MY MY MY

It seems that everyone and everything is making a come back nowadays. Take That started off the craze, but recently we’ve seen comebacks from the likes of Blur, Spandau Ballet, The Verve, Spice Girls, and even a one off gig from Led Zeppelin. Apparently 90s boyband 5ive also made a comeback, although you’d be excused for not noticing. And it’s not just in the world of music that we’ve seen a revival of the old; TV shows like Doctor Who and Gladiators have returned to our screens, and Wispa chocolate bars are back in the shops. The latest piece of 20th Century nostalgia to return is the Wispa Gold, riding on the huge success of the original Wispa comeback, the Wispa Gold is the same thing, but filled with caramel. It was discontinued in 2003, but after a petition on Facebook, Cadbury’s have announced it’s return this September.

So how will they go about marketing the return of yet another classic chocolate bar? After their successful For The Love of Wispa TV/viral campaign, this time round they’ve opted to harness the power of outdoor advertising. Cadbury’s have bought advertising space around the country, and are letting the public decide what goes on it. In their own words:

So you simply upload your message to the Wispa Gold Messages website, and it could end up on a billboard somewhere. The idea seems very similar to some people’s responses to our recent Third Space university brief, set as part of the ClearChannel Student Design Awards. I know several people on our course came up with the idea of opening up the advertising space to the public and letting them put their own pictures/messages on it.

It’s a decent concept; if you include the public in the campaign itself and get them to interact with it, then they’re much more likely to spread the word. There haven’t been many entries on the Wispa Gold Messages website so far, but then the campaign was only launched a couple of days ago. Most of the entries so far appear to be messages declaring Person A’s all-consuming never-ending love for Person B.

And there’s no need to worry if you’re not artistic, you can send in a plain, text-only message, and if selected to go on a billboard, Wispa’s team of graphic designers will help spruce it up a bit for you by adding some lovely clip-art or some interesting typography, or maybe even both.

Amongst the love messages there’s also plenty of pictures of people’s families and children, as well as an occasional nugget of wisdom or advice that somebody obviously felt ought to be shared with the world in the form of a 48 sheet by the side of a dual carriageway.

Wispa have actually allocated hundreds of advertising spaces around the country for this campaign, including six ‘Big Ones’, presumably 96 sheet or above, and a large number at underground tube stations in London, as well as countless roadside billboards. You can see all the locations on their interactive map, and there really are quite a lot of them. Come October our streets will be flooded with messages from the public, courtesy of Wispa Gold, which could either be highly interesting, or highly annoying, although I’m sure either way it will generate plenty of publicity for the revived chocolate bar.

I just hope that between now and the beginning of October, Wispa receive some messages that are actually entertaining. After rummaging through all the clichéd love messages, and the occasional picture of someone’s cat, I managed to find one message that almost put a smile on my face:

In an old antiques shop yesterday I happened to stumble across this old newspaper from 1948, and it’s fascinating to see just how different newspaper advertising was 60 years ago. The newspaper, which I ended up buying, was a copy of the Illustrated London News from April 10th 1948, and the front page contains no headlines at all, instead it is full of advertisements. These advertisements rely almost entirely on text, so the typography plays a much more important role than it does in newspaper advertising today.

My favourite advert is the one at the top for Bulmer’s Cider, the very same Bulmer’s which has in recent years seen a huge rise in popularity, helped by advertising campaigns both in print and on TV. It’s interesting to see that 60 years ago, they were marketing it as “Champagne Cider” or “Pomagne”, clearly trying to make it sound more sophisticated. This sophisticated/luxurious image is helped by the addition of the Royal Crest, a feature which I believe does still remain on Bulmer’s bottles to this day, although now a lot less prominent. I cannot however, imagine “Champagne Cider de Luxe” adorning the bottles of Bulmer’s I drink down at the pub.

This newspaper is also an fascinating example of how the art of copywriting has changed. The adverts shown here use very different language to entice the customer than would be used today. Describing the customer as “discriminating” seemed to be common amongst advertisers of the time, for example in these two adverts for Basildon Bond notepaper, “Always the choice of discriminating people”, and Harden’s Tea, “For the discriminating”.

