Awesome, 1950s style

Forget awesome and mind-blowing... we all know that interesting and amusing is as much as we can hope for most of the time.

Learn with BOOK

This is from Punch magazine, 9 May 1962. I've been looking for it for some time but was searching under the wrong name. What astonishes me is that I don't remember any electronic gadgets in the 60s that displayed text. What exactly was he parodying?

Learn With BOOK

by R.J. Heathorn

A new aid to rapid—almost magical– learning has made its appearance. Indications are that if it catches on all the electronic gadgets will be so much junk.

The new device is known as Built-in Orderly Organised Knowledge. The makers generally call it by its initials, BOOK.

Many advantages are claimed over the old-style learning and teaching aids on which most people are brought up nowadays. It has no wires, no electric circuit to break down. No connection is needed to an electricity power point. It is made entirely without mechanical parts to go wrong or need replacement.

Anyone can use BOOK, even children, and it fits comfortably into the hands. It can be conveniently used sitting in an armchair by the fire.

How does this revolutionary, unbelievably easy invention work? Basically BOOK consists only of a large number of paper sheets. These may run to hundreds where BOOK covers a lengthy programme of information. Each sheet bears a number in sequence, so that the sheets cannot be used in the wrong order.

To make it even easier for the user to keep the sheets in the proper order they are held firmly in place by a special locking device called a ‘binding’.

Each sheet of paper presents the user with an information sequence in the form of symbols, which he absorbs optically for automatic registration on the brain. When one sheet has been assimilated a flick of the finger turns it over and further information is found on the other side.

By using both sides of each sheet in this way a great economy is effected, thus reducing both the size and cost of BOOK. No buttons need to be pressed to move from one sheet to another, to open or close BOOK, or to start it working.

BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. Instantly it is ready for use. Nothing has to be connected up or switched on. The user may turn at will to any sheet, going backwards or forwards as he pleases. A sheet is provided near the beginning as a location finder for any required information sequence.

A small accessory, available at trifling extra cost, is the BOOKmark. This enables the user to pick up his programme where he left off on the previous learning session. BOOKmark is versatile and may be used in any BOOK.

The initial cost varies with the size and subject matter. Already a vast range of BOOKs is available, covering every conceivable subject and adjusted to different. levels of aptitude. One BOOK, small enough to be held in the hands, may contain an entire learning schedule.

Once purchased, BOOK requires no further upkeep cost; no batteries or wires are needed, since the motive power, thanks to an ingenious device patented by the makers, is supplied by the brain of the user.

BOOKs may be stored on handy shelves and for ease of reference the programme schedule is normally indicated on the back of the binding.

Altogether the Built-in Orderly Organised Knowledge seems to have great advantages with no drawbacks. We predict a big future for it.

Body Of Organised Knowledge

 My last post brings to mind a piece in Punch magazine about an amazing new piece of technology that allowed instant access to information. You could go straight to the part you want, or start at the beginning and work through. It could be easily stored and the information was permanently recorded, etc, etc.

It was called the Body Of Organised Knowledge, or by its acronym BOOK.

Ironically (or perhaps not) I couldn't find reference to this on the internet, so forgive me if I have forgotten the title or the publication... but I don't think I've made it up.

Amen to Artillery

 Looking at old encyclopedias* in a bookshelf** it occurred to me that what with the internet an' all, they are a completely redundant genre. So we no longer get those poetic juxtapositions of headwords at the top of pages and on the spine. Amen to Artillery, Art Nouveau to Begin.

* For younger viewers, an 'encyclopaedia' is a book*** where we used to look up random facts before we had the internet.

** a 'bookshelf' is a place we used to keep books. 

*** a 'book' is a collection of paper pages, glued together in a block. You could read it one page at a time, and then turn to the next page.

If you're wondering why I'm starting to sound like Victor Meldrew, it was my birthday last week and I turned 70. I am feeling a personality change coming on, much like Harry Enfield's character Kevin when he turns 13.

End of the Argos catalogue, end of an era

The Argos catalogue is no more. If you are the reader of this blog who lives outside the UK, I should explain that this was like a mail order catalogue but no mailing was involved. Argos has stores in every town, where you can/could browse a catalogue and order every kind of stuff, which was stored in a back room, mostly not on display. It inevitably moved online, and after acquisition by Sainsbury's the stores are moving to supermarkets.

