Split identity

Split identity, a photo by Dubdog@Flickr on Flickr.

Claire and I visited the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art today, and as well as being impressed by many of the exhibits—the Edvard Munch and accompanying Graphic Art exhibitions are well worth a look if you are any where near Edinburgh—I was duly taken with its identity system.

Designed by Glasgow based O Street, they have aligned all the 'O's, (their website reveals an slight obsession with 'O's, as their name may suggest), something I didn't notice at first. This allows a neat, right aligned edge, with which to split the logotype in two, emphasising the fact that there are two galleries to the Modern which are split into different buildings separated by a road.

Before realising this, on seeing the half written gallery name on a sign as we approached the building the Munch exhibition was housed in, I thought it interesting, but a little gimmicky. A bold move, I thought, as I wondered how they ever managed to sell the idea of only displaying half the clients' name to the client. However, it all made sense very quickly when walking around the two sites, especially when seeing the two halves so closely situated, as in the above photograph, and I am now an ardent fan. I can imagine the fun they must have had in dreaming up different situations where they could exploit this visual game, and thus reinforce the concept to visitors to the gallery.

Check out more examples on my Flickr and the O Street website.

The Small Letter

The Small Letter is a type primer produced by Desmond and Libertad Jeffery in 1956. It was donated to the BA (Hons) Graphic Design course at UCS for its book archive recently, along with various other books, and it has become an object of fascination to me. With an introduction that states: "We do not expect this booklet to be of any use to anybody, except possibly as a Dreadful Warning to the thoughtful against undue distortion & ornamentation of basic letterforms," how could it not?

So intrigued by this, and other such books that have either been donated or I've personally acquired, that I have started a research/archive project on Tumblr. At this stage, I'm intending it to consist of pre-digital print, type, and graphic design related books, although this may change depending on what I uncover. The blog is titled after Jeffery's booklet.

The Small Letter project

Le sac magic

For some reason, and one that she can not entirely understand herself, my wife felt compelled to buy some coffee sacks from eBay last week. She has absolutely no idea what she is going to do with them.

However, they are rather wonderful things.



See the rest of the range over on Flickr

And the title of the next programme is…

I've recently noticed a major lack of quality control in title sequences for some of the BBC's output. This is despite the continued excellence of some of the programmes. Take, for example, this atrocious piece of typography for Go West, a Friday night BBC4 programme that is currently running, about British bands 'making it' in America.



It appears as if the producer has allowed a GCSE work placement student to knock this together in iMovie, as the type slowly pans down the screen while images of adoring audiences at rock gigs in USA stadiums fills the background.



Unfortunately, the overall effect of the sequence just gives the impression of being 'cheap'. It is as if these type of BBC4 'talking heads' programmes have had the majority of their budget spent on paying guest speakers, while stitching together archive footage from the Beeb vaults. Hmmm, I'm probably not far wrong in this assumption.

The first title sequence that made me choke on my tea for its complete lack of aesthetic consideration was Timothy Spall's Somewhere At Sea. Be thankful I wasn't able to find an example online to post here. Like Go West, I'm sure it wasn't a big budget affair, but it did showcase a BBC veteran of high regard. Much like the programme that really did make me wonder what was going on in the minds of the graphics department at the BBC; Stephen Fry's Planet Word.



Comic Sans, please! This programme was dedicated to language—one episode even looked at the visual side of sign language—and yet the designers seem to have completely dismissed the importance of visual language in its title sequence. This is even more baffling when given that some effort had gone into the trailer, which at least attempts to smpathetically visualise and authenticate the subject matter being discussed.



Now I understand that the same level of design savvy can't go into everything, and that not all budgets will cover getting Why Not Associates to do the titles, (see Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes), but the issue is that you don't need to spend lots of time and money on making a considered and understated piece of typographic communication as this is more about rudamentory design choices—things that second year undergraduate graphic design students are adept at. And they are decisions that I am paying my licence fee for. You can seriously undermine the entire credibility of a TV programme with this sort of basic insult to your audience's intelligence.

Finally, don't get me started on the end titles; I'll leave that particular rant to David Mitchell, who is much more adept at such things than me.

Sweet F AAA

The Saturday edition of The Guardian has been sitting on our kitchen table since I finished leafing through it yesterday morning. This image has been staring up at me every time I've gone into the kitchen in the last 32 hours, and only just a few minutes ago did I get the visual gag.

The mysterious case of the Christie typeface

My wife likes to read books in the bath. Due to this we have a growing collection of charity shop bought Agatha Christie books on the windowsill of our bathroom, with the paper getting slowly damaged by the changing humidity therein.

Apart from worrying about the condition of the books, I haven't really paid much attention to this collection until the other day. For some reason I decided to check out the covers, and I immediately noticed the lack of cohesion in the choice of typefaces used. This is particularly striking when looking at the one consistent feature of these covers; Agatha Christie's name. To illustrate my point, below are scans of a selection of our bathroom books ranging from 1956 to 2002 .

1956

1960

1971

1976

1980

1981

c.1995 (American edition with no date in book—1995 noted on price tag sticker)

2002

As an experiment, before scanning these in, I laid them out in the order I thought they were released in, based on the choice of typeface. Apart from one—the 1980 Helvetica rendering that I thought was late 1960s—I got the order spot on.

Considering the attention to detail that is lavished on TV adaptations and films of Christie's work, in terms of getting date specific references for architecture, clothing and product design correct, I find it interesting how typographic details on these books are rooted in the time of the reprint's release, rather than paying any attention to the context of the book.

