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19.08.08
Psycho buildings
With only a week to go, it’s worth pointing out that if you haven’t seen the Hayward Gallery’s Psycho Buildings exhibition yet, you’re running out of time. It’s an extraordinary collection of pieces that criss-crosses between architecture, installation, sculpture and overall madness. On our visits we’ve been trying to foil the rather over-zealous ‘no photography’ rule, and here are a few (slightly blurry) highlights. Ernesto Neto’s plywood and polyamide membrane opens the show, and in case you were wondering, is titled Stone Lip, Pepper Tits, Clove Love, Fog Frog, 2008. As you might imagine from the title (and the picture) it’s a very odd take on the human form that you wander around, and through, whilst sniffing (and wondering).
As you wander around the ground floor you’re increasingly distracted by what seems to be an amplified herd of baby elephants. In fact it turns out to be virtually every child on the south bank running backwards and forwards through Atelier Bow-wow’s Life Tunnel, 2008, which connects two of the Hayward’s galleries together. 
Upstairs though is where the exhibition really takes off. If you’re there early, you can queue up to have a row on the boating lake. Yes, true, a boating lake. The Austrian artist’s collective, Gelitin, have filled one of the gallery’s outdoor sculpture terraces with water so you can paddle about, several floors up. All of a sudden the Hayward’s much-maligned brutalist trays make a little bit more sense. 
Then you wander through Mike Nelson’s scene of mass destruction... 
...before reaching another of the showstoppers, Tomas Saraceno’s installation of a geodesic, atmosphere controlled dome. You negotiate a kind of air lock and sit inside the greenhouse, which is made that little bit weirder by the fact that the lucky few who pull the right tickets out of a bag...
...are crawling around on the top of the dome, above your head.
With all this going on it’s easy to forget there’s another classic downstairs, as you exit, where Rachel Whiteread shows off her 20 year old collection of doll’s houses in a vast, darkened space. Sorry, the pictures do this no justice at all... 
There are at least another half dozen pieces other than these on show, we couldn’t get sneaky shots of them all (but that’s another good reason to go). Highly, highly recommended. Psycho Buildings is on until August 25th at The Hayward Gallery on London’s Southbank.
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14.08.08
Not quite my type
Once, anyone interested in graphics had to become either overly trusting of the few journals that existed (if they could find them) or reliant on a handful of dry and off-putting tomes. But since the Brody and Carson books sold copies by the container-load, publishers have wised up and supplied a torrent of graphics tomes.
The quality varies drastically, of course, and only recently Laurence King’s Graphic Design: A New History appeared in print slightly too quickly, littered with mistakes and received a critical mauling as a consequence. But with a decent reading list, a few hundred pounds or a good college library, there’s no excuse for a graduate NOT having a decent grounding in the history of the profession.
But the one area that has struggled to find its defining text has been typography. Anyone with a burgeoning interest in this part of graphics had to piece together their own history from old type sample books, ferret seriously hard in libraries or study in almost too much detail those type annuals that geekily ask their entrants to specify which fonts were used in which layout, at what point size and so on.
There have been a few attempts at supplying the definitive typographic touchstone. Recently remixed, there’s 20th Century Type by Lewis Blackwell, About Face by David Jury, and probably the most useful of the lot, Type and Typography by Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam. By and large these are practical works with the obligatory smattering of history, practice and theoretically inspirational examples. Rockport’s 30 Essential typefaces for a Lifetime is a practical guide, and Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is still much used in our studio. It’s fair to say, however, that no-one has yet resolved the conundrum that, whilst great typography remains the basis of virtually all great graphic design, when recorded in print things can seem, well, pretty dull. Maybe because the desire to ‘crack’ the student primer market is so high, most feel the need to pad out their offerings with hundreds of pages of font specimens, when paradoxically, staring at spectacle g’s or suchlike is the last thing that’s going to excite a student designer.