I also love the copywriting on this advert for King Six cigars, which states “The quantity available for distribution is still, unfortunately, insufficient to meet demands”. It’s a reminder of a bygone era of advertising, but I think it’s a shame we don’t see a little more like this in newspapers today.

I previously blogged about the forthcoming release of Penguin’s latest Great Ideas series. At the time, they were only giving us as preview of the first ten books, but Penguin have since unveiled all 20 covers in the set, and they look a little bit like this:

Once again, I’m hugely impressed by the work of David Pearson and his team at Penguin. The two colour printing allows each cover to be unique, whilst still allowing the books to form a cohesive and consistent visual identity across the whole set.

The only two covers I’m not sure about are these two:

Right, I’ll start with the controversial bit: Ikea has bid farewell to it’s iconic Futura typeface, which it has been using for over 50 years, and has replaced it with Verdana. Yes, that’s right, Verdana. Here’s a quick before and after for you:

However, before we get in to why Ikea have seemingly lost the plot, typographically at least, let’s take a look back in time at an old Ikea catalogue, and how Ikea has developed as a brand. Ikea have actually been around for over 60 years, and first introduced their iconic catalogue back in 1951, although the oldest examples I can find are of this catalogue from 1965:

The catalogue clearly hasn’t changed much over the years; if you compare this 1965 example to the 2009 catalogue, they still retain a similar style and layout, with large, full page images of rooms, or close-ups of products on a white background, accompanied by the bold geometric letterforms of Futura.

Ikea has been using Futura, in one form or another, for over 50 years, and the two have become almost synonymous. Some years ago, Ikea actually commissioned it’s own corporate typeface, “Ikea Sans”, which is a unique version of Futura, with more weights and a few slightly altered characters. They also commissioned an “Ikea Serif”, which was based on Century Schoolbook, and the two have been used together in Ikea catalogues ever since, and have helped to make Ikea one of the most recognisable brands in the world. However, the 2010 catalogue uses Verdana throughout:

So why have Ikea unexpectedly made the decision to break off their ties with Futura and replace it with the rather odd choice of Verdana? Well, they say it’s all about keeping the typeface consistent, whether the catalogue is for England, Russia, Asia, or online. They want to use the same font in every country, and with recent expansion into a number of Asian countries, this has not been possible with Futura. The other advantage of Verdana is that it is highly legible on-screen, and Ikea say that with their catalogue now being online as well as in print, Verdana was better suited to the job. There’s no denying that Verdana is a good font for use on the web; it’s one of the core web fonts, so is cross-browser compatible and very legible at small sizes, it was in fact developed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter specifically for use on screen. However, it was never intended for use in print, and at large sizes it looks rather clumsy and unbalanced.

Verdana has wide letterforms to make it easier to read as body copy on a monitor screen, but when used as a display face it loses all elegance; the terminals begin to look odd, and the kerning goes completely wrong. It’s true that Futura/Ikea-Sans doesn’t support characters for non-western alphabets, but surely there would have been a better choice than Verdana to unify catalogues around the globe? Many designers are suggesting even that it would have been wiser to commission a fully extended version of Ikea Sans with additional characters to support other alphabets.

When the new catalogue was unveiled last week, it caused an uproar amongst the design community, with many bloggers criticising the move, and so many people mentioning it on Twitter that it made its way into Twitter’s list of top trending topics. There is even an online petition to bring Futura back, which at the time of writing had 3,519 signatures. On the Typophile site alone there are hundreds of comments that have been made criticising the move to Verdana:

“Verdana is wrong on so many levels. It’s less readable, prone to more clotting on the press or looking clotted, and forget about elegance. Myriad, Avneir, even Lucida or Vera would look much better”

“I just couldn’t imagine a serious catalog design employing a screen text face for printed display work. I really think that this is a nasty case of a business being cheap”

