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Kodak has themselves a new logo and gosh it looks plain and boring and undistinctive. Who are the folks convincing companies like Intel and Kodak that these logo/brand overhauls are going to revitalize their companies? Revitalization is a hard business…a new coat of paint isn’t going to cut it.
Update: More on Kodak’s new logo at Speak Up.
Erik Spiekermann explains how Nokia’s corporate typeface came to be. Looks like it was based on one of Nokia’s onscreen bitmap fonts. I’ve always wanted to create a “real” version of Silkscreen like that.
Neat information design on the menu for Alinea. The size, positions, and darkness of the circles on the menu represent the sweetness/tartness, size, and flavor intensity of each course.
Update: Better photo of the menu here.
Best Google logo yet…a Braille version to celebrate the birthday of Louis Braille.
Intel is retiring the “Intel Inside” saying/logo and is getting a new company logo as well…no more of the familiar “dropped e” logo. Now they’ll look like everyone else.
Khoi Vinh on the move…he’s the new Design Director for NYTimes.com. From the outside, it’s one of the best jobs in web design and it’s been filled well. (via waxy)
More and more, shoppers are judging books by their covers. “Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye.”
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran’s Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans…the cars are driving themselves.
I missed this while in Asia last month, but AT&T has a new logo, which is pretty much the same as the old one.
A museum of pull-down menus, for US states, currency, colors, etc. (via do)
New Swiss banknotes, the result of a design competition, feature an embryo, the AIDS virus, and a skull. “Considering the history of Swiss banking, one cannot help but make the connection between the gold bar on the 1000-Franc bill (the gold of African dictators hidden in Swiss vaults) and the skull on the same bill (that of their victims).”
At the risk (ha!) of missing it, I waited until this late in the game to check out Safe: Design Takes On Risk at the MoMA. Great show. Two of my favorite items:
For you armchair museum goers, what looks to be the entire exhibition is available online.
Also, the MoMA around holiday time, not so crowded. (Well, relatively so. There were still a fair number of people there, just not so many as in the Build-A-Bear store on 5th Avenue.)
AIGA Voice has an interview with Peter Morville about his new book, Ambient Findability. A question from the interview that everyone responsible for a web site should be asking themselves (emphasis mine): “Can [people] find your content, products and services despite your website?” Love that.
Rob Walker on the mass-produced individuality of CafePress.
Web design contest offers the potential winner a chance to “fire missiles remote-controlled by computer at a US military base in Iraq”. (via tmn)
A “song quilt” for Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase album. “Listening to the recording, I ignored song titles; creating images that represent the intangible connection between what I was hearing and what I was ‘seeing’ in my head”. There was a design site that did something like this several years ago…one of the Swanky sites, I think. Ring a bell?
Who doesn’t love advertising CMYK jokes? “A Clockwork C:0 M:60 Y:90 K:0”
Emigre Magazine has published their last issue (69, dudes!). Rick Poynor, in his farewell post on Design Observer, says goodbye to Emigre. Emigre fueled my interest in design back in the day.
Mirroring the progression of diaries and graphic design, scrapbooking, the practice of arranging and decorating photos in albums, has gone digital. Personal desktop publishing anyone?
Meg basically posted what I was going to say about Jim Thompson House, so head on over to read up on this interesting house.
Ok, one last wrap-up post about Hong Kong and then we’re focusing on the matter at hand in Bangkok (short summary: having a great time so far here). So, three things I really liked about/in Hong Kong and then some miscellaneous stuff.
1. Octopus cards. I really can’t say enough about how cool these cards are. Wikipedia provides a quickie definition: “The Octopus card is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used for electronic payment in online or offline systems in Hong Kong.” It’s a pay-as-you go stored value card…you put $100 bucks on it and “recharge” the card when it’s empty (or when it’s even more than empty…as long as your balance is positive when you use it, you can go into a HK$35 deficit, which you pay when you recharge the card). You can use it on pratically any public transportation in the city: buses, trains, MTR, trams, ferries, etc. It works with vending machines, at 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and the supermarket. You don’t need to take it out of your wallet or purse to use it, just hold it near the sensor. Your card is not tied to your identity…there’s no PIN, you can pay cash, they don’t need to know your credit card number, SS#, or anything like that. They even make watches and mobile phones that have Octopus built it, so your phone (or watch) becomes your wallet. Mayor Bloomberg, if you’re listening, NYC needs this.
