There’s a provocative interview over at Creative Review where Bruno Maag rages over the ubiquitous use of Helvetica and believes it’s comparable to Comic Sans: …if you start analysing it and going into the nitty gritty it is quite a horrendous font. It’s quite poorly crafted and has become completely overused. People go on about Arial […]
South Africa’s Kulula airlines recently received the re branding treatment from the creative agency Atmosphere when they applied this 101 guide to the various parts of the aeroplane. Passengers can now learn where the black box is along with the ‘jump seat’ and ‘throne zone’. More images can be found at PSFK.
When Prokol Polymers introduced their bus shelter in 2007, presenting the Netherlands with an indestructible, vandal proof design, they did so ignoring existing research that fragile-looking bus shelters are considered less of a challenge to destroy, and therefore are less of a target for vandalism. Spurned on by widespread reporting of this new marvel, hooligans reacted […]
It’s a shame there isn’t a UK version of the NY Times Netflix rental patterns but the design makes up for this, supporting the playful discovery of viewing patterns.
Charting the Beatles is a collaborative design project with submissions exploring the music of the Beatles from their use of the American pronounciation to their habit of self-referential lyrics. Possibly the most successful infographic in the set is a graph by Michael Deal tracing the songwriting contributions from each band member using data gleaned from […]
Most designers can barely contain their delight when using the ampersand in their work. This seemingly humble symbol (albeit now in widespread use in the inputs to SMS, emails and twitter) provides rich opportunities for visual flair given that it, more often than not, enjoys complete artistic freedom from it’s typeface family. The concept of […]
The Book Design Review published their Favourite Book Covers of 2009 and the list is marvel of art direction, typography and design. Although I note the books listed are all rather obscure reads — Would they struggle to find such rich pickings if they were restricted to the bestseller list? A lot of the people […]
The original Graphical User Interface with icons, folders, the mouse and email all demonstrated in the classic Xerox Star 8010 interface illustrated in a series of vintage polaroid images. The interface that impressed the Apple Lisa development team and influenced Apple’s adoption of the GUI patterns and metaphors seen here.
A good few years old but hardly gathering dust in the AIGA archive. This post by Milton Glaser deserves close and frequent inspection. Wisdom, provactive and entertaining — a perfect mix. I particularly like the antidote to the pushy ‘minimalism as panacea’ dogma in No.5 Less Is Not Necessarily More: I have an alternative to […]
A wall of saturated orange, faded cream, solid typography and bizzaro illustrations. It can only be a collection of Penguin Science Fiction book covers.