“This is a disastrous move by a company that’s supposed to be design-led! The use of Verdana has the unfortunate effect of making any design look as if it’s been quickly knocked out on a home computer with no thought or effort, just because it’s (usually) the default typeface on any Windows machine”

“Rubbish. It’s a screen font, not graceful at display size, and lacking in subtlety”

“To me, Verdana just screams “default.” I love it at small sizes on screen (and maybe even in print), but if it’s any larger or used in other applications it just makes me think of terrible PowerPoint presentations”

It seems to me a great shame that such an iconic brand, which has remained consistent for decades has suddenly decided to get rid of one of the elements which made it so distinctive, and clearly lots of other designers feel the same way. However, it is yet to be seen whether people outside the design community will bat an eyelid. To the ordinary Ikea customer who doesn’t care about the difference between a font and a typeface, and has never even heard of leading or kerning, it probably just looks like a load of letters.

(If anyone is interested, there’s a similar article about Audi who had a typographic change recently, moving from Univers to a Verdana-esque face).

I wouldn’t usually blog about something like this, but it put a smile on my face, so I thought I’d share it. If you too were lucky enough to get your hands on a copy of the Daily Express yesterday, then on page 40 you would have seen this headline:

I can only assume that it is supposed to read “finally”, and that someone at the Daily Express either made a rather extreme spelling error, or someone is perhaps leaving their job at the paper and wanted to go out with a bang.

I was surprised though that nobody had proof read the article and noticed the mistake, is it common in journalism for something to go to print without being checked first?

It is my opinion that the people running E4 (the TV channel) are geniuses. They have the most original and exciting stings out of all the hundreds of TV channels that now flood our screens, and they didn’t even have to empty out their wallets to get them. Instead of paying ‘professionals’ to come up with a series of stings, often with terrible end results (à la BBC2), E4 run an annual E-Stings competition, inviting their audience to create their own ten second sting and upload it to the E4 website. Of all the entries, the best 15 are chosen by a panel of judges, and are then broadcast on E4 on a regular basis (plus the overall winner gets a £5,000 commission). It works brilliantly, as no-one knows their audience better than the audience themselves, and the end result is that E4 end up with are set of stings that are all original and creative, and with a tone of voice which is spot on for their channel and brand.

I entered the competition myself this year, creating a stop-motion animated sting which I made in two days, using purple and white card and a selection of miniature people. This is my sting: (feedback appreciated!)

The competition deadline is now closed, and E4 have had around 800 entrants in total this year, a selection of which can be viewed on the E Stings website. Some of the entries are very amateur, as is to be expected, but a number of them are very impressive indeed. I’ve picked out some of the best ones I’ve seen so far:

It might seem a long time off, but already cities around the world are a planning bids to host the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. One of the cities that has already been confirmed as an applicant is Munich in Germany, and they’re currently in the process of trying to find a decent logo to represent their bid. I’m sure we’re all aware by now just how much controversy can be caused by a bad Olympic logo.

To find a logo for their 2018 bid, Munich ran a competition and asked people to send in their own logo ideas, and from all the entries a jury have now narrowed it down just to three potential logos.

The decision is now down to a public vote. Residents of Germany can go to the München 2018 website and vote for their favourite logo until August 21st.

My money is on number one, although I thoroughly dislike the typography. The typeface in number two is based on Din, commonly regarded as the German typeface, which I think is far more appropriate for their bid. If number two just lost the snowflake in the top left I think it would be a big improvement, it looks as though the designers couldn’t quite make their minds up – “Shall we go with the mountain symbol or the snowflake symbol? Hmm… Lets use both”.

At this stage the only two other cities confirmed as applicants for the 2018 Olympics are Annecy in France, and Pyeongchang in South Korea who are bidding for the third time running, after failed attempts to host the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics. Their proposed logos are both, in my opinion, less interesting than the offerings from Munich, although admittedly I have no idea what the Korean logo says.

