Working Hard to Leap Buildings

• December 21, 2010
  28 Comments // Retinart

I’ve always had a tendency to work maniacally on a project, pouring every ounce of energy into it until the outcome is struck.

This has been truest when it comes to Retinart. If you look through the archives it becomes quite clear that I work productively for a month or two, then lie dormant for several – there’s no real outcome to aim for, so I burn out.

A few weeks ago, as I was retreating to the warmth of my bed, I felt the exhaustion of the day swarming in my shoulders. “Hmmm” I muttered, “I have to stop with the Hard Work and just start working.” It was an odd thing to have flutter through my mind, but it was the closing of the day so I brushed the thought off.

The following days found the notion continually snake through my thoughts. Deciding to explore it further, I realised this was something I’ve always done, happily dedicating great effort to Hard Work.

9 Mini Reviews — I Do Love These Books: Part 1

• November 1, 2010
  8 Comments // Book Reviews

It’s not you, it’s me.

It’s not that I don’t love you, I do, really. You make me happy. Honestly. Crazy happy.

But I just can’t review you. I’m sorry. Yes, yes, we had some good times, you showed me some wild things. But no, I can’t. No… really, no, that’s enough, pick your self up! Have some self-respect!

Ok … yes … ok, I know, I know — you’re right. Alright, just a quick little one, ok?

A few of my favorite books

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to a few of my favorite books. For one reason or another, I’m (probably) not going to review these in great detail like I normally would; instead I’m only giving each a couple hundred words, instead of a thousand. >

In a sense, what they suffer from is that I love them too much — meaning objectivity is being thrown to the heap. But I do very much want to share them with you.

Learn Theory, Practise Aesthetic

• October 28, 2010
  10 Comments // Creativity

The most important thing you can do as a graphic designer is to practise as much as you can.

Practise with intention and thought and careless abandon.

Learn theory but realise that it doesn’t help you become a better designer, merely a more knowledgeable one. All the theory in the world won’t make a page more interesting to look at unless you understand how to marry the theory with aesthetic.

Aesthetic is the craft of our profession. I’ve heard some designers say that aesthetic is like the bastard child of design, it’s there but it shouldn’t matter as long as the functionality is solid or the design serves its purpose as a communicative artifact.

These designers are idiots.

Aesthetic matters more than anything else. Our profession is largely built on craft and gut feeling and knowledge that can be learned but rarely taught. This makes some uncomfortable as it suggests that any ol’ creative hipster could walk into our studios and do what we do. But like I said, designers who think this are idiots. We are not part of an industry done by rote, nor willy-nilly mark-making.

Forget All The Rules About Graphic Design

• October 25, 2010
  24 Comments // Graphic Design

In 1954 Bob Gill developed a design the he would later call more pleasing “than any other design job [he] had done up until that time…”

What pleased Gill so much was the Title Card for CBS sitcom Private Secretary, “because the result looks so inevitable and easy.”

He was 23 when he received this job and it served as the moment his career went into overdrive. Not only did it win him his (first) ADC medal and saw his name grow to demand more respect (he would joke it was the year that he finally got an answering service for his office), but it taught him something monumental.

Private Secretary was special because it helped him realise that a design can only be taken so far by an aesthetically driven solution.

“I stopped trying to ram my aesthetic prejudices down their throats. Why should clients have my tastes? … I talked to them about solutions and ideas instead of design.”

It is because of this attitude towards “inevitable” solutions that Gill’s clients thought so fondly of him. He was giving them tailored work that was concept driven and so well considered that he was able to effectively describe them over the phone.

He started to consider what the solution should be first, worrying about appearance second.

Typographic Marks Unknown II: Ligatures & Blockquotes!

• September 21, 2010
  17 Comments // Typography

Much like the origins of the spoken word, those of the written are often forgotten.

And the marks that make up those words? Mostly never thought about. This can also be said of the question mark, the exclamation point, quote marks and the beautiful, beautiful ligature. Turns out their history is pretty interesting.

In September 08 I wrote an article on a small collection of typographic marks that had interesting histories, weren’t often seen in use or were often abused in their applications. It was a lot of fun and I wanted to give it another go.

But rather than have a look at a few of the lesser-known marks we use like I did with the previous article, I thought I’d go for the exact opposite — have a look at a couple of marks we all know about and use.

The Question Mark

Latin for question, quaestiō may be where the origin of the Question Mark can be found.

Whenever our Latin writing friends wanted to indicate a question or query, they would add quaestiō to the end of the sentence.

Lacking a sense of elegance, and not to mention taking up quite a bit of space, quaestiō was abbreviated to QO. This worked wonders for the scribes as their jobs became a little easier and they could produce texts quicker and have more space to work with.

But for some, QO seemed like a word with missing letters. To counter this, the O would be placed beneath the Q, rather than next to it — a clever little move that turned QO from an abbreviated word, to a glyph unto its self.

Being that this was now a sort of symbol that was always drawn by hand, the evolution of it to the question mark we know today is fairly evident (and pretty damn cool).

Borrowed from Wikipedia.

Good Designers Learn From History

• September 14, 2010
  17 Comments // Graphic Design

What a wasteful child I was, unaware of what graphic design history can give.

I foolishly thought of history as dusty facts and faded images. And only the foolish child thinks history doesn’t matter, that it’s irrelevant and inessential to growth.

I browsed Meggs’ History of Graphic Design sparingly, reading not much more than the captions.

Then a few designers kept catching my eye, so it was more reading — but no longer mere captions, but the illustrious body copy that Meggs gives us in search of understanding. Then it was everything I could get my hands on.

