Logo Design History

I love branding. In a way, I see every typeface that I create as a "brand." Recently, I ran across this excellent site detailing the design history of many of today's logos. An interesting and inspiring source.

Logo Design History.

50's Inspired Piece

I am working on a 50's inspired script. I recently found this great blog: Today's Inspiration. Some really great illustrations from the past. I love to see great illustrated work, and the fact that a fair number of them include some script ideas is just bonus points. Enjoy.

The next great thing in parking garages!

I had heard of these, but this is the first time I've seen it explained. This would be great; instead of driving around for hours, just have one of these robot parking garages take care of it.

New Italy Identity

Apparently, Italy has recently revamped their identity. Let me sum it up: Its awful.

I lived in Italy for a short time. This identity doesn't say Italy to me at all. Its a disjointed amalgamation that puts together and waters down way to many ideas.

Italy certainly could do better and deserves better. One thing I remember about the World Cup is that the typeface on the Italian jerseys was not only cool, no doubt custom designed, but also said "Italy" just through those simple forms. And, it did it in a way that made Italy seem very interesting and modern .

More identity shredding here.

Bacon Alarm Clock

For the person who has everything, this alarm clock awakes the snoozer with the smell of freshly cooked bacon. I can't make this stuff up: look.

Cottege

Continuing our industrial design theme (although, recently, this blog seems to have turned into Jalopnik, designer edition) I noticed this New York Times article the other day. I don't really buy into the "small footprint" stuff, but I do like the concept of having a Frank Loyd Wright-esqe cottage in some back roads location with a nice little stream running through my living room. With high speed Internet, of course. Well, nobody sells those yet, but I was most impressed with BlueSky's offerings. I would love to watch the rain come down behind some of those huge windows while working on my latest typeface.

Speaking of which, we will return to our normally schedule programming on Tuesday. I took a week off to take care of some administrative and tax stuff.

Designer's Favorite Cars

An interesting article on designers favorite cars. I think the BMW 6 series should be ranked higher. At first I thought there surely had to be a mistake about the Audi TT, or "stretch bug" as I like to think of it as, but I looked up the latest styling and was impressed.

Psyop Anthem

I first saw this about two years ago; at the time I liked it, but also was somewhat puzzled by its condemnation of the very thing Psyop does. I don't quite get why graphic designers are so hung up on "losing their souls" to evils of capitalism, and how Psyop thinks that this will somehow induce companies to use their services.

Anyway, the tune is catchy, the visual style is interesting, the color scheme is cool, the message is entirely counterproductive, but here it is.

Dubai Architecture

Some interesting Dubai architecture.

Abu Dhabi Museum Project

Looking for something to do?

EventCrazy is kind of like a search engine for all kinds of local events. A great stop to look for some inspiration or advertising venues.

Superbowl Ads Follow-up

All the ads are available here, courtesy of YouTube.

Highlights
Live the Flavor. Great concept and execution. Kudos to 5 Point Productions, a small video editing company that competed for and won the right to have their commercial air.
CareerBuilder Ads.

Good
Fedex Moon Office
Sierra Mist Beard Comb-over
Coke Videogame


Hideous
Chevy HHR. Choose this one without knowing its history, and no alma mater bias, seriously. This was the "college ad." Some SCAD students were in the running, but they lost. I'm sure theirs was better.

Guerilla Marketing

Just recently, I was wondering why we don’t see more of...

...this...

...this...
...this...
...this...

and this here in the states. Yes, guerilla marketing. As you can see, all of these images don’t have their point of origin here in the USA. Then, I got my answer.

Seriously, when looking at few of these campaigns, although they are clever and probably very effective, some of them seem destructive and disruptive. I think that American advertisers recognize this, and understood that American culture doesn’t have time or allow disruptions or annoyances, making it a tactic that is rarely used stateside. There are also probably some legal, or rather enforcement reasons that make it more common overseas. Any other thoughts?

Everything with the exception of AXE via adgoodness. AXE via ibeliveinadv.

Tis the season...

Yes, its superbowl ad season. What were you thinking of?

The 10 Best Super Bowl Ads of All Time!

