Print/Illustration: Oliver Munday

Found this great designer's work via bookcoverarchive.com where he is often featured.

Oliver Munday is an American designer, currently working in Washington DC, where he has founded a design studio. His work is very wide ranging and goes beyond just print applications, and the sheer size of his portfolio and quality evident in his work is inspiring. He is also a long-time contributor for the New York Times, often responsible for illustrating articles and publications.

He definitely has his designing career pretty much sorted for the near future, and his immense body of work should mean that he never has trouble finding employment or new clients. Seeing other successful designers always motivates me, and his level is definitely something to try and aim towards in the next few years.

Check out his impressive portfolio here.

Classic 1920's Animation

Though i've never had a particularly great interest in animation or the origins of the 'cartoon', since learning of the Felix the Cat cartoons' existence i've been meaning to blog about them, but never got round to it until now. Felix the Cat is a often overlooked animation series that began in the 1920's and has been running off and on in various forms since then (apparently due to make a comeback sometime in the near future, having all but disappeared for the last few decades).

It marked the start of the popularity of animated characters in the silent film era of the early decades of the 20th century, and actually existed a fair few years before Disney began their Mickey Mouse cartoons, arguably making it responsible for Disney's success with the character (whose shorts marked the start of specifically recorded soundtracks in animation).

The animations are brilliantly executed considering the limitations the artists had at the time, with a lot of care and attention put into the themes, art direction, and cultural relevance. The character Felix himself shares a lot of similarities in fact with Mickey Mouse, so it's sad that the character that inspired Disney's breakthrough animations was in the end killed off by them, since Felix's popularity dropped as audiences preferred Disney's non-silent style of film.

Part of what I thought makes the 1920's/1930's Felix films great is the offbeat, surreal nature of the animation and storylines. Below is the 'Woos Whoopee' film from 1928 (during the 'Prohibition' period in the USA), in which Felix goes to an illegal 'speakeasy' club to get wasted, which US audiences lapped up at the time. It's strange and fascinating to see this sort of cartoon art style mixed up with controversial and 'adult' themes, but for me these films seem to have a lot more personality and charm than a lot of modern-day equivalents, and it's a shame the character never really got the widespread recognition he deserved.



One of the greatest things about this particular film is the timeless nature of it. Audiences today (at least those that drink) can relate to it, even nearly a century later and in completely different societies/cultures. Who can honestly say that when drunk they've never danced on top of a table, or stolen someone's drink, or got completely lost on the walk home and ended up getting back at 6AM? Though i'm not so sure about being chased by elephants or following walking lamposts...

What's So Wrong With Comic Sans?

Though the value of the typeface (or lack of it) is becoming an incredibly tired 'debate', the reputation of Comic Sans, as well as the history and reasoning behind its creation, is well documented in an interesting BBC article that appeared on the site yesterday.

Particularly interesting was the discussion of how typeface has become an ever more considered element of everyday work, whether it be graphical or otherwise. Before the dawn of computer technology for the masses, the general public would not give a second thought to the application or choices of different typefaces in the world around them, whereas now every man and his dog, not just the designer, has an opinion on them and is prepared to go to great lengths to let the world know about it via the medium of the internet.

Also noteworthy was how the trend to slag off the typeface has almost come full circle, and it's threatening to 'make a comeback' and gain some sort of value as a retro-chic/ironic typeface choice. Hopefully that day never comes, and it rests within the primary school signage/comic strip speech bubble applications where it belongs.

The full article can be found here.

Brand Mark Development

As part of a current university design brief we have been tasked with building up a brand identity, so when I saw this post on Under Consideration's 'Brand New' blog, I immediately found it fascinating, not to mention highly useful. It documents US kid's TV channel 'The Hub' and their recent rebranding effort, complete with a chart of unused brand mark options that were explored during development of the new identity.

It's not often you get an inside look like this into the process of a major rebranding effort, so it is a good opportunity to get some information about what sort of range of exploration you should undertake when developing a new mark.

As you can see from the image above there are well over a hundred executions considered (though there are ranges of very similar efforts but with slight adjustments). Though it may not be necessary to always go into such depth to find a good mark, the fact that the new identity is being received well shows that it pays off to exhaust all the possibilities before settling on a final execution.

Brothers Coffee Roasters

Found this great packaging for new coffee brand Brothers Coffee Roasters on the 'thedieline' blog.

"Coming from a science background, Nathan (the roaster behind Brothers Coffee Roasters) has approached roasting coffee with the same methodical reasoning as science. Using this as inspiration, the marque created for Brothers takes reference from the periodic table while the full logotype is inspired from the process of roasting the coffee. A whole range of 12 blends are in production, all featuring a different coloured circle on the packaging to appropriately represent the blend."

I'm really liking the minimal and clean design, with the focus on the colour coding of the different blends and the nicely executed logotype and supporting information. I always find it refreshing to see retail packaging go for a sophisticated 'less is more' approach, rather than bombarding the consumer with pointless information and offers plastered across the box with little thought towards weighting or placement.

More images and information here.

