A better class of lost and found

As you'd expect, you get a better class of lost and found notices in a leading art school. This from the Royal College of Art notice board.

Negatives in signs

The grammar of warning signs is somewhat challenged by these examples, found within a few metres of each other in Hyde Park.

These icons are clear enough for me. Although, according to international standards, the red circle should be enough, in the UK we've never quite accepted its negative force,. So we tend to add a diagonal line to make sure.

But what I like about this is the additional prohibition: "It is an offence to damage this sign". I want to see that as a pictogram, please – the hand that was feeding the squirrel now attacking the sign with a hammer... all in a red circle with a line through it.

Pragmatically I'm fine with this, but it's a challenge to the sign regs pedant. A red circle generally means no whatever is depicted inside the circle. So this says 'no dogs on leads'... doesn't it?

So we'd need a dog with no lead in the circle... perhaps accompanied by a permissive sign for dogs with leads (generally white on blue).

This one seems to reflect the fact that No Cycling signs don't seem to work - the designer is just having a go at something different to see if it'll work. The black bike in a red circle apparently has come to mean 'cyclists welcome', if the pedestrianised shopping streets of Reading are anything to go by.

A sign of winter

The inevitable typo

Some words are so confusable you can sense the typo around the corner before you get to it.

So it is with a leaflet from a neighbour who is raising funds for the Britain Nepal Otology Service. This worthy organisation sends medical teams to Nepal to treat ear problems. They don't treat people who are unsure whether they exist: that's the Britain Nepal Ontology Service mentioned on page 2.

I wonder if there is a Britain Tibet Ontology Service.

Chasing the answers

Here's a quiz in the Times iPad edition. The answers are upside down, so you just turn the screen around to read them.

Oh.

It's digital - they won't mind

Just another of those 'we didn't bother to proof-read because it's digital' pages from the Sunday Times iPad edition. But this one has a certain charm, I think.

Extreme outsourcing

Spotted by Michael Green in a department store in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's behind you

I'm not sure why backwards pointing arrows are so rare - like these ones on a flight information display at Helsinki Airport.

If you don't know where something is, it is only by chance that you might be facing in the right direction when you look for it on a sign.

Usually it is the absence of an obvious destination that tells you it is not in the direction you are facing. So you have to turn around and look for it on another sign, or, in the case of a hanging sign, look on the other side to see if it is listed there.

Bicycle jousting in Helsinki

Well, that's what it looks like to me.

Compared to what?

Without the helpful pie chart, I'd struggle to understand this American Express statement.

Baffling label of the day

A second-hand book just arrived from the USA. Appears to violate an international treaty obligation. Does this mean war?

Ideal font for Lucie Attwell fans with dyslexia

The BBC website recently featured the OpenDyslexic font by Abelardo Gonzalez. I'm not dyslexic so can't form an opinion, but I wonder whether Mabel Lucie Attwell was an influence.

Gate 16

This photo does not include Gate 17 – that's a 6 on the right (at Riyadh airport, where I was last week). The number on the left uses Arabic numerals, but the one on right, being in the Arabic script, does not.

Confused? We call our numerals Arabic because Europeans learned about them from the Arabs. But Arabs call their numerals Hindi or Indian, because India is where they are actually from.

News from Brighton

I'm very late discovering this great collection of news stand posters from the Brighton Argus (last updated several years ago. It's clearly where life happens - makes you want to go and live there. Thanks to David Woodward for the link.

Branding triumph

Historic Reading

Beautiful Reading
Reading, paradise by the Kennet and Avon Canal
Reading, the Athens of ...
I heart Reading.

I'd have liked to have been in that meeting.

Olympics retrospective

Quite a few of us are still puzzled by that logo. Graffiti concept - great. Execution of the concept - not so great. I rather like the one the New York Times used for its Olympics coverage.

Is it the one that got away?

Incidentally, their Olympics blog, by Campbell Robertson, included this nice quote:

'...Visa went too far. Not only was it the only credit card accepted at venues, signs on every cash register read, “We are proud to accept only Visa,” a slogan of doublespeak so hideous its originator deserves a back of the hand from Don Draper.'

Follow the true Path

Two versions of the same message seen at Wisley Garden.

