Here’s another little spare-time project I’ve produced for my own amusement, and now offer to the world under the heading of “free stuff.” It’s a list of episodes from the MTV series Daria, sorted by season and which disc they appear on in “The Complete Animated Series” DVD compilation:
Image links to a print-resolution PDF (though this PNG file might still give you printing quality similar to that of the actual DVD case packaging)
And with the main content appropriately posted up at the beginning, for a change, I’ll now proceed into the usual progressively more ramble-y notes and commentaries. read more…
Okay, my calendar says last night was the new moon, but close enough. (For all I know the moon could even still be in the sky, here, at the moment, except that it’s overcast.) What news?
Let’s begin with three items from The Atlantic. First, Alexis Madrigal compared examples of letterhead from Thomas Edison and rival Nikolai Tesla, and concluded that “it’s no contest whose letterhead is better. Judging by these examples from Letterheady.com, Tesla wins by a mile.” I wonder, though. Perhaps it depends on what your criteria are for judging “better.” The Tesla letterhead is eye-catching, but at the same time might be great for convincing people you’re a dangerous mad scientists while less effective at winning business from Westinghouse, e.g.
And then two from the excellent spinoff site Atlantic Cities. Wonderful old TWA posters by David Klein, possibly one of the last gasps of this kind of style in the realm of non-ironic corporate advertising. And the “Patchwork Nation” map which assigns every county in the United States to one of various community types. The terminology might be improved—I’m not sure I would associate the phrase “monied burbs” with Lorain County—but it’s fun to play around with.
Next some vintage design of a different era, circa-1980 postmodernism. Oh yeah, I remember this stuff, its traces still lingering around when I first began studying graphic design. Just go browse the image gallery at least.
And finally, a more recent change in tastes, with Seth Stevenson’s amusing and gleeful examination of the rise and fall of advertising agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky. I have to generally agree; they really were almost worshipped for a while, and they probably did deserve a good smacking-down for those horrible Burger King ads, alone.
Some comments on the recent logo redesign announcement from comics publisher and IP-licensing company DC:
In an assortment of delicious fruit flavors!
First of all, if it feels like we were just here not all that long ago, well, we were. After decades of the “DC Bullet” design, the company introduced a swoosh-y design back in mid-2005. My own comments at the time, on a now-lost blog, were “DC Comics boldly leaps (in a single bound) into the mid-90s” and “It’s like the ‘Electric Blue Superman’ aesthetic applied to logo design.” I didn’t think it was bad, really, just kind of corporate-slick and trendy. (To say nothing of the official announcement with its ridiculous fluff-statements like “There was a level of concern that we weren’t fully utilizing the power of DC.”)
I suspect that many people, like myself, had finally found the design growing on them a little bit these last few years, which points to what might be my biggest criticism of this redesign: it just seems like flailing. read more…
Here’s something I started working on way back last September, actually, and finally have ready to share: a schematic diagram of Ohio’s major highways in the style of the iconic London Underground map of Harry Beck.
Click the map for a larger version
This one has really turned out to be, perhaps as much as anything else, an illustration of the value of acting on novel ideas rather than sitting on them.
The city and region of Cleveland, and their potential for tourism, have plenty of interest to me beyond just the specific potential for graphic design to boost the latter.
Technically I don’t live in Cleveland and never have. I’ve never even had a full-time job in Cleveland. Of course, I have worked there on many occasions, and visit Cleveland often; even if one disregards the fact that Lakewood is not just near Cleveland but essentially a part of Cleveland in more ways than not, Cleveland is obviously the focus of a “region” which I’ve called home for several years now.
I will confess that, even after all this time, I don’t really consider myself a “Clevelander” and probably never will. But the fact that I don’t have some sort of deep personal-identity attachment to Cleveland, and continue to live here anyway, is arguably a testimonial in favor of the area rather than a failing. I like Cleveland, and northeast Ohio generally; I think there are many great, underappreciated attractions in the area, and I’ve had many enjoyable and successful experiences showing the city off to guests.
So I absolutely believe that Cleveland has additional potential as a tourist destination, and a desirable place to live as well for that matter. And in that spirit, I think that one of the last points emphasized in Susan Glaser’s recent Plain Dealer article, that “Clevelanders need to believe in themselves before anyone else will” is one of the most important points.
I remarked to a friend not long ago that in Northeast Ohio, perversely, it’s really kind of a “point of pride” to be downtrodden. And while I’m so, so far from being a Pollyanna (if you’ve ever read my political writing you know this very well) I think the pessimism and self-mockery is a bit overdone in Cleveland. read more…
Been a while since one of these. But, it’s quiet lately; the typical post-holiday client “coma” seems to be deep indeed, this year. In the meantime, then, a few items of interest:
Last week, Slate posted about “The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See,” a painstakingly produced work by “one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.” It did win the Cartography and Geographic Information Society’s Best of Show award, although honestly, the wonder seems a bit lost on me. It isn’t like the Imus map is really any more easy to navigate, at a glance, so far as I can see. And if you’re still going to have information packed so densely that you have to hunt around, anyway, I don’t see the real advantage over computer-generated maps. Oh well. I was at least interested in the notes about how the ordinary, computer-generated maps are made.