Infographic: Time Travel in Popular TV and Movies

Found this infographic via coolinfographics. Love the simple visual style and presentation, though perhaps the designer has included a few too many films/tv shows to make the infographic as legible as it should be.

Full size version here.

Vortex Water Fountains by William Pye

These water fountain installations by William Pye use an interesting dynamic to completely flip the normal idea of how a water fountain traditionally works. His cylindrical acrylic structures are filled with water, pumped in a circular motion and programmed to rise and fall within the cylinder, which creates a 'vortex' air pocket in the center of the cylinder. I love the simple style of his constructions and visual effect they produce.

This installation was placed in the departure lounge of Gatwick Airport North Terminal, but he has done similar installations in other places around the UK.

Nescafe Advert Concept

Stumbled across this nice concept piece for a Nescafe print ad (I say concept piece, but i'm just assuming that it isn't official due to the poor English in the copywriting). I'm a sucker for anything typography based, so this simple and unassuming design paired up with a solid concept really grabbed my attention. Would be perfect for a series of adverts running up and down escalators at Tube stops, or just as single executions within public transport networks.

LEGO Kitchen Table

Large scale LEGO structures are nothing new, and nothing will ever really be particularly impressive after James May's effort, though then again that project had over 1000 participants, whereas this project was the result of just two people, namely the Parisian design duo Simon Pillard and Philippe Rosetti. Even just the general decor of their house is enviable, but it's inspiring to see designers take their more ambitious ideas outside of the digital medium and integrate them somewhere as intimate as their own living spaces.

More photos of their impressive setup can be found here.

When Rebranding Fails 2

I recently read up a little bit about the Gap rebranding saga, and it reminded me a lot of Tropicana's failed rebranding effort last year (see this post).


Not much to comment on about the actual new logo, except for the fact it is very generic, uninspired and pretty averagely executed. Though I don't disagree with the use of Helvetica in principle (it is a classic font and will always be brilliant, despite being overused) American Apparel did the 'black Helvetica' logo first, and much better too. The square couldn't have been positioned in a much worse place and the gradient is pretty horrible and unnecessary.

However whereas Tropicana's effort lasted around a month before they quickly backpeddled, only a few days after unveiling the new branding Gap have backtracked and even called upon designers via Facebook to have a go themselves at creating a new logo.

Unfortunately this has made the vitriol around the internet towards Gap even more intense, as most designers feel it is cheapening the profession and the value of design work. A particularly good example of this is a blog post by this designer, who has claimed to have created a perfect new logo for Gap, but is expecting a promise of payment if it is chosen (probably a joke, but his post makes a lot of good points).

Though Gap must be enjoying the attention they're getting right now, failures like this can surely only harm the brand in the long term (Tropicana reported significant drops in profit following their unpopular rebrand). There was nothing particularly wrong with Gap's old logo, and despite being in use for over 20 years, it doesn't really strike me as desperately needing a redesign. I'll be interested however to see what happens next, and what branding Gap opts for, whether they end up picking one of their crowdsourced solutions, go back to the previous logo, or keep their unpopular new branding.

Old 'Which?' Magazine Covers

Great selection of Which magazine covers from between 1960 to 1981. Beautiful composition, typography and graphical finesse on these covers, and a far cry from the generic photoshoot product images on the covers in recent years. I'd like to know who the art director was during that period.

Thanks to the Delicious Industries blog for finding and uploading these old covers, and more of these glorious covers can be found here.

Variations of the Batman Symbol

Saw this post on Under Consideration's Brand New blog. Never had a particular passion for Batman or comics in general (except the recent films) but I enjoyed this look at the variations and 'evolutions' of the logo. It's impressive how each iteration has taken on a unique style and tone, despite working within the same tight constraints of size, general shape/form, and colour. For example, the Dark Night comic version, seen in the video below, uses a far more angular and edgey design approach to suggest a more sophisticated or adult tone in the comic series. Looking at this collection of logos provides a good incentive to really explore more options during brand mark development, as there are literally almost endless iterations to experiment with and always more options and tweaks available.

Here's a pretty nice video which is more or less chronological, and morphs the versions into each other. It also seems to have a couple of versions that aren't in the above image, and vice versa.

Frank Miller: 300 and Sin City

Having watched the 300 film based on Frank Miller's graphic novel for the first time last night, I thought i'd write a quick blog post about some of my opinions, mainly relating to the art style and direction in comparison to Miller's other famous big screen adaption, Sin City.

Though enjoyable in parts, overall I found the film underwhelming. In comparison to Sin City, with its dark, gritty art style and superb direction, it felt almost amateur in comparison. The obviously airbrushed and composited landscapes/skylines just didn't work for me. Clearly they were intended to be stylised rather than realistic, but it broke any immersion in the film I had, and just made me wish it could have been filmed in actual locations, with tweaks to contrast/saturation and tint added in post production, rather than during the creation of the scenes. There seemed to be a vast amount of effects thrown around with little thought or consideration, successfully creating a surreal feel, but without any of the subtlety and finesse of the graphic novel.