I'm trying to decide if they mean the same thing. Obviously they do, in that the outcome is the same (if we ignore the option of walking on the flower beds). There is also a strong hint in the positioning of the Path version – it's on the grass. 'Oi! Not 'ere. Can't you see the path?'

But 'Keep off the grass' comes with baggage: bossy park keepers, school rules (at my school, the teachers and prefects could walk on the grass).

'Keep to the paths' mostly works, except that some of the paths are grass... which would stop robots in their tracks if they've also seen the 'keep off the grass' version.

I like the way Paths is capitalised, by the way - a multi-faith notice.

Guerilla signs on the underground

Thanks to Gill Ereaut for pointing me to this. There's loads more on The Poke. I'll now be paying more attention to notices on tube trains.

Neighbouring signs

Seen in Goodge Street: probably just my immaturity, but I like the way that a shop called Bang Bang ends up next to a sex shop.

And in the same street, I can't help wondering where the Jennings Bet designer had just had lunch on the day he or she designed the logo. Or was it the other way around?

New Simplification Centre blog

We've just moved the Simplification Centre website to WordPress, thanks to the hard work of Kate Stinson, and this means our blog has a lot more potential... so I'll be blogging there quite a bit from now. Please have a look from time to time at www.simplificationcentre.org.uk/blog/

I do like to be beside the seaside

After our fun day out at Runnymede, we've tried the attractions of Southsea.

Column breaks and meaning breaks

The Times iPad edition excels once again with its column breaks

Flags for all persuasions

Who's buying those flags at the bottom of the page?

Apple's daft questions: my answers

This may not be very secure of me, but Apple have asked me those daft questions again (this time on my laptop - last time it was the iPhone).

This time I've answered truthfully.

Ups and downs on the Tube

See what I nearly did (the clue is the position of the down arrow)?

Close but no biscuit

Nearly a good idea.

More daft security questions... from Apple this time

My Apple account has suddenly demanded I set up some security questions so at some future date they can interrogate me to see if I am who I say I am.

Who writes these things? I've no idea of the answers to any of these questions. I actually remembered the wrong car as being the first one, and found I couldn't correct it. I could make something up, but who's to say I'll invent same thing when the Apple cop is on the phone.

In which city was I first kissed. Huh? How old are you, Apple?

Internet gateway

Spotted by Phil Gilbert in Bourton-on-the-Water.

Could explain why my broadband is slow in the evenings.

Misérables

With the Information Design Conference happening next week, and dominating my life for the last several months, I've been regaling friends with hilarious tales of conference disasters of yesteryear. Like the one at Cranfield where they served coffee in the foyer of a building where students were sitting final exams. Invigilators burst out shushing us as we chatted. Then there was the time they scheduled major roof repairs for the day of the conference. And the symposium I organised in a Cotswold hotel, inspected in the summer, but found to have no central heating when we met in November. It was market day, and luminaries such Pat Wright, Michael Twyman and David Olson sat around the table in army surplus jumpers.

So just before leaving for the long weekend, Greenwich University broke the news today that Working Title will be filming Les Misérables, with Russell Crowe and other famous people, just outside the window of the conference next week. Crowd scenes, horses, dodgy accents, occasional gunfire and music to accompany the dance sequences.

At least we won't be bored.

Pleasure

Just some of the delights that await you at Runnymede Pleasure Grounds.

A pretty plant display

Outside Somerset House, London.

Signs of optimism

I'm just back from a great holiday in India. These two signs in Pune seem rather optimistic, each in their own way.

Decision time

Paddington Basin, London. Thanks to Martin Evans for this. I'm guessing which route he took – I admire him greatly but wouldn't say he walks on water.

A room called Barry

Companies often give names to their meeting rooms – for example, the names of iconic cities, such as Paris, New York or LA. You soon learn that a meeting in Milan doesn't guarantee great coffee.

An energy company I'm working with has a meeting room called Barry. Their meeting rooms aren't named after famous gas fitters, as you might suppose, but power stations.

It's just unfortunate for such a safety-critical industry that one of them is Killingholme.

Welcome to Reading

I like documents which bear traces of a continuing conversation – like author's manuscripts, whiteboards in a meeting room, or this one in Reading town centre.