At Low End Mac, meanwhile, another design celebration in which I can’t quite wholeheartedly join: the 10th anniversary of the “desk lamp” iMac. Personally, the “middle iMac,” between the “space egg” original and the “featureless slab” model which I have, never quite sat right with me, aesthetically. That big dome just seemed awkward. That said, LEM’s roundtable restrospective on the design and its legacy is very good reading.
To round things out, three links on the past and future of what we call “the book.” First, it “seems that Amazon and others have been using statistics that skew the data” to exaggerate electronic books’ displacement of print. Second, The Atlantic has a look at some ambitious design work which may offer the paperback book a new lease on relevancy. Finally, a curious discovery: Lady Bluestocking’s facsimile dust jackets for vintage books. I’m not familiar with most of the books in her catalog, though the dust jacket for this one is pretty darn amazing at least:
Available for purchase
The Plain Dealer‘s Susan Glaser has recently been considering Cleveland as a tourist destination, with an article on her own views of the Forest City’s strengths and weaknesses last month and a follow-up with reader comments today. I think this is a very worthwhile issue for discussion, and that in mind I’d like to share a few thoughts of my own.
First of all, before getting to anything else it’s interesting to me how many of the suggestions in Glaser’s follow-up story fall entirely or in part under the heading of “graphic design.” A majority of them probably amount to issues of “design” in some sense or other, really, but within that, many suggestions are really calls for better visual design:
- a complaint of ugly scenery on the rapid line from the airport points to a big clean-up operation, certainly, but perhaps also to installing some kind of attractive visual elements in addition to clearing out the ugly stuff
- a complaint of RTA ticket machines is basically a call for better interface design
- another of Glaser’s readers recommends better provision of maps and travel schedules at bus stops
- one correspondent complains (very reasonably) of the difficulty of finding a way into Tremont and suggests some kind of shuttle service, but Glaser herself adds the additional/alternative solution of a good wayfinding sign system
I think more and better graphic design could definitely help Cleveland and surroundings, in these ways and more besides; I still think something like the coordinated visual branding I encountered in France sends a great signal to visitors. Of course, as with most of the other suggestions in Glaser’s articles, two significant questions are left unanswered: 1) who would be responsible for making proposed improvements happen and 2) how and by whom would they be funded?
It’s funny how college students can be perpetually broke, but somehow have the most amazing toys and gadgets stuffed into their tiny rooms.
I recall scouting a photo shoot in the residence halls while I worked at Drake University, in fact, and being struck by one pair of students with an astonishing projection home theater system just-barely wedged inside their box of a dorm room. Suddenly all that larger, “suite” style housing that universities were building as fast as they could made perfect sense to me. The existing situation in front of me, after all, was a plainly ridiculous juxtaposition.
Of course, packing an already-crowded dorm room with showy electronic entertainment kit is nothing new. Back in my own dorm days, at dear auld ISU, things were much the same. The “god box” computer, the speakers which could go to 11, etc. But perhaps nothing stands out, 15 years later, quite like this one kid with the 200 disc CD changer. read more…
All told, on balance, the past year has been a good one, at least for me and my work. (The wider world in 2011 is another issue which, though still of relevance to my own life, I won’t go into right here.)
In brief, I feel like I can look back on an excellent year of creative activity, and on very respectable financial achievement. I do wish that there were more overlap between these two, admittedly, rather than so much of the creative activity being only indirectly funded by old-fashioned, unglamorous “work harder” effort for clients who require reliability and efficiency more than novelty. But, one recognizes that this is by no means a unique circumstance. Particularly having read biographies of William Blake, Poe and Jack Kirby within the past year. (In some ways all three seemed like the same story, played out in the 18th, 19th and then 20th centuries.) At least fiduciary needs and creative aspirations are fitting together somehow, at the moment, whether or not that fit is quite perfect.
For a somewhat more detailed review of 2011, meanwhile, I’ve just gone back over the past 12 months of Modern Ideas posts and flagged particularly interesting and/or significant highlights. And, while definitely a simplified approach, even this has revealed a rather neat little catalog of activity, the extent of which I actually found a bit surprising upon looking back.
January
- The “Spider-Man Timeline” enjoys a modest round of online publicity
February
- Completion of three front covers for my first-ever book series, Case Studies in Nursing
- A series of “significant comics logos” posts of which I’m still rather proud
- Completion of the Fantastic Four 50-year series timeline
Continuing a round-up of my media acquisitions from Christmas 2011, let’s move on to the big pile of books:
Sherlock, spies, comics and runes
Starting at left: The Rune Poem, about which I wrote earlier this year. This is a good example of a book that I like having, for my own, as a book; I think it will be great to just pull off the shelf and muse on once in a while. Or even just seeing it there on the shelf, and being reminded of it.
Next over, The Tailor of Panama, by John LeCarré. In this case I think the design beats the content, possibly, if by a narrow margin. And I write this as a LeCarré fan, but that’s one knockout of a cover design. Lively, sharp, jaunty; the irony is delicious. Moreover, though, while The Tailor of Panama was a good book, in the years since I first read it I’ve noticed that it and basically all of LeCarré’s post-Smiley works seem kind of interchangeable, at any rate when it comes to the protagonist. Same moral, and general, shabbiness, same marital awkwardness and passionate but seedy affairs, same reflexive dissimulation and lack of conviction. And while the individual stories are always good, after four or five of them it begins to seem a bit repetitive.
Next, the big one in various ways: Kirby: King of Comics, by Mark Evanier. read more…