Great Design Links

Just a quick entry today. I want to share a great resource of contemporary web design: Design Meltdown. Frequently updated, the site categorizes some of the best websites on the web into different contemporary design "genres", even splitting hairs down to the all-too-famous "shiny buttons" and "gradient madness!" Joking aside, its worth a bookmark, and they also pass along some information on how to duplicate the look in question, offering books with ornaments to scan or sites with textures to download.

Milton Glaser

I have never been a huge fan of Milton Glaser. I don't mean that in a bad way at all, just that he was never a huge "hero" for me as a designer. Now, one of his employees, on the other hand is quite inspiring. Deborah Adler did some really nice work on the Target medicine bottle. That, and she is pretty cute. This idea of simplification inspired me to redesign our lab requisitions when I used to work at a medical lab; I will post more about that later.

Back on track. Here are some very interesting statements, particularly regarding style, made by Mr. Glaser when he spoke at BYU. These comments were recorded by John Dilworth, whose blog I just stumbled across on accident. I had some comments, but I felt that Milton’s words by themselves were perfect, and anything I wrote detracted from the message.

On not developing a unique style: “If people know what you do, they have power over you.”

On style: “I fear arriving at a level of competence (in a specific style) and then being doomed to repeat it forever.”

On intuition: “Our intuition is smarter than our intellect.”

On drawing: “(exercising your drawing skills once a week is) much better than going to the gym.”

On words: “Words are images.”

On art: “fine art is art that has had the impurities removed.” “fine art is art that is created purely with the intent of producing a spiritual effect on the viewer.”

On learning: “(The greatest achievement of my life) has been being able to wake up learn something new each day.”

Locksit

I thought this was a particulary brilliant idea. Behold the "locksit." The seat folds back to lock the wheel.

Via Core77.

Also, FontFont has released "Die 100 Beste Schriften," that is, "The 100 Best Typefaces." Mein deutch is a bit schlecht, but it helps that there are pretty pictures, although that is a minor gripe; many of the featured typefaces don't have good examples available. You can download the .pdf here.

Via TypeForYou. A lot of great material on this blog, updated very regularly.

The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

I recently stumbled across a business/statistics term I hadn’t heard of before; the long tail. It was just recently coined by Chris Anderson in 2004. On the supply curve, it is the products that are out of range of the sweet spot or the most popular products. In the future to survive, businesses will have to offer more choices to their customers and become specialized, essentially flattening the demand curve. The internet has allowed the chance for more specialized products to be distributed at affordable prices. In a bookstore you only have so much space for your product; Amazon has unlimited space. In the type design world, smaller foundries are essential to this process, offering more and more choices and specialization. Don’t let anyone tell you we have enough fonts.

Wired article
Wikipedia article

Soviet Bus Stops

This one has been making the rounds, but I am sure there are a few that haven't seen these yet. Behold, Soviet bus stops. It seems the CCCP invested a fair amount of their GDP in producing these. The workers united to produce some genuinely unique bus stops, and some could use some "usability" analysis. Lets take a look, shall we?


The central committee, in their wisdom, decided that birds were a must, roofs were optional.

Vladimir, enough paint. Lets just stand these two concrete slabs on end and call it a day.

Is it an overpass or some sort of Soviet skate park? In all fairness, I actually like this one.


Doubles as a kiln.

Nice composition. Not sure how the guy riding the bike really works with the geometric thing they have going on here, but hey. Maybe the artist just really liked those old-timey bikes.

More of the triumph of socialism here. The photographer that took these is named Christopher Herwig. He compiled these while living in central Asia for a few years. He has an interesting portfolio that is worth a look.

Lexus LF-A

I like to draw inspiration from a wide range of art forms. This brings us to a new regular feature on the site I will be labeling "Inspiration." Inspiration will feature something well designed or crafted, either a product or piece of art, or even just an idea that has nothing to do with graphic communication.

This week, we have the Lexus LF-A. Most of the time, if find Lexus and Acura design rather passe in comparison to BMW, but the Lexus LF-A concept looks very interesting indeed. Have a look.