A bit off the top

I came across Bill Dan’s rock balancing a couple of years ago, and have just been reminded of it while looking through Dave Gorman’s Flickr stream which features some of his own rock and pebble based trickery. It’s amazing to watch Bill’s videos of this art, combining much patience, delicate balancing acts and hunking great chunks of stone. According to Wikipedia Andy Goldsworthy is also a practitioner. I’m off to find some of his stuff now…

Oh, and here’s a guy called Danny Brown having some fun with rock balancing film.

A few weeks ago I considered the idea that not only is junk mail annoying, largely useless to the recipient and consumes time in avoiding and deleting it, but is an invisible waste of energy resources. Each piece of junk mail that passes through a mail server uses electrical energy in doing so, both to power the server and cool it. This is a small amount of energy per email admittedly, but when you consider that junk mail is reckoned to account for around 70% of all email (and that stat was from back in 2004) it’s possibly quite significant.

I made the mistake of talking about this with a couple of friends, who while not unsympathetic to the issues of sustainability and care for our environment told me to ‘get a life’ when I suggested it would be interesting to calculate how much energy is used and how much carbon produced by junk mail.

Thankfully I noticed in Russell’s blog that Nicholas Carr has already done some thinking about this kind of thing, by considering how much electrical energy avatars use in Second Life. There’s an ongoing argument in the comments following his post, and the amount of consumption is greatly disputed. However, it’s an opening gambit on the issue of invisible energy consumption which goes beyond the present concerns about phone chargers left on all day and televisions on standby.

So to summarise, we’re all doomed.

This one comes from Kieran.

“Have you heard of a club in London in a church that has pickled sheep in the entrance and they give you bags of wine?”

I finally managed to visit the Alan Fletcher exhibition at the Design Museum this weekend. Not a moment too soon as it ends on the 18th, so make haste if you’ve not been. Within just a few minutes of being there it occurred to me how many of the pieces of work clearly demonstrated the fundamental principles of good graphic design (nay, visual communication). This sounds obvious I know, Alan being one of the all time greats, but it really helped crystallise those principles which I’ve long known, but possibly neglected over the last few years of running a business and getting bogged down 90% of the time with non-design related activities.

So, I thought I’d revisit these principles here as a way of focussing my attention back on what really matters, and try and keep these at the forefont of my mind, even when credentials presentations, VAT returns, wireframe reviews, endless meetings and general day to day business running conspire to ensure that the design work often gets squeezed down to the nub end of the day.

This is a work in progress and I’d welcome feedback and input. Let’s call this ‘Graphic design principles: version 1.0′. I’ve tried to illustrate each principle with an image - some of them are undeniably rough. Some of the pictures I took at the exhibition were even beyond publishing so I’ve resorted to Google image theft.

DRAWING
All college lecturers bang on about poor designers not being able to draw, but it’s true that if you never wield a pen or a pencil, even in a rudimentary fashion, then how can you ever explore a visual idea or try to explain it without resorting to the all together less instantaneous computer.

HUMOUR
Or wit. Whatever it’s called, if it’s apt and causes a positive response then it’s an effective piece of communication that stays with the viewer far longer than a piece of passive communication.

INFORMATION
Let’s not forget what’s at the core of what graphic designers are supposed to do: communicate information, be it a telephone number, a provocative statement or an instruction. Sometimes that means getting down to basics, laying out an order form or some such piece of everyday stationery. But there are so many ways to do it badly.

CONTEXT & AUDIENCE
A guiding light for how we should present information and content, the context and audience should always inform how we approach these facets of a project. This can often render humour and wit a useless tactic of course.

PLAY
Go on, have some fun. If you don’t enjoy what you do, how the hell do you expect anyone else to enjoy, appreciate or benefit?

MEDIUM
Unless you’ve been expressly told to ‘design a brochure’ the medium should be informed by information, content and context. Choosing the right medium not only makes the information more accessible, but in itself can carry a whole meaning. Even if you have been told to ‘design a brochure’ there’s a hundred ways to do it and even more papers and printing methods to use.

CRAFT
Sometimes it can take a while to get something looking right. It’s about crafting. Taking the time, and getting something to a point where you say ‘that works well.

INSPIRATION
Take it when it comes, and be ready for it at any moment (carry a pen, write on your hand). We use a tiny percentage of our brains. The unconscious mind is really the driver, the conscious mind just rubber stamps the thoughts. Ideas will come at any point, and often marinading an idea in a bus ride or a good walk will yield results, such as these clam ashtrays.

CARING
Odd one this, but if you don’t care about what you’re trying to communicate you’ll do it badly. So, even if you’re designing a catalogue for wire, find something about wire that you care about (even if it’s just the beautiful cross sections!)

STANDPOINT
This is a tricky one, but sometimes you need to adopt a standpoint in order to care. It’s your way of bringing something extra to your work. An observation that translates into an approach, an action or a belief. It’s obviously a more readily obvious principle for personal and unpaid work driven by personal impulse, but can be judiciously exercised in commercial projects too, where you have the ear of the marketing director.

There are no less than 100 instances of hairdressers with the name ‘Hairport’ and around 40 with the name ‘Curl Up and Dye’ listed on yell.com. But why? These atrocities are presumably the result of company owners having enough time to sit and come up with a name, but not enough time to realise it’s a bad idea before they commit to having stationery printed and a big perspex sign stuck up above their front door. Hairdressers seem to be the worst culprits when it comes to puns and generally wrong names. Here’s a shot of the former example spotted in Stamford Hill recently. I’m hoping to find the shop I once saw near Brick Lane called ‘Touching Cloth’ to add to the archive. Have you got any seventh wonders of company naming to share? If so send them here and I’ll add them to the archive. Yes, how very original and lazy of me to ask other people to help me compile my blog.

I was astounded to see a Red Admiral flying around outside my studio today - in mid January! It didn’t land so I didn’t get a proper shot, but I did manage to take some spectacular action shots of fast moving brick wall as you can see. There’s a pic of what it should have looked like below.

One my clients has a whiteboard. It’s about 2.5 metres tall, about 3 metres wide and is only a few millimetres in thickness, yet it radiates light, allowing anything written on it to be easily seen with the room lights switched off. Yet it consumes no electricity and isn’t powered by tiny bioluminiscent sea creatures. What infernal technology is this? Nothing more than a white window. So simple yet brilliantly effective. Of course, group brainstorming has to be kept strictly to daylight hours, and if it’s a particularly dull day you may need to draw your chair up a little closer than normal, but it’s a great way to save some energy, and it looks marvellous.

Well, I thought I’d found a fairly ridiculous hat on a ladies head (fig.1). But then I ended up being quite easily cajoled into wearing an even more ridiculous piece of millinery (fig.2). My singular attempt at ridiculing a stranger has immediately backfired, and I shall take this lesson to the grave. It’s given me a great idea for a series though…

Fig 1.

Fig 2.

Like staring at a blank sheet of paper trying to conjure up an image or a sentence, I’m now looking into the abyss that is my new blog.

One of my art teachers (they were often the most influential teachers) once advised me to scribble on the blank sheet in order to get started. Any marks made after that could only then improve the situation, one hoped. This is well illustrated of course by Stefan G Bucher’s Daily Monster. So, by way of scribbling on my blog, I’ve written this and include a link to my previous moblogging activity here: www.moblog.co.uk/blog/ saintjim

Hopefully this new blog will push me towards something deeper than taking pictures of more Victorian urinals. Well, there might be a few of those in here too.