Right

Critical tensions

Tickets ordered.

Programme
St Bride Library

Costings

Diagramatic

A work colleague showed me some old board games he had knocking around the other day. These diagrams came from the instructions to a sub-subbuteo football game based on tiddlywinks. Due to the haircut and clothes of the guy playing table top football with two perfectly happy and grinning children on the photo on the box, we guessed the game dated from the 1960s.

What is it about the combination of sans serif, geometry, dotted lines, arrows, and red & black that will always appeal to me?

Old Town

While in Holt, north Norfolk, last week, Claire and I popped into the Old Town clothing workshop and showroom. If you like your clothes made to order, in the UK, with a certain 1940s understated styling, then this is the place to go. I imagine British Sea Power would love it.

If the clothes aren't to your liking, then the shop is well worth a visit for its interior design alone. Resembling a store in the 1940s, it feels honest and a breath of fresh air in comparison to the majority of soulless and generic clothes shops; Fat Face this aint!

Old Town have a novel way of selling their wares as well, one that should thankfully keep immediacy seeking fashionistas away, (should the 1940s ever come back into fashion that is). No clothes are available to buy on the spot—you try on the styles you like to get a size fit, then trawl through swatches to pick the fabric and colour you want. Then you wait 4-6 weeks for your garments to arrive by post once they've been hand built. This avoids over production and ensures quality items that have had time spent on them rather than knocked out as quickly as possible in a sweatshop in China.

I also like the fact that they produce their own newspaper; above, with typographic jokes on the front page; below:

Images grabbed from the Old Town website.

Norfolk types

Claire gets pretty frustrated with my constant photographing of found type wherever we go. This last week, a spring holiday on the north Norfolk coast, was no exception. However, even Claire was impressed with this village sign using the local vernacular:



It's rare that I stop the car specifically to take a photo, as I did with the above. However, I did again for the image below. A sign from a bygone era, impressed as I was by the awkward diagonal stacking of the letters and the Norwich City colours (almost):



Is the E trying to eat the cross bar of the T?

After a stroll through a particularly poor market (I'll not name the town involved for fear of provoking a Suffolk/Norfolk dispute), Claire spotted a row of antique's shops she wanted to look around. One was held in an old church building, and above the entrance I found this ghost of where type had previously been:



I now feel a new project coming on: recording ghost typography. This was reinforced as an idea when across the road I saw an abandoned shop with this above the window:



It also struck me as odd that the shop with the word 'technology' above its emptied shop front was across the road from a row of shops selling antiques. Technology has less longevity than antiques, obviously. Or is it that each piece of technology soon becomes an antique, and in this case, just moves across the road into a different shop?

More exhibitioning…

2011 promises to be a year of major exhibitions, well 3 at least:

The Design Museum
30 March - 3 July
Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odessy

Time your trip wisely and take in the Brit Insurance Design Awards at the same time.

Tate Britain
14 June - 4 September
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World

The V&A
24 September - 8 January 2012
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion

McWordle

McJunk essay copy put through Wordle

RIP Celia Stothard

I was lucky enough to see the poster artist Alan Kitching speak about his life and work a couple of years ago. It was extremely touching as he had to take breaks because he was getting overwhelmed with emotion as he was realising, mid-talk to a room packed full of design lecturers, that many of the people he was mentioning as having been a great influence on him had passed away. It was really quite moving as he chocked on his own words and asked the audience to bare with him while he composed himself.

It is with this in mind that it is very sad to hear the death of Kitching's long-time partner Celia Stothard. The design community has lost one half of a creative partnership that produced many iconic posters. I particularly like the story of the two of them blowing their pension on a huge collection of theatrical type. As Celia wrote of their finding the collection in Eye 74:

"Alan climbed up a ladder to check a range of condensed letters stacked on the barn wall shelves. Some had become damp and infested with woodworm. They would have to be dried out and treated, but first the make-ready (random bits of printed paper, glued to the underside of letters to bring them to type height) would have to be removed. As I logged, measured and photographed cabinets and randoms of type around the barn, I heard a shout of ‘Schwitters!’ and joined Alan, looking in amazement at the first of many examples of the Wrington pressmen’s unconscious ‘make-ready’ art, reminiscent of Dada collages.

Alan already had enough type in his ‘palette’ but the prospect of working with this range and scale was thrilling. In June that year I had up-sized from a two-room flat in SW7 to a former alehouse in Kennington SE11. I had envisaged Alan and some of the Typography Workshop in the covered rear yard, but almost an entire print works? Still, there was plenty of room on the ground floor, the joists could take the weight and the old beer cellar was dry. Who else would or could do it?

Perhaps it was the full moon over the horseshoe atop the Organ’s barn door, or the sweet Somerset air that added to the feeling of fate, but I turned to Alan: ‘Pension payments or this?’ ‘This!’ we chorused and returned to London to make the bid."

RIP

Links:
Eye announcement
Celia Stothard - 'Buy a pension or…' Eye 74
Fine words article, Eye
Vauxhall Society Obituary

So much to do

SoMuchToDo
Originally uploaded by eyemagazine

Linotype

"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

Paul Rand Retrospective

Paul Rand Retrospective from Jeremy Cox on Vimeo.

Steady now

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

via Swissmiss via Bmdesign

Anti

Links:
Anti Design Festival