentation together I was quite happy with it. I wasn't as familiar with the slides as I would have liked, but I think I did OK. The Chair called my argument 'powerful' so it can't have been that bad.
Afterwards I bumped into Nico, who is very interested in the Design is the New Management Consultancy stuff. So we had a good chat about that.
So, what do you think of computational creativity? Did what I said make sense?
Was anyone in the audience?
That's old news I know, sorry. I've been meaning to post on this for a while, but some slippage occurred, sorry. That's enough sorrys.
It's good. It's really good. It's rare that magazines do these things right, but Creative Review have done just that. It's interesting, makes good use of the media and is sufficiently different (and yet on brand) from the magazine.
They also have much better photography than me.
Oh, and they've linked to me.
Thanks to Charles for sending me this blog. I'd seen it before, I think because Richard had linked to me. Anyway, enough blogantry.
This site is gorgeous. Manna for designers.
It's a blog about found type, print and stuff. To quote the author, "Found on holiday, at boot sales, in book shops or junk shops, littering the pavement, dropped into a waste bin.".
The nice thing is, it really gets across that lovely tactile feeling of ephemera, which is tricky on a screen. Ace Jet 170 succeeds because it's well designed and lovingly looked after.
All the images are obviously taken from Ace Jet 170. Hope you don't mind.
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