One of the oddest things that happened to us over the summer was a massive surge in views of our Vimeo animation projects. Or, more precisely, project.
As on many sites, we can track how many ‘views’ one particular piece has received. So we can tell you for free that for quite a while this animation for the Pew Center was our ‘most viewed’ with 4,000. We thought that was quite respectable.
But only a couple of hundred of people have bothered to watch this animation of the BFI’s logo. Ah well. Such is life.
It’s therefore been quite a shocker to discover that our most watched video is now this stop-frame animation of a Virgin Atlantic 747 being repainted in its new livery. Thanks in part, we think, to links from Brand New and Gizmodo, this piece has now racked up a pretty healthy 172,000 views (and counting).
We have received dozens of logo mash-ups from all over the world following last week’s post. Here is our selection of the best ones so far.
Several people had the temerity to mess with the johnson banks brand, or our logos. Such cheek. The one above is from Stuart Price. Meanwhile look what Chris Jeffreys did to our Shelter logo.
We hope that Chris’s employer isn’t reading this because we got an avalanche of great ones from him.
And this one too. Now, back to work Chris.
A lot of people seemed to have, er, sex on the brain, including Mike Reed.
Here are some sportswear mash-ups from Andy Thorne and Amanda Grace Liu.
Food, drink and er, manga from Leigh Dunks and that man Jeffreys again.
Big Macs and TV? Perfect combination really (thanks to Matthew Robinson).
And to end part two, Obama and O2 (the British phone brand) from Ed, Chris and John at Lost in the Forest. Great stuff.
Will we have enough for a third edition? Feel free to send us more at: info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk
In the meantime, thought for the week is taking a brief vacation. See you in September.
The recent news that the broadcaster BSkyB (who trades as SKY in the UK) is getting all hot under the collar about Skype’s continuing rise in popularity around the world raises all manner of interesting questions. Not least of which being how you can possibly claim to ‘own’ three letters which are patently part of another word entirely.
That set us off, visually speaking, and led to the mashed up logo we offer you at the top of this post and then others - some patently ridiculous, but others, well...
Feel free to send us your own: info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk
Recent trips to the Arabian Gulf on business and pleasure have opened our eyes to Arabic fonts, scripts and calligraphy – an art form we’ve enjoyed and admired but never studied in any detail before.
…we’ve found ourselves collecting good and bad examples of attempts to fuse native and western scripts, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
There are obvious examples of western brands with Arabic adaptations that work on pure brand recognition alone – it’s pretty obvious that these say Coca-Cola, McDonalds and STOP, but it’s the colour and shape of the enclosing devices that generally give the game away.
It gets more difficult when using two languages side-by-side - most international organizations opt for the bilingual/coexisting approach, trying to write each word or phrase in something remotely compatible. So here’s the classic bilingual approach…
…or more unusually, western letters rendered in a typestyle designed to ‘look Arabic’.
The above examples illustrate that finding successful bi- or mono-lingual approaches that co-exist happily is more difficult than it seems.
There seem to be various reasons for this. Arabic scripts are based on many essential yet quite different character forms (Kufic, Thuluth, Naski, Riqaa, Taliq, Diwani, and Muhaqqaq) which will probably confuse western typographers. And the rules by which we measure and design ‘our’ typefaces have no directly corresponding rules in Arabic.
Simply redrawing Arabic scripts with western style fonts looks clumsy, but doing the reverse can look just as bad, if not worse.
One of the key differences and challenges, of course, is the two letterstyles reading in opposite directions – there are some examples of designers exploiting the ambigrammic or bilingual opportunities these offer up (such as the ‘art’ logo belowwhich does read in two languages and the Arabic version of the Los Logos identity) but most appear a little flummoxed by this, and no wonder.
Even one of our favourite examples of ‘smart’ design with Arabic letterforms turns out to be problematic.
This ad, done in London, announced Virgin Atlantic’s Dubai flights – the typography was meant to both say ‘shortly’ (pronounced ‘kariban’) and had been cleverly adapted to look like a plane.
But, because some important accents had been dropped it actually read ‘kariba’ – a nice attempt to fuse language and meaning but one undone by poor grammar.
Paradoxically, use of key typographic elements can almost backfire. Albeit not designed specifically for the Gulf but related, we thought that this proposal to Islamic Aid was a neat fusion of western meaning and ‘rhombic dots’ but we’re still not sure if they are ever going to use it (it was criticized for seeming ‘too Islamic’).
To western eyes, one of the most beautiful aspects of Arabic calligraphy is the ability to twist and turn the letterforms into beautiful forms and shapes, called calligrams.
Whilst these can be beautiful devices, in the hand of modern designers they seem to somehow lose meaning, or struggle to look contemporary.
Probably one of the highest profile examples is the symbol of TV station Al Jazeera, but to western eyes the calligram is especially hard to decipher (it technically derives from the network’s name written in Arabic and is derived from a golden globe emerging from water).
On a more positive note, better type examples are beginning to appear. Although not universally accepted, yet (maybe because of its cost), only last year Linotype introduced Helvetica Arabic, which to our eyes looks like a good attempt to produce an Arabic typeface with some of the neutrality of the West’s favourite typeface of the last 4 decades.
And perhaps designers working in the Gulf will be encouraged by designs such as Iranian-born Mehdi Saeedi who continues to show just what is possible with Persian script, reinterpreted for the 21st century.
But if Arabian brands are to reach out to western audiences, designers and typographers both here and in the Gulf need to try a little harder to break through the visual and verbal divide. Once we get there, it should be worth it.
Last week we were a little frustrated that the first 747 in Virgin Atlantic’s new livery could only be photographed on a cloudy day surrounded by Manchester puddles.
But there’s a new phenomenon in our lives - the planespotters. This arrived on ‘Airplane-pictures.net’ within hours (so thanks to Charles022 for that), now you can see what we meant by the metallic red tailfin.
Also, already in cyberspace there’s this full piece of film panning left and right, up and down across the new livery, which isn’t maybe that interesting unless you’re a planespotter yourself, or weirdly interested in plane liveries all of a sudden.
What is interesting (honest) is the piece of stop frame animation below that shows what happens when you paint an aircraft. It takes about 4 days, and costs a heck of a lot of money.
For the eagle eyed amongst you, yes the new identity features on the belly of the plane as well.
