Came home the other day to find this wrapped around the handle of my wheelie bin.
At first I thought it was a note from the Council. But it's not. It's an advert for a firm that will come round and clean your wheelie bin. For £3 a month they'll come round and clean it every 4 weeks.
What a good idea. (The ad, not the bin cleaning. I think I can manage to clean my own bin.)
We're in the market for some new furniture at the moment, so today we wandered around some shops. Right outside our office I saw this old type manual in a pile of rubbish.
Then in the fabulous new Habitat store on Regent Street we saw this.
Right in the window are some huge 3D letters. Lovely stuff. It's a only a guess but I reckon either Graphic Thought Facility or NB Studio did this.
Inside the store they have these huge letters everywhere. I think they might spell Habitat if you got them all together. Looks great.
Following on from yesterdays post about Helvetica here's a quiz to determine whether you can tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial.
All designers love Helvetica*, it's the ultimate typeface. That's a cliché but it's true.
Why do they love Helvetica so much? It's beautifully cut, it's elegant and it almost always looks great. It looks great big. it looks lovely small and it's easy to read. Please, please don't get Helvetica confused with Arial. Please don't do that. Arial is not a real font. Let me explain.
In the old days (before the Mac) fonts were designed to be cut out of chunks of metal and printed onto think paper sheets. Paper, that's the key word there. Then the computer came along and another application for fonts was invented, the screen. You see, you read differently on screen to how you read on paper. Text that's printed onto paper is made of ink and ink smudges (even though you can't see it, it does) and print consists of millions of dots, 300 per inch usually. Text on a screen is backlit and made of pixels, normally 72 per inch.
All this means that a font that's designed for print may not necessarily work on screen. Most do, but not all. That's why in the 90's loads of fonts were designed for the screen only. Arial started out like this. It also gets round all the licensing issues (ie the cost per user) involved with getting Helvetica for 3,000 employees.
On a Mac screen fonts are easy to spot because they're all named after cities, Chicago, Geneva etc. So please don't use screen fonts for printing. And if you feel like using Arial, try Helvetica instead. Or Futura. Or Fruitiger. And never, ever Comic Sans. Don't get me started on that.
Right then, the whole point of this post is to tell you all about a new film coming out all about Helvetica. Brilliant.
* There are people who hate Helvetica but they tend to be designers from the 50's. They prefer serif f
Dan has asked a tough but brilliant question.
Art direction - what is it?
I've decided to answer here in a highly personal view largely based on my own experiences. I'm sure some of you will disagree, feel free to comment below.
My first real job in advertising / design was as an art director.The Chairman of the agency was an art director who was taught at the RCA. An old school, very talented creative guy.
Once we were preparing to brief a photographer for a shoot. The shoot wasn't spectacular, it was an old guy walking through a wood. The Chairman made loads of great suggestions that morning that helped to form my opinion of what Art Direction is. Here's one example. I'd visualised the old guy in the photograph wearing dark blue trousers, the Chairman changed them to red. I protested, "Why red? Who wears red trousers? It will look silly?" His thinking was that the red trousers would form a nice contrast to the browns of the wood and would help the main character in the picture stand out. He was right. And it didn't look silly.
Somehow what is ordinary in real life looks lifeless in print or on TV. Visuals often need to be larger than life to just look ordinary. Images need the spectacular turned up to 10 to have any chance of catching your eye.
I'm not being very clear.
To me, art direction is just that - directing the art. Making sure the images you produce are as beautiful, meaningful and rich as you can make them. Great art direction can evoke emotion and is the difference between this
(Picture taken from jas | n with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
and this. Does that make sense?
The idea may have come from a copy writer, a planner or even the Chairman's wife, but the Art Directors job is to take that visually to another level. So if the idea is to have horses leaping out of the ocean a great art director will take this
(Picture taken from Eliya with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
and turn it into this.
So how do you get better at Art Direction?
For me you need to understand how the visual world works. Basic things like chiarascuro and golden section. You need to understand how to create drama with light and how to make a 48 sheet change pace from left to right.
You need to look at the great image makers. The great painters, particularly the really, really old ones, because in those days paintings were used to tell stories and are laden with visual symbolism.
(Picture taken from the National Gallery with huge thanks, usual stuff applies.)
Lastly, there are probably some decent D&AD books on the subject.
Dan - hope that helps. Anyone else got any ideas?
