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.

Update 9/4/10: apparently the new icon has drawn some highly negative reactions, with The Steve himself being drawn in to issue a royal dismissal of critics.

I also notice that the overall appearance of the program’s user interface has changed, moreso than in recent versions, it seems. I’m not sure if any of these cosmetic changes are really improvements, but so long as they don’t bring back brushed metal I’m okay. (Really, the brushed metal interface may have been a worse design choice than the Blue Dalmation iMac.)

What I find interesting about the UI tweaks in iTunes ten is that overall, everything has a faded, bleached-white look which reminds me quite a bit of the alterations made to the WordPress interface just a few months ago.

Is this the new “in” look, now? Light gray, pale gray and hint-of-gray white?

Maybe this would be the perfect time for Marvel to reintroduce the ghostly, color-desaturated incarnation of their android hero The Vision.

Image via Mile High Comics

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.”

I mean, come on. Does a squat vase shape with a ridged bottom (see what I mean?) and an exclamation point in the center really resemble a tire? Maybe people would have a better chance with something actually, y’know, wheel-like, i.e. round:

Something I whipped up this morning

I don’t know that this is “idiot-proof” either, but it seems a heck of a lot closer to getting the concept across in a direct, no-nonsense fashion. Of course, it occurs to me that with car consoles basically becoming full-blown computers, it may not make sense to restrict things to a static symbol. So here’s an animated option of the above:

Please hit reload if the animation loop has stopped

Better, worse? I don’t know. Sometimes I think the quest for a “universal” graphic symbol solution is just silly. Wouldn’t it be more effective to just use something like this?

Like the marketers say, include a "call to action" whenever possible

In my opinion, it’s true that a picture can be worth a thousand words, but some times a word can be worth a thousand pictures. What’s simpler, after all: drawing a bicycle or just writing the word? Of course, this wouldn’t be “universal,” but 1) how many cars are actually sold across language barriers—maybe it’s more than I realize, I don’t know; in any event 2) a symbol that no one can figure out isn’t necessarily more “universal” than text, and in the case of the English language alone that text is probably comprehensible to around a billion people, give or take. (Though our British friends would probably want “tyres” rather than “tires.”)

Plus, it isn’t like tire pressure is (usually) a safety-critical issue. There are lots of good reasons to maintain recommended tire pressure, but for what it’s worth, I really don’t think that the large number of people driving around on underinflated tires are doing so for want of a dashboard light to tell them so.

I suspect it may have rather more to do with what an absolutely wretched and unpleasant chore it is to not only check, but inflate, tires. Air compressors are brain-jarringly noisy, for one thing. And, unless you have one at home, maintaining tire pressure generally means paying through the nose at a service station for about ninety seconds of air, during which you must scurry around on a dirty blacktop, fighting with a hose that is constantly trying to retract, trying to get all four tires filled just right before your time runs out, all the while exposed to traffic, the elements, stares, etc.

As I have observed on other occasions, graphic design can achieve remarkable things but there are limits to its powers. And when it comes to solving the problem of mass tire underinflation… I think it would realistically be more appropriate to call in industrial designers and mechanical engineers, rather than symbology experts.

It was much fun, and I’m rather especially pleased with my idea of combining the two iconic images of the Doctor Who world which even I immediately recognize. So far at least, no one has told me that I’m not the first to think of this, so I’m enjoying a modest amount of pride at this warped little notion.

Part of it sprang from a simple desire to take the opportunity to draw a Dalek, so long as I was taking the opportunity to draw Doctor Who “stuff” for what may be the only time in my life. Because hey, who doesn’t love the Daleks? As noted, even I’m aware of the extermination-obsessed robot salt shakers without having ever seen an episode of the series.

In fact, it’s occured to me that the Dalek is a fine example of an iconic visual design, at least per the criteria I explored earlier this summer. It’s pretty unique highly distinctive: there’s really nothing else that looks quite like a Dalek. It’s gotten wide exposure, first appearing in a nationally-broadcast television series. It represents more than just itself, having become an emblem for not only Doctor Who, but science fiction nerditry and even modern British culture generally.

And, as designs go, the Dalek is really, really consistent. The details have, I think, been tweaked a bit over the course of 47 years (thank you Wikipedia), but on something as bizarre as the Dalek, that doesn’t really change the overall impression. Moreover, the Dalek is remarkably consistent for the design of a “live,” ambulatory character, because so far as I can tell, they don’t really move. The shape of the Dalek is always basically the same in every appearance, unaffected by changes of posture or expression because neither concept applies.