Argos does a remarkable job of making a wide range of stuff available in small towns which now longer have specialist shops. At one of our early summer schools the host institution failed to supply a projector... so we popped out to Argos and bought the one we still use. 

Some of the vox pop comments in radio interviews struck a chord. Most homes had an Argos catalogue and in the pre-internet days it gave kids access to window-shopping. Families would browse the catalogue together and plan purchases, voice their aspirations and drop birthday present hints.

I'm not sure what the current figures are, but when Argos was a client in the 2000s the figures were astonishing and surprising: for example, they were one of the largest jewellers, furniture retailers and suppliers of electrical goods. Most of the photographers in Milton Keynes where they were based seemed to be sustained by product shots for the catalogue.

The production of the catalogue was a major operation involving five or six printing plants around Europe, and several binderies. They were delivered on pallets near the door of Argos stores for people to take home. When we asked about recycled paper it emerged that there wasn't enough recycled paper in Europe to print the Argos catalogue.

Every now and again they would ask us to review a particular aspect of the catalogue and propose improvements. We treated these projects as exercises in decision support, helping people to choose what features and qualities they needed, and which products had them. We would produce beautifully crafted explanations which were then made rather naffer by in-house designers to fit in with the brash Argos brand.

It was a fascinating encounter with the world of retail. For example, Good Better Best: a typical product range has to have basic products (good), an average products (better) and a top end (best). Some customers will invariably buy from one of these relative price points. 

When we worked on the Argos jewellery section, it included a diamond ring priced well over £3,000  although the average jewellery purchase was under £10. No one I spoke to could remember the expensive ring ever being sold but its job was to be Best and lift the image of the Argos jewellery brand. The recipient of a gifted ring could not know for sure that the giver was a cheapskate.

Information Design Journal - first notes

While I was looking for the first conference programme, I came across these coffee-stained notes I made in 1978, about the journal that was launched in 1979 as Information Design Journal.

Information Design Conference 1984 - the programme

I've been looking through old archives looking for visual evidence of the first Information Design Conference (Cranfield, 1984). The 2014 Information Design Conference in London is the thirtieth anniversary of that first event  - here's the programme, printed on an Epson dot-matrix printer.

The information design summer school remembered

We've just got back from the Information Design summer school on the island of Syros. Here's our happy band of participants, and some scenes from the course and the island. We organised it in partnership with our hosts, the University of the Aegean, and the IIID. A very memorable week.

 

Ghost website

Clicking on a link in an old document, I accidentally discovered that our old website from around 2001 is still there, sitting on a server somewhere - not sure where exactly.
http://www.idu-enterpriseig.com

Still doing the same kind of stuff - consistent or just unimaginative? Don't answer that.

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.

My Mac Plus

Steve J's death has brought the old Mac Pluses out in a burst of affectionate nostalgia. Here's my contribution: when I finished my doctoral thesis, Jenny commissioned a portrait of my Mac from artist friend Diane McKeating. It is sitting on top of my enormous state-of-the-art 20 megabyte hard drive. Well, this was '87.

Still invisible after all these years

When the Information Design Association was started in the early 1990s, one of the things I remember discussing was the invisibility of our specialism. In the Yellow Pages, we had to go under Designers, Advertising & Graphic.

One early success was to get a category created in the Design Effectiveness Awards, run by the Design Business Association. It survived a few years, but has disappeared now.

I was reminded of this when applying for a savings account with Santander (or Abbey, Bradford, Bingley, Alliance & Leicester, as I think they were once called). 

They wanted to know my occupation, but it was back to the bad old days.

Laver's law and typefaces

Someone just asked me what's with Cooper Black - nice typeface but mostly seen as the credits roll for Dad's Army.

I remembered some kind of law of fashion cycles, in which our view of a fashion changes as time passes. So just went on 'tinternet and found it is known as Laver's Law

James Laver was a fashion historian at the V&A, and this appears in a 1937 book Taste and fashion.