Presumably this is what Font. The Sourcebook (from black dog publishing) is trying to tackle – how to make type interesting and relevant whilst retaining a good practical angle. And in some respects the book succeeds – in the first half the obligatory historical surveys (you know – papyrus, Trajan’s column, illuminated books, art deco, yada yada) have been interspersed with short chapters dedicated to more modern themes. So there’s a visual essay from Ed Fella, some theory from Teal Triggs, notes on type families from Peter Bilak. Some of these ‘interjections’ are terribly short – there are only a handful of pages allocated to typographic interviews with Pentagram’s Dominic Lippa and Experimental Jetset, which reveal very little and contain those rather dull form questions like ‘how many different fonts should you use on a page’, etc. You’re left wondering why there are only two of these - did they plan more - did they email several designers and only two replied?
But the chapters on David Pearson’s wonderful Penguin Great Ideas series, and the typographic artist Sam Winston are great and genuinely insightful, and almost worth the cover price alone. 
Two hundred pages in we reach the ‘conclusion’, which, fairly obviously, points that ‘there’s a lot of type about nowadays’ (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly). Then, oddly, we have both the 1964 and 2000 First Things First manifestos, presumably to act as a subtle plea to any of the student’s still reading to go into design, not advertising.
Then of course we have the obligatory 100 pages of type specimens, restricted in the authors’ words to ‘50 of the most innovative and interesting typefaces in use today’ – not such a bad idea but laid out so poorly, and as alphabets only (with no visual examples) that you wonder if they dared show any these layouts to any of the typographers who contributed to first half. And whilst I have a degree of affection for both Rosewood and Souvenir (two of the included fonts) I struggle to imagine that most type-heads would have them in their top two hundred, let alone fifty. 
Incidentally, highly respected font-heads The Foundry have just been in touch with their own views on this problem. ‘We were approached just a few weeks before the book was to be published, asking us to take part in the type specimen part, on behalf of The Foundry and of Wim Crouwel. Having asked to see samples of how they were going to display the fonts and in what context, we were ‘to put it politely’ disappointed in the proposed layouts, but more seriously concerned at some of the inaccuracies in the text itself - for that reason we declined to take part.’ Ouch. Harsh, but fair. As a book proposal, it probably seemed attractive. And certain aspects of the book, where the contributors have worked hard on their pieces or revealed something genuinely interesting, work well. But have I just read the definitive, must-have category-cracker? The Art of Looking Sideways for typography? Er, no, I haven’t. Sorry.
This is an adaptation of a recent article for Design Week by Michael Johnson. Font.The Sourcebook is out now, published by Black Dog Publishing, priced £24.95
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11.08.08
The alphabet that keeps on giving
There seem to be certain irrefutables about life as a graphic designer. That Helvetica will be everyone’s favourite typeface (and film). That, if ever asked to design anything for a film client, they will happily play with sprockets, film reels and/or directors chairs as iconography. That (whilst they would never be caught dead wearing the colours themselves) they will merrily recommend phenomenally bright pinks, oranges and greens to clients on a weekly basis.
The other irrefutable truth is that they will spend inordinate amounts of time twisting and turning found objects in their hands or on their computers to make letterforms, to an almost obsessive degree. Just in the last month you would have seen this ad for Audi on British poster sites, making quite ingenious use of road signs. 
And you would have seen the blogosphere light up with interest in Gary Hustwit’s next project (on product design) and its already-designed poster…
..or visited degree shows with their endless variants on a similar theme, whether they be bulldog clips or ring-pulls.
Now, whilst all of the above are nice pieces of work, it would be only prudent to point out that making letterforms up out of objects is, er, not exactly new. As long ago as 1954 Gene Federico was substituting type for wheels in this classic layout. 
Then Michael Tesch offered us this in 1959. 
And Herb Lubalin, no less, was making creative use of slinkies many decades ago. 
In the mid-nineties (in a definitely retro mood) we based an entire season of paper posters on letterforms made from folded or ‘found’ paper-related objects.
