Category: {design}

Design

The Apple logo

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The original company logo from 1976 depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the fateful apple glowing above his head and looks about as far removed from a computer company logo as it’s possible to get. The picture frame contained Wordsworth’s description of Newton, “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”

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Rob Janoff designed the more familiar Apple at about the same time. The typeface used was Motter Tektura.

According to the logo designer…the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, in line with Apple’s mission statement of making high-technology accessible to anyone.

As with many old typefaces, there doesn’t seem to be a font of Motter Textura available today apart from this Cyrillic clone.

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The original apple was streamlined and given coloured bars at
Steve Jobs’ behest in order to “humanise the company”.

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Ironically, it was Jobs who also decided to remove the colour bars in 1998. The current logo is now a typical piece of flexible contemporary branding, easily reproduced in any colour, at any size or shape.

City of Saints and Madmen

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Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful and award-winning fantasy tales of the sinister city of Ambergris are now back in print in the US from a major publisher. This is good to see, not only because the book is well worth your attention but also because I helped design the interior, providing title pages for the stories and designing and illustrating the whole of the ‘King Squid’ section. Fantasy is a meagre description for this book, it’s far more inventive and intelligent than the mass of works that labour under that description in the shops. Ditch your doorstop dragon sagas and give yourself a treat!

Vintage magazine art I

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Magazineart.org has a great selection of covers from the golden age of illustrated American magazines. Not complete by any means but there’s some great art and design there, and the covers of Science and Invention are especially fun. Interesting to see that the technique of having a figure or object partly obscure the magazine title isn’t a recent invention at all.

Continue reading “Vintage magazine art I”

Great British design

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The BBC’s Great British Design Quest has reached a shortlist of ten:

1) Catseyes. Hmm, more of an invention to me but the brief here seems to be pretty broad.

2) Concorde. Can’t imagine this winning seeing as it’s generally regarded as a costly failure. In design terms though, it was a great-looking plane.

3) Grand Theft Auto. Er…a computer game? And one that merely imitates Hollywood at that.

4) The K2 phone kiosk. Some of these choices seem to be determined by nostalgia more than anything else. The cast-iron urinal phone booths are distinctive but I’m not sure they could be called “great”.

5) The Mini. This is a design classic, and, like the VW Beetle, still in use today.

6) The Routemaster bus. More nostalgia.

7) The Supermarine Spitfire. And again… I wonder what people would think if Germany voted in a similar competition for the Stukka divebomber?

8) Tomb Raider. Another computer game… Yes, it was surprising at the time but it was another game aping Hollywood. In game terms, something like the Rubik’s Cube was far more “classic” and original. But then that’s not British, is it?

9) The London Underground map. This is the one I’d vote for. Harry Beck’s solution to mapping the first underground rail network was brilliant and elegant. Not only that but it’s stood the test of time and been imitated (and parodied) in similar transport maps all over the world. While we’re at it, let’s also remember Edward Johnston and Richard Kegler’s 1916 type design for the Underground system, the world’s first widely-used sans serif lettering.

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10) The World Wide Web. Respect to Tim Berners-Lee and all, but, again, is this a design or an invention? And how British is the web? Do they mean the web or HTML?