So I went crazy and installed the iTunes update mere days after it was released. Hoping there isn’t some critical flaw to make me regret that.
Meanwhile, this update actually gets my attention because, in spite of my having no more interest in making my music player “more social” than I do in making every last corner of the internet “more social” (in other words I won’t be turning on “Ping” any time soon), iTunes now has a new hat! That is, a new program icon:
How did we ever function before gazillion-color glow effects?
I am particularly amused because, just last spring, I wrote of “the irony of iTunes’ icon… a program for managing electronic music files which is represented by the image of a compact disc.” Perhaps someone else observed that and decided to ditch the CD from here on out. Certainly, two thirds of the “Rip. Mix. Burn.” slogan which promoted early version of the software now seems relatively archaic.
I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while; about a month ago the cars.com Kicking Tires blog posted that apparently one in three drivers do not recognize the following symbol:
Hint: those ridges at the bottom are a clue
Personally, I have a hard time believing that even two in three motorists know what this is supposed to mean, mainly because I don’t think it’s in most cars on the road yet. The above glyph is supposed, in theory, to indicate low tire pressure, and “is supposed to be ‘idiot proof’ and understandable across a wide variety of cultures and languages.”
Not surprisingly, it isn’t. (Even the cars.com bloggers apparently confused this with another, similar symbol, originally.) I definitely have no difficulty believing that “14% thought the symbol represented another problem with the vehicle entirely.” Anyone who has made more than a couple attempts at logo design quickly finds that logos and symbols tend to function much like a Rorshach ink blot test: there’s almost no end to what people will see in them.
And that can happen even with fairly sensible, clear, “safe” designs. Whereas this thing? I can see using the word “idiot,” but not necessarily as part of the phrase “idiot proof.”
The sands have nearly run out on this long month of August, though summer apparently resents my premature anticipation of autumn, as we’re in for a series of 90-degree days this week. A bit of a rag-bag of links for you as I try to get up to speed this morning:
In case you missed it, The Learning Network declared last week to be Infographics Week. Lot of good links from their announcement, at any rate.
The BBC Magazine considers the intersection of geography, identity and design in the choices of background art for UK passports.
HTML Watch: security questions.
Cleveland-based company Cliffs (they produce neither snack bars nor black-and-yellow study aids) has launched a cute little campaign tweaking the now-departed LeBron James. Amusing, though I always wonder how much these “raise our profile” campaigns by successful but little-known businesses are driven by vanity, compared with any business objective.
Finally, AIGA Cleveland has no events scheduled for the immediate future… which means that I will not be receiving any more e-mails announcing their “Let’s Bike” event. And after receiving them, on average, every five days all this past month, that’s something to celebrate on a Monday morning. 
Autumn approaches, or at least sits in the waiting room, ready for our appointment. Back-to-school time is here. And the king of American sports launches another season of tailgating, fantasy leagues and gladiatorial entertainment: football is back.
Expectations are, as usual, low for both my adopted Cleveland Browns and my beloved ISU Cyclones. But sports posts always prove popular, and I’ve promised once or twice to go into detail with some thoughts on the most recent Cyclone logo anyway. So grab a burger from the grill and a frosty cold one, and join me for a little armchair quarterbacking from a design perspective.
For context, you might want to begin with a visit to SportsLogos.Net first and have a look at Cyclone logos since the 1960s. The bird-in-Mickey-Mouse-shoes is still a “throwback” favorite; not so much the 1980s logo, which looks more like a rather drab product of the 1970s, from where I sit. Both, in any event, were mostly before my time.
When I joined Cyclone Nation as a trainee member, fourteen years ago, the current logo’s immediate predecessor (the “Tasmanian Cardinal”) was itself barely a year old. Unfortunately, “Taz” had serious issues of identity from the very beginning:
Will the real Cyclone logo please stand up?
Where was I? Ah yes: Living History Studios. (See preceding posts one and two.)
Back when I lived in Des Moines, Living History Farms was (it still is, for that matter) a set of period recreations demonstrating frontier life and its transformation by new technologies.
So, wouldn’t it be great to have something like that for graphic design? Imagine an exact replica design studio from around 1984, just prior to the desktop publishing revolution (you could even have an original Macintosh sitting quietly on the boss’ desk, a fancy toy which as we know now would rapidly become take on far greater significance).
You could watch skilled craftspeople working with technical pens, markers, presstype, logo slicks, paste-up boards, etc. See real “mechanicals” being built, as opposed to the farcical pretend exercise I made during my junior year of college. All of this with neither mouse nor scanner nor color laser proofer.
As noted in a previous post, my first decade as a professional graphic designer has seen a constant rain of changes in the field. Yet in this instance it might be said that avant-moi, le deluge; the real all-consuming flood of change in graphic design was probably the previous decade or so.
The first decade of this century has brought a variety of changes to graphic design, as a result of ongoing advances of digital technology. The last decades of the old century, however, must have seen sweeping change as a result of the arrival of digital technology, in what was until the late 1980s very much a hand craftsmanship discipline.
The interweb knows not an August holiday.
Environmental graphics: “Psychologists have expressed concern that the mood… could even encourage suicide.”
Bog Snorkelling in pictures. Now that is what I call an attention-grabbing ad.
New Inner Belt Bridge in Cleveland: real proposed designs and amusing satire from PD cartoonist.
Real-life heroes: the Great Typo Hunt.
Recently finished Walter Mosley’s excellent (even though the cover design was totally phoned-in) new novel, Known to Evil. Apparently the author also finds time to create awesomely weirded-out abstract art as well.
Brigid Alverson makes a plea for better comic book publisher web sites.
Computer graphics history: MacPaint source code released—with interesting notes for those of us who are unlikely to ever dig in and make sense of the code, no matter how elegant it may be.
Dumb: “the Dollar Rede$ign Project.”
Finally, craigslist has redesigned its homepage. I think it’s a commendable effort, being more visually pleasing while not really making it hard to find things or losing the recognizeable “craigslist look.”
a.k.a., that “book about plant genetics and genetic engineering.” The approved front cover design:
Pretty satisfied with this one
Available from Wiley-Blackwell, as soon as the manuscript is ready, the rest of the cover is designed, and the book is printed and arrives at the distribution center.
In one of my favorite books, A Short History of World War I, James Stokesbury wrote that, although the Habsburg dynasty’s unofficial policy was “govern and change nothing,” the Emperor Franz Josef I “had nonetheless presided over a great many changes in his time. He did not think all of them were for the better…”
Franz Josef was 84 years old at the beginning of the first world war, however; I’m barely 32 years old and a decade into my professional career, and it feels as though I have also stood witness to a great many changes in my field of specialty.
Of course, the past decade has seen considerable changes in many professions, with the continuing IT revolution consolidating and extending its gains. Ever-more-advanced computers, mobile devices and of course this lovely internet of ours have left few businesses untouched.
All the same, I submit that any activity which involves graphics and imaging has been particularly affected. And graphic design is not only itself such an activity, but also touches on many others: photography, printing, etc.