Annecy 2018 logo

Pyeongchang 2018 logo

Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of these logos will still be in use by the time the 2018 Winter Olympics come around. It’s been the trend in recent years for the host city to have one logo during the application process, and then commission a new logo once they win their bid. For example:

Looking at all of these logos, I think they all show an improvement from the candidate logo to the official logo. I believe the London 2012 Olympic logo is the only one to go the other way, being changed from a good logo to a bad one. Oh dear.

For anybody not familiar with the Penguin Great Ideas series, it’s a series which brings together some of the most influential texts ever made, from the minds of the worlds greatest thinkers; from Confucius and Plato, to Darwin, Rousseau, Woolf and Orwell, to name just a few. They’re the kind of books that you would read in a public place if you wanted to try and make yourself look ‘oh-so-sophisticated’ in front of everybody else.

However, the books could be full of anything, complete nonsense even, I think I would still want to buy them, because of their incredible covers. The idea originally started out as one set of 20 books, and they used the colour red to tie the set together and create a visual consistency for the covers. The books were all printed using only two colours, red being the spot colour, and black being the only other they could use, printed on to white stock. It’s always a challenge designing for print in just two colours, but the end results were fantastic. The different illustrations and use of type on the covers help each book to remain interesting and unique, whilst the two colour treatment really ties the books together to create a set that is visually stunning. The covers are a very tactile experience, they are printed on smooth matte paper, and feature heavy embossing. They’re the kind of books you want to run your fingers over, and jpgs really don’t do them much justice.

Due to the success of the first set of 20 books, Penguin decided to release another set, again featuring black and white covers, but this time using blue as the spot colour.

As well as the covers, the spot colour is also used on the spines of the books, volume one all having red spines, volume two with blue ones, which means they look fantastic when they’re lined up on your bookshelf. Moreover, the spines are numbered, which is brilliant from a marketing point of view, because once you’ve got a few, you’re no longer content with just seeing the numbers 2, 3, 7, 15 and 20 on your bookshelf, you want to buy the rest so you can have the full numbers 1-20 staring back at you.

In September last year they released volume three, choosing to feature green as the spot colour. David Pearson, the man behind the Great Ideas series, comments on the choice of colour:

“Green’s not a selling colour. It’s much harder than finding the right red or blue. Most reds sit nicely against black or white; green doesn’t have that presence. [...] I was getting more confident as a designer, so the decisions were getting bolder. This series is more image-led – getting rid of some of the white and flooding the cover with information. Predominantly white covers (with the green) would be a bit vague.” (Creative Review, August 2008)

And now of course it’s time for volume number four. Having already used red, blue and green, this time they’ve gone for purple, and what a great shade of purple it is. So far they’ve only revealed the first ten covers, out of 20 in the set, but I think they’re possibly the best yet.

Talking about the latest set of books, Pearson says:

“The formula is now so familiar to us that the main struggle is really an internal one and that’s for us to move the series somewhere new each time. Across this many titles each cover has to be distinct enough to maintain interest and – I hope – the boundaries we originally set ourselves have allowed enough flexibility to do this. There will always be a part of me that feels slightly sheepish at having produced so many of these things (80 so far) but much more so, I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a project that taps into the very specific skills I do have (and not the myriad that I do not).” (Book Cover Archive, August 13th 2009)

Personally, I believe this cover would have to be my favourite out of the whole lot:

For more information, and to view the full set, check out the ever wonderful Book Cover Archive.

As far as I can tell, every classical music album comes with terrible packaging design as standard. A mix of horrendous typography, accompanied by generic photographs of instruments, composers, or in the worst cases, both. These are some of the most amazing, most celebrated pieces of music ever made, so why don’t they deserve good design?

Don’t even get me started on the many problems I have with this album cover:

Perhaps it’s simply that the record companies want to keep the album art ‘refined’ and ’sophisticated’ in order to differentiate it from the other music found on the shelves of record shops, or increasingly on the pages of internet shops like Amazon. Just glancing at the covers, you can instantly tell that these are classical albums; they’re certainly not rock, dance, pop music, or anything else. However, album covers that are trying to look too sophisticated and pretentious run the risk of deterring new listeners. I don’t know anybody my own age would even consider buying a classical album, yet I’m willing to bet that it’s not because of the music itself, it’s because the packaging makes it look like you’re only supposed to purchase it if you’re past retirement age.