And something fantastic started to happen — I was becoming a better designer, producing work with greater reason, stronger justification and refined meaning.

Jan Tschichold is the designer who really kicked my interest in discovering beauty of image and theory in history

Graphic Design History Gives Us Theory

History is of as much importance as theory — they should be married in the classroom and honeymoon in the studio.

To truly understand and use a piece of theory properly, we need to know why it became worth knowing — in what conditions was it first developed and used, why was it successful and what was its original purpose and audience? Without this knowledge, how could we use it effectively?

Why your client is a shithead

• September 9, 2010
  22 Comments // Miscellaneous

Why is your client acting like a shithead?

More often than not, it’s our own fault. At least in the sense that we can fix it, therefore we can take responsibility.

Very, very few people are naturally painful. They don’t go home and tell their kids exactly how to play with their toys, tell their partners that they are taking too long to do whatever or that their dinner guests need to move their plates a little to the left and down an inch.

(Alright, so there might be some people like this, but they really are shitheads and there isn’t much we can do about that.)

They’re nice people, just getting through the day, trying to get their work done. They have a boss they work for, a family they love, a book they cry at and a movie they laugh through. They have their own stresses and worries and don’t want us to add to them.

They’re normal. I know, I know, a whacky thought. But they’re human and nothing more nor less.

So why is it that they treat us so poorly? What did we do to insult them? Why do they ridicule us and force us to think unnatural thoughts involving the tearing of flesh from limbs by the teeth of angered hounds?

Paula Scher, Herbert Matter & Swatch: Was it Plagiarism or Parody?

• September 7, 2010
  10 Comments // Creativity

After the flames of modernism became mere embers, the design community started to turn to something with more warmth.

People were after something comfortable — a song buried in memory.

So designers of the eighties began looking back to move forward.

Digging through the archives and history books, designers searched for visual languages which had more romance wrapped in their tones than that of the clean lines and bold type of modernism.

Philip B. Meggs, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 4th edn., pg 481.Should a designer sit down and find novelty in a historical style, they wouldn’t set out to copy any exact piece. They would learn the language it spoke and use its “vocabulary of forms and form relationships, reinventing and combining them in unexpected ways.”

Looking Back with Paula Scher

By the mid-eighties, Paula Scher had become known as a designer producing original and clever work that sometimes spoke with the tongue of the past, emulating style and feel in interesting and new ways.

Doing this, Scher and her business partner Terry Koppel put together a promotional booklet entitled Great Beginnings.

Compiling the opening paragraphs of well known novels, the booklet served as a great introduction to how one can reappropiate design styles long gone in fitting and interesting ways.

~~~

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The poster that got everyone thinking

Photoshop Has (Almost) Nothing To Do With Graphic Design

• July 29, 2010
  53 Comments // Creativity

Think of the photographer who captures a fraction of time or the illustrator who tells a story. Will these moments not exist if it weren’t for the camera or the pencil?

They exist in spite of the tools used to capture them.

The ideas that we develop for our clients, the messages we wish to communicate, exist in spite of Photoshop or any other piece of software. The lines of code wrapped in an interface do nothing but hold a (virtual) expression of our ideas. Much like the photographer’s moment, the ideas exist whether captured or not.

But so many insist on calling Photoshop mishmash pieces design, when they are nothing of the sort as they hold no idea, just stylistic nonsense. A hammer can help build a house, does that mean hammering two planks of wood together is good enough to be a home?

Oh Photoshop, Your Crown Is Too Heavy

Yes, Photoshop is, today, an essential tool of graphic design. Yes, knowing our tools well make our jobs easier and can help our work become beautiful — there is no denying that.

But it isn’t enough to know the tools well without an idea to which they can be applied. The expressions these tools craft will be without soul, meaning or story.

The idea is not validated by the tools used to craft its expression. But the tool does find validation in the expression. The tool relies on it to be considered valuable. Photoshop is no different than any other tool.

In 100 years, discussions about what version of Photoshop was used to produce the wonderful work today will not be held. It will call it a tool. It might be an wonderful tool to wield, but it is only a tool. It may have changed the way we express our ideas, but it shouldn’t change the way we conceive them.

The Timeless Beauty of National Geographic

• July 27, 2010
  30 Comments // Graphic Design

Who isn’t familiar with that wonderful yellow frame?

It holds breathtaking images of exotic destination and mountains of nostalgia! It’s the flag of the editorial institution that National Geographic has established over the span of 120 years.

The eponymous yellow rectangle has seen virtually no change, much like the interior pages, since it first bordered the front covers of the 1888 launch issue.

I thought it could teach us a few things about timelessness in graphic design, so I randomly picked four issues to look at; March 1964, November 1988, April 2000 and a recent December 2009.

The Front Cover

National Geographic’s front cover is a great example of how well simple branding can be tied to a product or message. In this case, the slightly warm yellow has become a symbol of wonderful photography, intriguing articles and serves as a doorway into places worlds away.

The ’64 issue is clearly the most different because of a floral border that, while taking up space, being distracting and kind of just kitsch, is romantically wonderful. It feels so appropriate to the sixties (echoes of William Morris?) that I’m glad to see it. Though I must say I’m also glad to see it evolve to nothing more than a yellow border.

The yellow frame works the hardest as a piece of branding, being more recognisable than the logotype (which only changed slightly — notice the slight type size change in the ’09 issue?) and far stronger than the floral badge that was used in the ’88 and ’00 issues.

Wish to delve deeper?

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