The Dalek is also, as iconic visuals go, a good demonstration of how icons are popularly embraced. Just run an image search on “Dalek” for example. Apparently they have even been featured on a postage stamp. And, if the Dalek is definitely not a simple design, it does occur to me that from the perspective of people making it their own, it does at least have the virtue of being cheap: one can make a perfectly serviceable Dalek out of cardboard and random household objects, because that’s probably about all that the BBC itself could afford in originally constructing the things.

Well done, Raymond Cusick.

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.

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?

Now, note that I grabbed these from various places around the web and the colors are a little off; in reality this identity system did have a consistent color palette. Otherwise, though, it was every bit as all-over-the-place as it looks.

If there were any “primary” logo from the Tasmanian Cardinal system, it was probably the above-left. As you’ll note, however, this was very complex and involved small, condensed lettering which would become meaningless dots at small sizes, especially on the world wide web that shared its boom years with this logo’s infancy. So we also had an “ISU” version, and for good measure an entirely letter-free version (which always looked somehow “naked,” in comparison). Plus, the bottom-right version, which probably exemplifies this whole mess; I sense a sadly misguided “all of the above” decision, at some point in the design process, at the bottom of it all.

Eeesh. As though all this weren’t enough, the various lettering components might appear by themselves to create even more chaos. As I have noted in the past, big sports teams generally allow some degree of a “more the merrier” approach in terms of their “official” graphics; that way there are more merchandise options to sell, after all. But there’s a difference between having a large and varied wardrobe, and having an outright identity crisis. I liked the Tasmanian Cardinal logo, but it was really one big swirling, avian identity crisis from day one and probably never could have been effectively “fixed.”

So, the whole thing was tossed out (or rather, deprecated to “throwback” status, as old sports logos and graphics never really go away), and the athletic department started over. And in 2008 presented us with this:

So, what do I think of the “I-state” logo, having lived with it for a year or two?

More or less what I thought when it first appeared, I suppose: “eh, it’s okay.” Honestly, there’s not a huge amount to say about this. I don’t love it, certainly; it’s not at all what I would have come up with. Every time I see it I can’t help thinking “we aren’t ‘I State,’ we’re ‘Iowa State.’” And, as I am not the only person to point out, there are three other “I” states in the union, two of them right next to Iowa.

Plus, the shape doesn’t really seem to work. The capital letter “I” is, by its very nature, a strong vertical shape, and in this case it’s very angular. Having it crossed with a horizontal word which is also curved upward… just doesn’t really seem adequately resolved; there are too many conflicting forces.

And in the final analysis, I just don’t think it’s very exciting. Not really unique or memorable; based on my criteria for “iconic graphics,” it doesn’t manage a very promising score.

But it isn’t a disaster. If I don’t love it, I don’t mind it, either. It’s simple, at least. And I do quite like the lettering that accompanies this graphic identity system; unlike the logo itself, it’s shapely, distinctive and has a good sense of direction. If ISU sticks with this version long enough, eventually it may acquire a feeling of tradition at least, if not iconicness, through age.

That, however, is a big “if.” Ten to fifteen years seems to be the lifespan of Cyclone logos; if “I-State” can make it to sweet sixteen without some future athletic director indulging a desire to leave his or her “mark” on the program with a rebranding, we may have a winner.

All the same, I don’t think I would have recommended carving it in bronze.

Maybe I'm a pessimist but that just seems like asking for it

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.

Ideally, Living History Studios could even work on some real projects. I imagine the main revenue would undeniably come from other sources of support, but there would have to be various people and organizations which would find value or simply novelty in working with something like this, and be willing to pay for it. And hopefully, one could find a printer or two willing to deal with old-fashioned, literal “camera-ready art.”

I imagine that it wouldn’t take much searching, really. So little of this stuff actually goes away; you could easily find all of the period-accurate gear for the studio, I’m sure. It seems like most design departments and studios rarely get rid of any equipment, but instead simply push it into a closet. Even Modern Alchemy has a modest collection of two old Macs and various other no-longer-used stuff like floppy disks. Any place that’s been operating long enough would probably have piles of supplies and equipment, which they might almost pay to have taken away.

Yes, since you asked, I seriously think that this is a good idea. It’s a little bit wacky, sure, and a little bit obscure; unlike letterpress printers, there’s no equivalent of enduringly-iconic lead type for the graphic design of 30 years ago. Indeed the whole field of graphic design, new or old, is still kind of obscure, though decreasingly so in recent years.