"The same costume will be:

Indecent: 10 years before its time
Shameless: 5 years before its time
Outré: 1 year before its time
Smart: now
Dowdy: 1 year after its time
Hideous: 10 years after its time
Ridiculous: 20 years after its time
Amusing: 30 years after its time
Quaint: 50 years after its time
Charming: 70 years after its time
Romantic: 100 years after its time
Beautiful: 150 years after its time"

This seems to have worked quite well for flared trousers which have ceased to seem quite so ridiculous, and I feel I can once more share our 1975 wedding photos (merely amusing now, heading towards quaint). And it won't be too long before photos of blokes with their trousers falling down can be used for blackmail purposes.

But I'm not so sure it works so precisely with typefaces. I think Cooper Black is ready for mainstream re-entry, but I'm not ready to dust off Kabel.

Nothing's really new

Martin Andrews puts on frequent displays from the ephemera collection at Reading University. A recent one was of old letterheads - the sort with a picture of the factory, and illustrations of key products. Some of them were so full of pictures that there was very little room for words.

Here's one from my own modest collection (of two). What strikes me about letters like this is how similar they are to modern marketing emails, with a central message surrounded by pictures. And the references to telegrams in the letter reminds us that fast business communications have been around for quite a while.

I bought this example from the wonderful Ken's in Newport Pagnell, when our company was based there. Not just a motorway service stop, NP was also home to Information Design Unit, and William Cowley's parchment works, one of the last left in England.

My midnight train to Georgia

As I pack away my books, workers outside are putting the finishing touches to a gleaming new office block they’ve spent the last year or more building. As turf is rolled out, the mud and rubble becomes an impeccably striped green lawn, and today they are fitting the street lamps.

Symbolic, I wonder? Three years ago, the moment I moved into this office they started demolishing the buildings next door, a protracted process with delays while they dealt with asbestos, and one that involved a combination of precision disassembling and the grinding brute force of a huge machine that ate all the concrete and bricks and turned them into hardcore for the new building’s foundations. With a six month pause while the banking crisis delayed their progress, the noisy activity has continued for most of the three years. Working to the constant din of reversing dump trucks and fork lifts, generators, cranes and deliveries, the environment didn’t feel as friendly as the cheery memos the builders were careful to send, keeping us neighbours in touch with their progress.

Meanwhile, sitting in an almost unheated office (12 degrees some days, on the thermometers purloined from the kind biologists next door) reading memos from the university urging us to save energy, we realise that some things in universities, those communities of highly intelligent scholars working to create new knowledge for the common good, are not as they may seem.

Anyway, I’m leaving now, leaving behind the disassembling, dissembling and grinding down (I’m speaking of the building site next door, of course).

In praise of Studio Vista, Ken Garland and the good old days

I'm not sure if there is anything around today that is quite like the Studio Vista series of design books published in the 60s. There weren't all that many design books to choose from then, but these were fairly affordable, accessibly written and stocked by our local bookshop - I bought several of them while still at school, and they did a lot to lure me into graphic design.

Here are the ones that survive on my bookshelf - I also remember having Norman Potter's What is a designer, and  John Lewis's Typography: basic principles.

Ken Garland's Graphics handbook was the one that had the most influence on me - it was too early for me to really get the more philosophical books such as Pye or Potter, but Ken's book provided an uncomplicated toolbox, covering everything from semiotics to international paper sizes in just 90-odd pages. And it does have a philosophy, demonstrated through its scope, its timeless layout, and a wonderful preface, which Ken printed in enormous type in the hope it would be read.

I mentioned the influence his book had on me recently to Ken (who I had the immense good fortune to be taught by), and I recalled the photo of him on the back. He pointed out that the book was written so long ago that the little girl he is holding here is now 50.
http://www.kengarland.co.uk
 

Graduation 2010

Here are the 2010 MAs doing the hat thing. It was great seeing them back for graduation, and to hear that most have jobs.

In the Simplification Centre we've also spent the last two years piloting a Certificate of Higher Education in Information Design, and the first four students graduated this month. Here are two of them, Preneeta Mann and Anita Nair, with Jenny Waller (who developed the programme) and myself (first time I've worn the academic dressing gown).

