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Spread round Flickr (and other places) like wildfire. How much did the beauty of the headline move the story up the news agenda?
(Pictures from secretlondon123, shihlun, blackbeltjones, Martin Deutsch, MykReeve and my bad self.)
I've been seeing these vans for years, but never managed to get a photo until the other day.
I know it's a very geeky designer joke but it always makes me smile when I see one. They used to have a division called eps maintenance. Wouldn't that be brilliant? Your eps is corrupted so you ring eps maintenance and they race round and fix it!
The divisions they have now are called EPS Social Housing, EPS Building Services, EPS Security, EPS Refurbishment. Very funny.
(For the non geeky designers reading this, eps is a file type like a jpeg. It stands for Encapsulated PostScript.
Sir Martin Sorrell, in Marketing Week.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the BBC's Media Futures Conference. The best bit of the day by miles was Peter Day.
That's Peter over there, top left in the blue shirt and the cream trousers. There's a better picture here and his BBC biog is over here. But you all know who Peter Day is, right?
He didn't speak, he only chaired a session. But he was very well briefed, very well prepared and he spoke persuasively and intelligently. He had this great quote from Paul Saffo, "Just because something is inevitably going to happen, it doesn't mean it's going to happen any time soon".
What struck me most was how he never once said, err.
Granted, Peter Day is a professional broadcaster and he's been doing it for years and years, but still, he never once said "err". Not once. No umm's, no erm's, no you know's. I was so startled by this I counted erms and umms for the other speakers. On average (and my survey wasn't very scientific admittedly) no speaker could get through one minute without and an erm or an umm or a you know.
I realise that dropping countless 'you knows' into a presentation is mainly a stylistic issue and in the right circumstances it can be effective, but more often than not it's just lazy. It's very easy in this industry to convince yourself that you're a good presenter when actually you're just average. Good speakers are people like Peter Day, Tony Blair or Winston Churchill. As Jon Steel points out in his brilliant book (you have read that book haven't you?) Winston never needed any PowerPoint to get his point across. Neither did Peter Day.
I know Blair and Churchill and the like are talking about much more important things than the difference between Arial and Helvetica, but even your local MP could stand up for 45 minutes and give a competent speech about the local door knob society. No notes, no PowerPoint, no erms. John Dodds once saw Seth Godin stand on a char (in the middle of Buckingham Palace or somewhere) and talk about funny coloured cows for nearly an hour. Could you do that?
Next time you speak, try and do it without any erms.
The main thing I don't like is the sizes. It seems like the three separate elements have been stuck together. They all fight with each other. The relative sizes are all over the place. There's no elegance to the spacing. Way to complicated visually.
Moan, moan, moan.
Not written by me, written by you as part of the Summer Of Design Books series. You can write and post a review too, go here and follow the simple instructions.
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I've read this book in the french version, but the english one should be (and looks) the same, so here we go.
You all know that the Didots used to be pionneers at the XVIIIth century, and you also know how gorgeous M/M 's work can be.
But what happened in between?
It's time to discover french's specific timeline and masterpieces, and how after the golden years (until 1880) the avant-garde had to fight to be heard (and seen) and how 20 years after the WW2 the swiss style and the modernity will make it through the design schools.
But wait, here are the '70s and in the whole western world, this modern thing is getting boring, turning into the so-called international style.
So, how will designers working in France manage to jump into a New Typography train that's 40 years old, while postmodernism is making its way everywhere?
Michel Wlassikoff, graphic design historian, will tell it to you - and much more, as his book starts in 1500 and ends in 2005.
Plenty of pictures here, with the finest exemples and high quality reproductions.
You guessed it: what we have here is the ultimate book for graphic design in France.
The Story of Graphic Design in France
Michel Wlassikoff
Gingko Press
If you ask me Creative Review are doing a pretty good job of bridging the gap between print and online. Lots of good stuff from the magazine finds it's way onto the blog in an accessible fashion. There's enough of a gap between the print version so subscribers don't feel cheated, yet it still feels like fresh content. Good.
On that note, my ten years article is now on the Creative Review blog in full. Since the article was published lots of people have emailed over their ten years stories. It might be nice if people started adding these to the CR Blog.
In other exciting publishing news I think a cartography publication are going to reprint the map post.
I've just joined The Penguin Collectors’ Society. They sent me this lovely postcard.
You should join too (you don't have to collect Penguins to join). It only costs £16 in the UK and you get good, free things every now and then. AceJet170 explains it better than me.
As an aside, on that postcard it says, "Penguins, taken on the train, elevate and entertain". I wonder what a format that could elevate and entertain and be taken on the train would mean today...
Years ago I saw this album in Tescos. Or Asda. Or Iceland. I kept telling people about it. But I don't think anyone ever believed me. So yesterday I bought it.
Mad, eh?
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