In contrast, Sin City didn't constantly over-do the graphic style, yet managed to remain even more faithful, visually, to the graphic novel than 300. Despite being almost entirely black and white it never felt bleak and dull like 300 managed to in certain parts with extensively desaturated colours and dark tones. The fact that colour was so sparingly used in Sin City made it even more effective, and the couple of scenes in 300 which were shot in a very similar art style just felt cheap and thrown in last minute, as a homage.



After sitting through the credits which were created with a more illustrative style, similar to the Casino Royale film intro, what i'd really like to see in future from Miller is a film adaption of a graphic novel shot with an identical (or closely adapted) art style, like Persopolis (shown below). Though he has proven it can be effective to translate illustration into a real-world template in Sin City, 300 seemed like a missed opportunity, and it would be interesting to see whether he could translate his traditional graphic novel format into a full length animated feature film.

Contemporary Abstract Art

Found this guy's stuff via another blog, and it grabbed my attention straight away - I think his style is absolutely incredible. Love the way he has mixed geometric shapes, colour, and forms to create his compositions. His portfolio is lacking in information but presumably his work is a mixture of hand drawn/sketched composition and photoshop/illustrator finishing. With his portrayal of contemporary society and themes, his work is a great example of abstract art being brought into the 21st century.

His 'name' is N1ko and you can see some of his other work on his Behance network profile here.

Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown

Stumbled across this website the other day. It's an interactive music video for Arcade Fire's new single 'We Used to Wait'.

Pretty impressive stuff, and a good demo of new web technologies and what can be done. Built in HTML5, it allows you to tailor the music video specifically for you - you enter your address on the website, and Google Maps uses the data they have for that address during the video, including Street View photos, aerial satellite shots, etc. It's not amazingly well realised, and could definitely be improved in some respects, but it's a pretty unique project, and sets the benchmark of what can be done, so it will be interesting to see what other designers (maybe with higher budgets and more time) can come up with in future.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Icon Design: Ben Barry

I found these nice icon sets by American designer Ben Barry, done whilst he was on an internship for Newhouse Design. They're for American Airlines travel maps, and he's created a great couple of sets of icons representing the landmarks for major tourist cities (shown above are Paris and London, obviously). It's impressive how he has managed to distill such complicated buildings and structures into easily recognisable marks, viewable at small and large scales and in one colour.

His portfolio is definitely worth a look, his work is incredible (both in volume and quality) and he's also only recently graduated! According to his website he's currently working for Facebook's design team, which is unsurprising considering how impressive his stuff is.

designforfun (Ben Barry's Portfolio)

Variations on the Number 4

The different logo designs of the UK Channel 4 Corporation’s major TV channels and +1 or HD equivalents. I’ve always liked these logos. They’re easy to reproduce, work in any lockup, clear and simple, and perfectly suited to each channel’s seperate tone, subject matter, target market, and they work great as a whole series too. Part of the charm of these logos is that I can't see them becoming dated or obsolete any time soon - the fact that Channel 4's main logo has remained largely the same since the channel begun could be seen as proof of this. It's also impressive how convincingly extra elements such as high-definition or +1 indicators have been incorporated into the original designs, as most of the designs were created before such channel variations were widely used. All good logos, particularly for the media industry, need to be flexible and adaptable in this respect. They're designed in-house I think, but I couldn’t find proper confirmation of this. More information about the channels can be found on the Wikipedia page here.

Phil Yamada - Paint on Print

Found these via another design blog, love the idea of using acrylic paint on top of newspaper prints, giving a strange 3 dimensional overlay effect. The graphics that he has overlaid on the pages vary wildly, but each has their own charm and merit. There are 26 unique elements in the series, recreating the alphabet. This is definitely one of the more interesting and well-accomplished uses of typography and lettering I have seen, and a good example of how to think outside the box as a designer.

Pantone Rubix Cube

Pantone Rubix Cube concept, nice design + execution. Designer unknown

Metro System Logos From Around the World

Metro transport logos from more countries around the globe than you can shake a stick at. Most of the variations revolve simply around a unique depiction of the letter ‘M’, providing some great inspiration for logo designers looking for solutions. The full article with a list of all the cities the logos correspond to can be found here.

Ten Successful Logo Redesigns

Found this article on 'successfully' redesigned logos on logodesignlove, pretty interesting examples and commentary. Full article is here. An interesting trend, at least in these examples, is that the logos have often been simplified, both in composition and in illustration or colours used.

When Rebranding Fails

Rebranding or redesigning an iconic trademark is always going to be met with a certain controversy, but it’s not often that a new brand is met with such widespread disapproval that it is removed shortly after introduction.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the recent Tropicana rebrand debacle, which saw redesigned packaging, logos and marketing by The Arnell Group rejected shortly after introduction after a large number of ‘passionate’ complaints from consumers.



The question now is, are the other rebrands by Arnell for Pepsi Co. in danger of meeting the same fate? The Pepsi range rebrands have been met with widespread disapproval and outright vitriol from some consumers, particularly on online design blogs and forums. However the new designs have now been rolled out across the globe, and the controversy in the design community has all but disappeared as people seem to be accepting the new branding.

Check out the original NY Times article here.