But nobody interested in ‘found’ alphabets can ignore the definitive version, by Mervyn Kurlansky, then at Pentagram London. It dates from 1977, and was done for what was then called Preston Polytechnic. He used any objects he could find lying around the studio to create his alphabet, originally printed in black and white... 
...which was then re-printed in U&lc magazine and eventually re-created it in colour. 
And whilst some of the objects might not have stood the test of time (B and C, for example?), the idea still looks like it could have been done yesterday. Marvellous.
Whether they know it or not, designers have been standing on the shoulders of Kurlansky’s alphabet now for decades. Paul Elliman has been collecting found items and objects for years to build his ‘bits world’ typeface since the mid-nineties…
...used here in collaboration with GTF in this project for the Chaumont festival dating from 2004.
So ubiquitous is the technique that there is, of course, a flickr pool celebrating found alphabets.
And some of them are very nice indeed. And as we write, thousands more designers and photographers are arranging found objects into letters and experiencing that ‘eureka’ moment for themselves, and who’s to say there’s anything wrong with that? Each time it’s done, it’s done slightly differently. Perhaps this is just one of those ideas that will keep going, and going, and going, and going...
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07.08.08
The Boombox Project
Recently, photographer Lyle Owerko wrote to us, thinking that we might like his Boombox Project where he has been recording vintage boomboxes for posterity. He’s right, we think it’s great. 
There’s more here.
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04.08.08
The trouble with hearts
A few weeks ago Belfast unveiled a new logo which has since been critiqued all over the press and the blogosphere. We held back from comment, partly because others have done it, partly because we figured that a town like Belfast probably could do with some good PR, not bad. And partly because our initial reaction was that their heart had some similarities to a recent project of our own.
Yes, we did do a heart logo a few years back, for The Art Fund, yes we used a geometric heart and yes there are applications in the scheme that use multiple hearts ‘coagulating’… 
But the truth is that anyone designing a logo that includes what the lawyers would call ‘a generic shape’ – ie a heart, or a circle, or a rectangle or a diamond - has to face up to the fact that that there will, by the law of averages, be other versions close to the version gleaming at you on your computer screen.
When we designed The Art Fund’s ‘love/art’ heart 3 years ago, we did very longwinded trademark checks to see if anyone had combined a frame and a heart in this way. Luckily, no, but we saw quite a few heart logos on our legal travels. We looked back this week and reminded ourselves of several, including this shocker for ‘the heart of England’ (a tourist board logo).
You’d be amazed just how many heart logos are registered. How about this for Tesco stores? 
Or Keith Haring? 
Or even ‘The RAF Benevolent Fund? 
Unfortunately, for Belfast and its designers Lloyd Northover (also the recent recipient of flak for the possible provenance of its ‘Tottenham’ logo)... 
...it transpires that there are more than one or two people around the world using a turned ‘b’ as a heart. Here are some, as pointed out by those hardened bloggers on Brand New. 
But the really tricky one is that earlier this year, not one, but 2 towns in northern England beginning with B revealed logos, based or B’s, rotated left, based on hearts. Oops. 
Now, perhaps, in mitigation, these logos hadn’t yet been registered, or failed to turn up in the checks. Or perhaps Belfast didn’t actually do any trademark checks? There’s little one can say at this point, other than commiserate with all parties and admit that ‘it happens’, especially with such common symbols. But for three towns and cities to share the same brand idea is a little unfortunate, to say the least.
But only recently it nearly happened to us – we presented (slightly half-heartedly it must be said) this initial thought to a charity symbol, based on tears/ripples with the nagging thought in our heads that ‘we’d seen that before somewhere’. 
Sure enough, in researching heart logos for this piece, there it was, registered already for Smithkline Beecham. Ouch. That could have been expensive.
(Apologies for the awful quality of the pic). Lucky then that the client admitted that it made them think immediately of checking their gas supplies, not making a donation. Harsh (but probably true).
The overwhelming feeling from all of this is if your design contains any hint of ‘cliché’ you’d better check it pretty thoroughly, perhaps even before you present it. It’s still better to bomb an idea in private before it gets public, and potentially very messy.
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