Rounded corner boxes - I forgive you

When desk-top publishing first came in (remember that term?) it was easy to draw boxes with rounded corners, something that had previously been very difficult to achieve with Rotring pens, CS10 board and french curves (ask a designer over 40 to translate).

Because they were so hard to do, they weren't in the professionals' repertoire, and therefore a sign of an amateur at work.

In this guide to design for DTP commissioned by Monotype in 1991, rounded corner boxes are a feature of this amateur-hour how-not-to example.

I've changed my mind now, although I'm still not keen on long line lengths, floaty headings in upper case, and needless naff shadows.

Proof-reading and diminishing returns

When I worked at the Open University many years ago I remember hearing of a statistics textbook that was published with numerous errors, throwing students into panic as sums did not work. When the second edition was published errors continued to be found, and also in the third. However, the canny boffins turned the situation to their advantage by showing that the diminishing number of errors still found in each edition followed a neat curve. They challenged students to use that data to calculate how many errors might be predicted to be still present in edition four, five and six.

I was reminded of this by a recent post on Paul Luna's blog which includes a nice non-apology for numerous errors by a seventeenth century printer (the point being that the book took so long to print that facts that had been true when a particular page was printed, were no longer true when the book actually went on sale).

Before and after: it had to happen

I suppose if I hung around long enough in this business it was bound to happen - one of our designs appearing in a case study as the bad old 'before' in contrast to the shiny new 'after'.

In this case I couldn't help noticing our T-Mobile bill design as the 'before' to the new design developed by Boag Associates and Tullo Marshall Warren, illustrated in Borries Schwesinger's The Form Book. While not wanting to take anything away from the new design, I thought it might be worth looking at why designs become obsolete and need revisiting.

 

The bill we developed started as the One2One bill, developed by Karen Moate and Abi Searle-Jones (forgive me, other colleagues, if I have mis-remembered). It was pretty revolutionary in its day - colourfully branded, and designed to work both on paper and on screen. The key information is in the top half of the page, to allow for on-screen viewing as a PDF, and information on other pages is flagged on tabs at the top of the page - designed to become clickable on screen, and to act as an iconic access device on paper. To achieve this top half focus, we moved the postal address into the bottom third, where it was folded to appear in the envelope window, either on its own, or incorporated into the payment slip for people who paid by cheque.

A key constraint of this design was that it had to be implemented in the Flexible Bill Formatter application that is integral to the Amdocs billing platform. Amdocs dominates mobile phone billing and although at this time (the project started in 1998, I think) their formatter was very primitive compared with dedicated systems such as Doc 1, we had to use it... and were surprised to find that it could not cope with double column layouts. That's why in our design the customer information block is to the right and below the main billing information – Amdocs could not get it to sit in the white space above.

The new One2One bill was developed with live-data testing and real customers – this meant formatting around 20 real bills, with all their itemised numbers, and mailing them, followed by interviews. Reactions are far more authentic when presented with your own data rather than a scenario. All the usual achievements were noted after launch: fewer enquiries, higher satisfaction. And to crown it all, we won an award, presented at a bizarre but enjoyable dinner in Cannes. Here's a picture of our client Michael Soter receiving the award from Joan Collins. You never knew the world of billing was so glamorous, did you?

When T-Mobile acquired One2One they asked us to adapt the bill to the new brand, with the result below left. The new brand guidelines no longer allowed the tinted background that previously had highlighted the total on a white panel. But note that this is different in two key respects from the 'before' that appears in the case study (below right). In our version the customer information is anchored by the vertical line, that in the case study 'before' floats below it. And in our version, there is a prominent contact phone number at the top right, missing in the case study example (and criticised for being missing there).




The lesson from this – information design works in a shifting environment, where products change brands change, and most importantly people change. Memories fade, and designs aren't always maintained.

When we became fully integrated into Enterprise IG, following our own acquisition, we had to stop working for T-Mobile as Vodafone was a major client of the group. This was regrettable, as we had by then been asked to develop radical new designs for the bill, which, it was obvious to everyone, was no longer fit to cope with the new products and tariffs being offered by that time (2004). Here is one of the more exploratory designs we developed, never produced (designer: Richard Bland).