If you're a Dad and your little ones are in the 0-2 bracket and you're intravenously attached to your laptop and your offspring are fascinated by this contraption you're so fond of - I have help.
Knee Bouncers was set up by some graphic designer Dads who had exactly the same problem. It's a series of lovely little animations and any (yes, any) key press sets off a squeal or a flash or a peek-a-boo or some other movement. So your kids can sit there hammering the keyboard to their hearts content.
Your little ones will love it, and you won't feel so bad spending all that time on the laptop.
I've just spotted this on the BA website.
It's a tie up with BA and Google Earth. Basically you open up a special BA layer in Google Earth that shows you all BA's special offers around the globe.
Seems like the perfect marriage doesn't it? I think it's a good idea. It certainly makes a lot of sense, which is more than can be said for most advertising / marketing these days.
I'm always interested in these little marketing, 'how can we monetise search' tie-ups that Google keeps trying. I imagine if you worked at Google, there is so much spare cash that you'd constantly be trying new innovative ideas. That's what I think anyway, I might be wrong. Google is so powerful that you'd presume that marketeers would be falling over themselves to partner up. I bet it's expensive.
A little tip for you. If you run a Graphic Design business, or if you're thinking of starting one, or if you're a freelancer then a set of Pantone Books is essential. But expensive.
It's much cheaper to buy them off eBay. The same books, but cheaper.
Jon from the strange Isokon emails me the following tale. In a world where we're increasingly having to spend ages discussing IP with lawyers, this is an interesting story.
Picture taken from predragbubalo with huge thanks, usual stuff applies
"A friend of mine is a designer for a company that did a promotion in the
US city of Las Vegas. They needed various signage and branding for the
promotion that would be displayed throughout the area it was taking place.
What he later found out from the company's legal dept., was that in the
city of Las Vegas, the following graphic/sign elements are trademarked by
Las Vegas itself...
Stars with seven or more points
Stars, three or more; Three or more stars
Circles, plain single line; Plain single line circles
Circles, three or more; Three or more circles
Diamonds with decorative borders; Diamonds with plain multiple line
border; Diamonds with plain single border; Plain diamonds with a single or
multiple line border and decorative borders
Rectangles that are completely or partially shaded"
Someone has found a decent marketing use for these things.
I really love this.
Kate Bingaman runs a beautiful site called Obsessive Consumption which started as a way for her to document (usually in beautiful illustrations) everything she bought. 
The drawings are lovely, really nice. Now she's hand drawing all of her credit card statements until they are paid off.
Which sounds like a good thing to add to this list and may possibly be an entrant into What The World Would Look Like If It Was Run By Graphic Designers because Kate is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Mississippi State University.
That's interesting because it's one year on from Katrina and MSU is taking an active role in the rebuilding of New Orleans. All this thanks to your friendly accountant blogger Graham Salmon.
There you go - five great links in one post.
This is nice. I saw this a while ago at one of those sample sale things (I hate those, but a mate of mine dragged me along). The sample sale was for Howies and on the way out they'd stuck up this little sign.
In this world where we're all talking about "living the brand" it's nice to see some people (I mean employees I s'pose) really living the brand.
Just a nice thing, that's all. Move along.
I've no idea what this about, but it looks bloody marvelous.
Picture taken from Color Deficient with huge thanks, usual stuff applies
Via Jon from, well I'm not really sure where you're from Jon. Jon?
Does anyone know what Kinja is? Does anyone use it?
This morning I stumbled across the Noisy Decent Graphics Kinja Card. It seems like a public, ziki or something? It's got a collection of recent feeds, some related links and some mildly useful traffic info. Apparently I write 11 posts a week. I might look at it regularly.
I thought it was about time I clarified a few things, especially in this world of IP issues and the challenges the digital era presents. I also ought to be an advocate for best practice in this area. If you see what I mean.
1. Wherever possible I will try and use my own images.
Stuff that I've taken with my camera, or stuff I've created in Photoshop or similar. You are free to use these images, but please drop me a line and please give me a little link in return. Thanks.
2. Sometimes, I might use an image from Flickr.
Like this post where I'd driven past the Unicorn Theatre but not had enough time to get a decent photo. If I do use a photo, I'll credit the photographer and provide a link back. If for any reason you don't want me to use your pictures drop me a line and I'll take it down.
I realise that's not perfect, or comprehensive, but I hope it's sufficient for a blog in the 2.0 world. And no, that's not me in the picture.
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