But come on. There’s got to be room for at least one Living History Studios somewhere in this vast land of ours. Find a location amidst the densest population of graphic design professionals, or maybe an area with the most graphic design college programs based within a few hours. New York, wherever; I don’t care. It would be awesome!

In some ways, I love the idea of not only visiting such a place, but working there. Just imagine it: technical stability for more than five-minute intervals. One could get off the upgrade treadmill, completely, and find professional stability through the brilliantly counterintuitive means of embracing the status of anachronism, rather than constantly trying to stay one step ahead of it. That’s innovative, outside-the-box thinking.

(And for what it’s worth, working at Living History Studios would hardly necessitate living in the past; in some ways one might be able to enjoy technological change more if one’s livelihood no longer depended on keeping up with it. My friend Sean has mentioned, various times, an interesting notion that one should make one’s second-favorite activity into one’s career, and reserve #1 for a hobby so that one can freely enjoy it. Maybe gadgets would be more fun if you didn’t have to know anything about them. LHS employees could go right ahead and bring their iPhone to work—so long as they keep it out of sight while “in character!”)

Yeah, that could be really something. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m the person to start Living History Studios… not only am I probably too boring to really throw myself into such a wacky idea, I’m definitely not much of a fundraiser. Most importantly, though, I was just born about 15 years too late. As I’ve noted in these posts, my exposure to this “lost world” really has been limited to the merest  glimpses. Had I actually worked in a pre-computerized design field for even a brief time, then maybe I would have some business trying to recreate it. As is, it would be like one of today’s teenagers trying to explain how VCRs or mail order catalogs were used.

(Plus: hand craft skills were never my strong point. I always struggled to get sharp, clean results from technical pens, markers and cut paper.)

Ah well. It’s still a great idea. If anyone with the AIGA, or the Smithsonian, or just some crusty old veteran designer with rooms full of obsolete equipment, feels like taking the concept and running with it, by all means go right ahead, and please let me know!

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.

To be honest, I can only perceive the faintest outlines of this antideluvian age, like trying to make out shapes through dark, murky water. So my sense of the timing may be a little off; it could be that the 1980s were the real transformative decade rather than the 90s. I know that the Macintosh, of course, debuted in 1984. And I believe that software applications began offering real advantages over traditional methods fairly quickly for layout, typesetting and illustration (photo retouching required a little more time and and a little more computer horsepower). But I’m not sure exactly how quickly all of this played out.

All I can say with any certainty is that, by the time I was admitted into the graphic design program at dear auld ISU in the autumn of 1997, the field’s transformation from a hand craft into a computer-based activity was largely complete. In retrospect, even our seemingly old-fashioned faculty, for all of their muttering about the perils of “the computer,” had resigned themselves to relatively minor, token efforts at including craft skills in the curriculum.

It didn’t seem that way to most of us eager 19 and 20 year olds, of course. We wanted exciting fonts and vivid color (all 256 colors, in fact, on some of the older Macs still in use then) and dazzling computer graphics. We had little enough interest in the first year’s abstract, “practice” projects anyway; even less when they involved laboriously cutting letter forms out of Canson paper and assembling them into a collage. (I believe that students were permitted to use “the computer” for that particular project the very next year, in fact.)

Even I, who had set out for college with vague ideas of drawing comic books (I was way too conscientious a student, as it turned out; one classmate did in fact get into comics, probably as a result of spending much of class time drawing rather than attending to our assigned work) and was therefore used to working with technical pens and ink, happily set them aside as soon as we were allowed and took up Adobe Illustrator instead.

The very last gasp of pre-digital methods in our graphic design curriculum was the first project of ARTGR-371, at the beginning of spring semester, 1999. As it happens I still have many of the files from this project—on my computer. Because, ironically, most of the project was done with a Macintosh and the whole thing was probably less of a lesson in graphic design production methods than it was a lesson in how ridiculously archaic the idea of building “a mechanical” had become.

The result was pretty much a complete fake, sort of like a telephone with an old-fashioned, “retro” case that actually contains entirely modern circuitry along with, probably, a whole lot of empty space. For those to whom the details may mean something, we basically created a newsletter using Pagemaker or Quark, then printed it out and cut it into pieces, reassembling them on sheets of acetate, with a few token elements replaced by ruled-line tape or ruby lith. It made very little sense: having already created an electronic layout, even if we were for some reason dealing with a printer that needed literal “camera ready art,” we could have simply selected “print separations.”

