Sorry for the sparse posts for the holiday season, but I’ve been busy getting ready for my various travels. Here’s a very quick post with something I ran across in the Canadian War Museum. It’s a tea-set made in World War I out of old shells and bullets, fashioned by an artisan who was waiting to go into battle.
Here’s a little change of pace. I ran across this little gem of a book at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City last week. Despite how it might look on video, this is a completely low-tech mechanical system, comprised of an acetate layer moving over a photo created from cut-up frames of motion.
The concept is so utterly simple, yet the resulting animation is surprisingly fluid.
Music by Adam and the Amethysts (used completely without permission—please don’t sue me Adam).
Big thanks to Sean for the playful posts he’s done in my absence. I appreciate him filling-in on such short notice. If I’m lucky, maybe he’ll even do some posts from time to time in the future, if he feels like it.
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Daring Fireball has a link to some great quotes about writing succinctly. They could just as easily be applied to design—making things simpler is usually more difficult than it appears, and isn’t always appreciated.
I recently completed some work on a poster for a music show coming up in December in New York at Carnegie Hall. I did the concept and the background image with Kate McGarrigle, while the text was put together by another designer.
The show looks promising too, with guests Emmylou Harris, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Jimmy Fallon, Teddy Thompson, and most likely some more which have yet to be announced.
Some proceeds will be going to the McGill University Health Centre Foundation.
Gotham has become the Barak Obama typeface. For those not familiar with it, it’s the one always used to write the word CHANGE. It’s big, bold, simple, and has both a sense of present trends and of history (it should, it was inspired by New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal).
I have to wonder if Starbuck’s recent campaign to give everyone who votes a free coffee, was also a way of subtly endorsing Obama by also using the Gotham typeface.
I’m not surprised that Starbucks would do this, I just find it notable that a typeface has become so linked to one man.
Here’s an excerpt from an older article from the Washington Post, which — as an aside — discusses some of the differences in how colour use affects the placebo effect:
“One of the most important things about a pill is [its] color,” said Daniel Moerman, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied the placebo and nocebo effects across different cultures. “That seems to be fairly widespread.”
But the mind is a funny thing, and generic responses to color go just so far in explaining the placebo or nocebo response. Consider this: In Italy, Moerman says, blue placebos made excellent sleeping pills for women but had the opposite effect on men.
The apparent reason? “The Italian national football team’s color is azzurri,” he said. “Blue.”
I’m going to place this in the “interesting, but needs more research” category. Still, an interesting notion of how perceptions can be different for different cultures.
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.
So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.
See the rest of the article, from the BBC (via Martin).
Digital technology moves so fast it can be easy to forget that a few things have been consistent for decades — like the QWERTY arrangement of the keyboard, which has been in use for well over 100 years. Looking at a computer keyboard, it’s extremely difficult to tell why this layout was chosen over the alternatives. Even a straightforward alphabetical arrangement would make more sense at first glance. The Dvorak keyboard layout in particular has been shown to increase typing speed by almost double, reduce errors, and reduce the amount of finger movement by a huge margin.
Using this Dvorak to Qwerty-comparison applet, the last paragraph took me 576 key presses. Under QWERTY, my fingers moved about 14 metres, but they would have moved 8 under Dvorak. Most of that comes from the Dvorak layout being able to handle almost 65% of the text on the home row keys, compared to a meager 32% for QWERTY.
The Dvorak Layout. Vowels are along the left side of the home row, most-used consonants on the right.
It turns out that the reason for this apparently silly layout goes all the way back to 1874, when the QWERTY layout was developed for mechanical typewriters. The earliest models used an alphabetical arrangement, but were prone to jamming. According to this summary:
The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called “typebars.” The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession.
So QWERTY was designed to specifically place the most commonly used letter pairs on opposite sides of the keyboard. Astonishingly enough, this layout has continued to be the standard for english-language typing ever since, despite it being less efficient than the alternative.