2. The on-train maps for the MTR. Here’s a (sort of blurry) photo (taken with my cameraphone):
The current stop blinks red — in this case, Tsim Sha Tsui (blinking not shown, obviously) — with the subsequent stops lit in red. If the next stop connects to another line, that line blinks as well. A small green arrow indicates which direction you’re traveling and there’s an indictor (not shown) which lights up either “exit this side” or “exit other side” depending which way the doors are going to open. Great design.
3. Muji! We located one in Langham Place (an uber-story mall) in Mong Kok (for reference, the store in Silvercord in TST listed on their site has closed). Muji is kind of hard to describe if you’ve never been to one of their stores before (and if you live in the US, you probably haven’t because they’re aren’t any, aside from a small outpost in the MoMA Store). Adam (see previous link) roughly translates the name as “No Brand, Good Product”, so you can see why I like it so much. They sell a wide variety of products (take a look at their Japanese-only online store for an idea of what they carry); at the Monk Kok store, they had snacks & drinks, some furniture (made out of sturdy cardboard), their signature pens and notebooks (a display of the former was completely surrounded by a moat of teenaged girls, so much so that I didn’t get a chance to test any of the super-thin pens), some clothes (including some great pants that they didn’t have in anything approaching my size), dishes, cosmetics, bath products, and containers of all shapes, sizes, and uses. I wanted one of everything, but settled for a couple of shirts (with absolutely no logos or markings, inside or out, to indictate that they are Muji products).
m1. Big Buddha, worth the trip. It’ll better when the tram from Tung Chung and back is built, although then you’ll miss the boat ride (fun) and the bus ride (harrowing at times).
m2. The Peak Tram. Touristy, but also worth the trip. The weird/ugly anvil-shaped building at the top is currently under construction, so the views will be much better when its finished. Go at night for the best view.
m3. The view from the waterfront in Kowloon of the Hong Kong skyline at night is one of the best in the world.
m4. Speaking of, Hong Kong is a night-time city. All the buildings are lit up, there’s a nightly light show at 8pm (think Laser Floyd without the music), and buildings that appear monolithic in the daytime transform at night, either by disappearing into the darkness while leaving a graceful trace of their outline or acting as huge screens for projected light shows. Reminded me of Vegas in this respect.
m5. We had tea in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel (go for the view, it’s incredible) and the live band played the theme song from The Lord of the Rings. I tried to get a recording of it with my phone (iPod was back in our hotel room), but it didn’t turn out so well. Very weird; we were cracking up and expecting the theme from Superman or even 3’s Company to follow.
m6. Oh, I’m sure there’s more, so I’ll add it here as I think of stuff.
Story on Muji, the brandless Japanese retailer that has high brand recognition and customer loyalty. (Say wha?) I’ve got a few Muji things and love them.
Speak Up critiques the covers on the recently released list of the 40 best magazine covers of the last 40 years. Chock full of snarky designy goodness. (thx armin)
The “Women of Design” issue of Step Inside Design magazine features, er, pussy cats on the cover. Here’s the story behind the cover design.
Slideshow of the biggest emerging design trends according to Murray Moss. This came out of a presentation at the 2005 AIGA Design Conference, which presentation (and audio recording) can be downloaded on the AIGADC resources page.
Harsh review of the user interface for The Complete New Yorker. My experience was better (changing issues took me only a few seconds), but the interface does leave a lot to be desired.
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog usability. I actually think most of these are pretty good, but as with all such guidelines, they are made to be broken.
In the real world, the process of design depends on evolution: “To consider the iPod, it did not spring fully formed from the mind of a powerful Designer, but rather it represents one distinct point on a long evolutionary timeline.” Intelligent design is bad science and bad design. That doesn’t leave much.
Wonderful interview of Milton Glaser by Chip Kidd from a couple of years ago. Touches on his iconic I [heart] NY logo, the updated version (which the NY Commerce Dept. tried to sue him for), and the economics of design. (via df)
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