Thinking back, it was just laughable. As was the fact that this was essentially the extent of our instruction in graphic design production. (I began to observe quickly, upon graduation, that we had left ISU better prepared to be art directors than junior designers. Which was somewhat awkward as no one hires a new graduate to be an art director. Or at any rate, not as a real art director, as opposed to a junior designer given a high-flown job title to make clients feel more special.)

What’s interesting to me is that this was also, basically, the extent of our instruction in the history of graphic design methodology. There was a “methodology” elective which I never took, so that may have included something more along those lines, but all of us took two semesters of graphic design history and I recall the course material relating almost exclusively to the end product of graphic design. Zany old professor Mickelson probably spent more time finding ways to veer off into a discussion of old trains than he spent on graphic design production techniques or how they influenced design outcomes.

Which is a shame, because anyone remotely familiar with the history of graphic design will be well aware that changes in style have regularly resulted from changes in available production techniques, going back to the arrival of monotype machines and before. In fact our professors, as I mentioned, were in essence constantly making this point with their warnings about the tendency of “the computer” to influence our work.

Yet how else could one engage in graphic design? We had no idea. I may have seen pieces of pre-computerized design here and there—technical pens, ruled-line tape, hand-built-model photography—but they were only a few pieces of the whole. Even now, with other pieces I have picked up here and there as well as a real interest in history, as admitted above I can only manage a vague concept of the old days and old ways.

Which brings me to a concept I’ve had in the back of my mind for some years: Living History Studios. However, this second installment of “design as once was” has run rather longer than I expected, and it feels like I would be “burying the lead” if I went into detail on LHS all the way down here. So it will get its own post, which is already written and will appear soon.

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.”

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.

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.

We’ve seen at least as many computer-specific changes as most professionals, I suspect, particularly being a predominantly Mac-using field. Compared with many offices which may have sat out the upgrade process for most of a decade using Windows 2000 and/or XP, designers have seen the G4 replaced by the G5 and then the kicker, the transition to Intel, at the same time that the Classic Mac OS was replaced by OS X, followed by a series of fast-evolving feline-codenamed upgrades. Plus, Pagemaker was retired in favor of InDesign, which has slowly but effectively choked the life from Quark XPress; then late in the decade Adobe bought its largest competitor, Macromedia, putting an end to longtime Illustrator rival Freehand, to boot. And I haven’t even gotten into web design…

Changes to print graphic design offer quite enough material for consideration on their own, I think. There have been indirect impacts from the internet: stock imagery, for example. Someone probably still publishes those 70-pound catalogs of stock illustration and photography, but I certainly haven’t seen one in years and I can’t help wondering if anyone at all has bothered to open one.

My current work doesn’t involve speccing a lot of traditional commercial printing, but it definitely seems that it’s changed. I can’t imagine that too many people send jobs to the printer by handing a zip disk to a sales rep any more.

And who remembers blueline proofs? I do, though it must be at least five years since the last time I saw one. There may still be a few printers using them, and a few holdouts who haven’t replaced film technology with computer-to-plate, but they’re probably down to a few legacy outfits, surviving on the margins with old paid-off equipment which they can’t afford to replace. The whole idea of bluelines or black and white laser proofs seems archaic; these days one can get fast, remarkable, sharp color documents out of a $500 device that can sit on a desktop.

Along with bluelines, I always recall film photography as another example of old ways now near-forgotten. Working with photography was certainly different during my first years as a designer. A photographer might take Polaroids (discontinued a few years ago) while setting up. There were pauses while changing rolls of film, and some limitation on the number of shots which could be taken (digital photography has of course made both concepts effectively obsolete). After the shoot there was a delay of at least a day or so for processing (now a photographer can burn a CD or DVD from a laptop, right in front of you), after which one would typically receive a stack of slides.

I distinctly remember some time in 2004 or maybe very early 2005, at Drake University, after we were already starting to receive digital photos from some photographers. And one older photog provided us with a batch of slides which, I (rightly) suspected, were to be not only the last time we got slides from him but the last time I received photos in non-digital format from any photographer. I stood at the light box “dotting” the best shots with little round stickers once used for that purpose, and had a very conscious “thus passeth the old way” feeling.

And yet, for all the change I can reflect on after ten years, I suspect that the decade or so of changes before I started my career as a professional designer was even more radical. Come back soon for some thoughts on this and a little, related idea of mine that I’ve been toying with for some years now.