Beyond Typography

Flash

This was sent to me:

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

An amusing piece of animation from Alan Becker, an artist in the US. When I'm doing some Flash work I sometimes feel as if the machine is working against me... 

I then found this:

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

Life in Type

I found this on Crap Detector...

Ok Computer, Printer, Scanner…

Continuing the student them today, here is an excellent video from James Houston. 

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

This is his final project for the visual communication's course at Glasgow School of Art. Also check out the other videos.

Creative Review interview him here.

Degree show

I visited my old art college at the weekend to look at the Degree Shows.

When I attended it was called Portsmouth College of Art, Design and Further Education and I studied BTEC Technical Illustration (TI) at OND and HND levels. It is now part of the University of Portsmouth and known as the Eldon Building and runs degree courses (dropping the BTEC courses). When I was considering whether to go on to do a degree in Illustration or do an HND, I looked at the stats. Back then, we were told you had a much higher chance of employment with an HND than with a degree. My experience since then suggests that this may have been true (most people I know in this profession went to Art College and came away with HNDs not degrees).

It also happens to be the 100th annniversary of an art and design school in Portsmouth. There was an interesting exhibition in the foyer including a display case with some "artifacts" from my course! Rotring pens, airbrush, etc.

The Illustration show always used to be the best show at the College, and I'm pleased to say that the course that now runs (although bearing no resemblance to its ancestor) carries on this fine tradition. You could see that a lot of research and hard work had gone into these projects. And a lot of originality.

One of the other displays I thought had some good work in was on the floors below. These included product design and digital design. 

  

I noticed they had replaced the lift as it looked very new. Hopefully for the second time in 20 years as it seemed knackered back then! The Refectory is now called the Art Cafe and has nice wooden chairs instead of the stacking plastic ones we had. Many a College party had been held in this place, usually with the Three Little Piggies as guest band. I remember one halloween party when everybody was flour-bombed by the guys on the TI course a year above me. Elmo the caretaker wasn't happy!

New buildings now occupy the area that were known as the huts. The name is self-explanatory. The new buildings (Eldon South) house the Communication Design (aka Graphics) course. There were some good bits in here, but nothing that I would say was really original apart from a couple of bits of work.

I wasn't impressed by the photographic exhibition. Same old images of the same old subjects (more or less) displayed in the same old way. As a person who commissions and buys photography I was left cold. I was rather disturbed to see a series of pics about British people and their guns. One image was of a young woman holding a pistol. I hope it was replica or decommissioned.

I only meant to pop in for half-an-hour or so and left two-and-a-half hours later!

If you you can't get to see this one (it runs until 13 June), go to your local college show. It's worth seeing what'll be on the market soon.

UPDATE: Find your local (UK) show here...

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/uk-degree-shows-whats-on-when/

My Brand Timeline Portrait

As I mentioned last week, here is my Brand Timeline Portrait as devised by Dear Jane Sample.

To explain a few things: I get up ridiculously early to beat the traffic (150 mile round trip), my Friday nights ain't what they used to be! A four-month-old daughter and three-year-old daughter put paid to any chance of a late night. I usually take my own sarnies, hence no reference to food. I have to admit that last Friday was not a typical Friday, so the info is for Thursday morning combined with Friday afternoon.

Show'n'Tell

I just attended my first "Show'n'Tell" session with the Creative Department, a monthly session where people get to show off what they've done. I found it really useful and interesting. I hope to attend this regularly and maybe get some design feedback for my work. For this session I spoke about the Fuse conference. Trouble was, I only had five minutes to do it in and got cut off!

I haven't done anything like this since I was at college!

Careful what you mean

Do you know what this means?

 

So what does this mean?

 

The first is what you're likely to see moulded on the bottom of a plastic container, the second is the universal recycling logo. The former was developed in 1988 by the US Society of Plastics Industry to distinguish between plastics types. The second logo is the recycling logo designed in 1970 by Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old student, in answer to a competition.

According to this, the plastic logo is not supposed to mean that the plastic is recyclable. If you search the web there are conflicting arguments. I have to admit, I thought it did mean that it was recyclable. Why design a logo that looks the recycling one otherwise?

Anyway, these students have done some really good work around the both logos.

Useful

Really useful typographic unit converter

Jane’s Brand-timeline Portrait

I found this (I know it's from May, but I was really busy!). I'll do mine on Friday.

Hello again

I'm back! Sorry for the lack of thrilling installments over the past month. Things have been rather hectic.

I've been working on rebranding the editorial products of a company that we recently acquired to bring it into line with the rest of the portfolio. Had a meeting with the relevant people and got on with it. Started off ok, followed the brief. To be honest, what they already for each report had was ok in isolation but as a suite of products needed some consistency, eg, standard colour palette, font usage, headers and footers, etc. Oh, and restyling the mastheads to incorporate the new logo. 

Got to the proofing stage and one person didn't like anything. The other people liked it. To be fair, he wasn't involved in the original briefing. When I sent him a copy of the brief he change his mind, because he realised I had answered the brief.

I have also been working on the redesign of some of our other monthly reports. Again, a detailed brief was all-important as a similar thing happened as above. I won't bore you with the details, but after some customer research, one of the person's objections (the body text was too small) was echoed by some of the customers. This has now been rectified.

A project that has been rumbling along for ages is now nearing completion: the redesign of the ICIS.com home page. This has been a long and arduous road. The brief was again all important, not least because it wasn't nailed until half-way through!

The point is, it really pays off if time is spent up front getting the brief sorted. I am really wary of people who say "I'll leave it to you". They generally end up saying "that's not what I was looking for".