Upon seeing all these vexatious examples of bad design, I soon found myself eagerly trying to search out some examples of good classical album covers. I found a very interesting Flickr set full of classical music albums, all on vinyl, from the 1950s. The covers are full of bold colours and shapes, and some delightful illustrations which really sum up the style of design at the time. It’s very far removed from the kind of illustrations we are used to seeing on album covers today.

So if classical albums came with good design in the 50s, at what point did it all start to go wrong? I took Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ as an example, and started looking at how the album covers have changed over the last half a century.

1960s

1970s

1990s

2000s

In my opinion the 50s is still the best example, but the one that intrigues me the most is the one from the 70s. Even if it’s not a great album cover, it’s great to see at least one example that steers clear of the all too obvious pictures of planets, and instead tries to approach the subject of outer-space and otherworldliness from a different angle.

Finally, I did manage to find one example of a classical music album that I thought had a great design. Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), part of Wagner’s opera, which culminates with the apocalyptical ending of the earth by raging fires and then floods, which wipe out both human civilization and the Gods. It would have been all too easy for the designer to simply place a picture of fire, destruction, Gods, or similar imagery on the front, but instead they went for a clean layout with a good visual hierarchy, a clever image, and some good typography to match (the only negative aspect is the record company’s insistence on putting their logo in the corner). I’d like to see more covers like this, and fewer pictures of dusty old composers and their violins.

For further examples of good, bad, and some slightly ridiculous classical album art, see these articles on the allmusic blog and the Too Many Tristans blog.

Illustration is an area of design that I have become particularly interested in over recent years, and one of the first illustrators that I really admired was Mr. Bingo, who became famous for his Hair Portraits, depicting people/characters by drawing nothing but their hair. The results are humorous, and I’d never seen anything quite like it before; I loved the way that the hair was drawn in such detail, and that nothing else was needed to recognise the people depicted in the portraits.

However, since discovering the talents of Mr. Bingo, I’ve discovered a number of other illustrators who appear to have a very similar style. In some cases, a little too similar. For example, this poster from Christina Christoforou, which is a “tribute to bands and their hair” (for sake of comparison, see Mr. Bingo’s Guns ‘n’ Roses print).

And it seems I’m not the only one to have noticed this; Mr. Bingo himself is keen to point out plagiarisms of his work via his Twitter feed. He recently highlighted the similarities between his own work and that of Toby Triumph. Toby is another illustrator whose work I particularly like, but the comparisons between the two illustrators are inevitable, as they both create detailed line drawings with ever so slightly wobbly/wonky lines which give the work that delightful hand-drawn feel that you don’t get from straight lines and smooth curves.

To compare, here’s the two side by side:

And another, even more undeniable similarity:

Now so far it sounds like I’m siding with Mr. Bingo, however, that is only because I personally discovered his work before I found that of Toby Triumph. To be fair to them though, I have no idea who created their work and their style first, or if indeed there is any plagiarism taking place at all, or whether the similarities are simply a rather strange coincidence. But it doesn’t stop there, I’ve stumbled across countless illustrators who produce very similar work, all with the same hand rendered, black line drawing style:

Now if I didn’t know better, I would no doubt assume that all four of the above images had been created by the same illustrator. But of course they’re not, and I have to admit that when I’m drawing, I often find myself adopting this style of illustration myself.

So why is this style of drawing popular with so many different illustrators? Perhaps it’s simply because it looks good, perhaps it’s because it’s relatively easy to draw this way, or perhaps it’s because it’s a natural progression from the cartoon style line drawings we all do as children. Personally, I love this style of drawing, but with so many illustrators adopting it, I wonder if it will be long before it starts to lose it’s charm, and we see a new illustration trend emerging.