Four kinds of digital page

I'm revising a conference paper for publication, and was recently speaking about it with a student. So I thought I'd put this thought from it on the blog, in the hope of one or two comments.
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Hypertext prophets used to speak as if the advent of digital text were a paradigm shift, incommensurate with past ways of thinking and acting through text. It is perhaps more common now to speak about the convergence of technologies and channels. In that spirit I identify four page archetypes which reflect generic resonances from the past, the continuing need for traditional functions of the document, and the technical capabilities and connectness of the current world.

Fixed pages are the most diagrammatic, and are found in illustrated books and PDFs. Because they are locked in place, the reader can assume that relationships between elements (text blocks, pictures, headlines, etc) are intentional and potentially meaningful. A page break signifies the end of a unit of text, in the same way as a sentence or a paragraph. The designer and writer, for their part, can craft graphic relationships knowing that they will survive the various technical transmission processes and reach the reader.

Flowed pages are represented by traditional novels, or by e-reader books. The author’s words are flowed in and fill the pages one by one, with page endings that are as arbitrary as the line endings are. But those page endings are fixed for the life of the document (or, in the case of e-documents, until the text is re-flowed after a change of font). Readers can therefore move back and forth between pages and use the constant geography of the book to navigate.

Fugitive pages are formatted temporarily and perhaps also populated with content temporarily. Pages are created afresh for each reading, and may change when revisited. A common example is an online newspaper, which offers a reasonably coherent appearance and user experience, but which is constantly updated. If you return to a story later in the day, you may find that it has been relegated to a lower position in the hierarchy or even disappeared from view.

Fragmented pages are compilations of page elements from a variety of sources which may not have any relationship predictable by their authors. Examples are the results of a search, or an aggregation application such as Flipboard (which assembles content from a range of the user’s favourite sources, such as blogs or social networking sites, into a magazine-like format).

These page types may exist in pure form or co-exist in combination. For example, an online newspaper may have fixed layouts into which fugitive content is flowed, and a column of fragmented advertisements drawn in through personalisation rules.

Why might this be interesting? Because there's a lot of talk about how the reading process is changing in the digital era, which has introduced us to fugitive and fragmented texts. Flowed texts are the stuff of e-readers, which are taking over from flowed paper books. But fixed pages, carefully crafted and diagrammed multimodal pages, are a challenge for digital channels. This could mean they die out, or it could mean someone will invent a digital channel that can handle them. Products like Inkling and the Apple iBooks textbook go some way, and are a response the finding that textbooks have not yet found a happy home in e-readers.

Best Typography Oscars

Thanks to Kate Cooper for pointing me to this nice blog that nominates films  for a Best Typography Oscar.

Coincidently, I was today reviewing an article for a journal which asserts that typographers choose typefaces with personalities that match content. My first reaction was that, as a typographer, I cannot remember the last time I did that. But, of course, I don't get to work on film posters.

Mind you, these are both historical references rather than personality-laden. For example, the War Horse title is not horse-like, but of its time - and beautifully observed.

Cancel that

This is only clear if I ignore what it actually says, and just know what it means.

Book crime

A book has appeared on my shelf that I cannot remember buying, borrowing or reading. Somehow it's found its way there. I wonder... did I steal it? is it hiding out on my shelf while the dogs are after it?

Its title: Criminal behaviour: a psychological approach to explanation and prevention.

Ronald Searle RIP

Goodbye to the incomparable Ronald Searle. As a reluctant boarding school pupil, his Molesworth books helped me see the joke and his cartoons were everywhere as I was growing up.

He was a prisoner of war with my father, but I don't know if they knew each other – Dad never talked about that time, but Searle drew it all.

Something I said? Is my Mac breaking up with me?

I know it's just a machine, but I was quite upset when my email system refused to deliver an email recently. I never found general feedback very helpful at school either – was it my grammar, my spelling, or just my general attitude?

Doctor, doctrix

It is 2012 isn't it? They do allow ladies to be doctors, don't they. Not according to the poor man who set up the registration page for this Aussie telco. Thanks to Kimberley Crofts for retweeting this one.

Proper handwriting

People were taught proper handwriting in the old days. This how some good friends, a little older than us, wrote the name on our Christmas card. I must practice my Ms.

Odd Peugeot graphic

Does anyone have any idea about what this could mean? Andrew Belsey found it in Peugeot's customer magazine, in an article about green issues. But with no caption, it's hard to know what's going on.