If you're designing a form to print out at home

If you're designing a form for people to print out and send in, please make a note: don't use up all my blue ink.

I'm talking to you, Cooperative Bank.

DIY doom

This morning's brief distraction: make your own warning signs at www.warningsigngenerator.com

Now we just need a European version.

Infographics as knowledge curation

It's noticeable that more and more people are describing themselves as 'curators' - a term one used to encounter only rarely as the job title of someone arranging neolithic arrow heads in a museum. Words only appear or change their meaning when enough people have a new meaning they want to express. Perhaps the new curation is a reaction to the fragmentation of the digital world - we feel the need to make sense of the chaos, the speed of change, and the sheer vastness of what's on offer. So each of us curates our Facebook page or blog, in an updated version of the mixer tape, or the coffee table display of novels, CDs and obscure fruit we artfully disarrange to impress and educate our guests.

I wonder if this doesn't also explain why infographics are so in vogue. We can abandon the dismal process of endless clicks through news stories that retrace their path, that are all based on the same primary source, or that leave us stranded as if we're at the top of the stairs trying to remember what we came up for. Someone has looked at the data, sorted out the arguments and presented them to us in a single compelling display: they've curated the issues.

Overheard

Overheard on the Docklands Light Railway the other day.

'Excuse me mate, is this the right train for Kennington' (New Zealand accent)
'No it's completely the wrong direction'
'Oh, we need to change at Kennington for City Airport'
'Ah, you mean Canning Town'
'That's right, Kennington.'

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.

Dissertations online: what's that all about

Searching for the British Library's online database of theses, most of the Google links were to services that offer to actually write your dissertation for you. Perhaps everyone else except me knew this is how you do it, but apparently you get the grade you want or your money back, and all the work is done by PhDs or Masters graduates, and tested with plagiarism software...

But you gotta love their student-friendly office opening hours.

What year was that?

Leeds, August 2011. People still queue for buses in t' North.

One's in the Eye

I mentioned architects and signs a few years ago on this blog, and it grew into a piece that's just appeared in Eye magazine. They've put some supporting pictures I provided on the Eye blog. The article is here, and the blog is here.





There's a nice profile of Robin Kinross in this issue. It's good to see his single-minded pursuit of quality in design writing and publishing properly celebrated.

Small print the movie?

Thanks to Beth Shepherd who sent this and told me about the wonderful Every Day Posters Every Day site, where it comes from.

Angry people blog

Nice blog covering a genre I hadn't thought of: Angry People In Local Newspapers.

I wonder if Stockphotos have these on tap. I'd like them to spice up document critiques.

This blog also has some nice links. If you enjoyed the recent mother/daughter in law correspondence in the UK press, you will also like Passive-aggressive notes

I have read and understood...

At the Simplification Centre we're looking at fresh ways to approach the small print - the contracts we sign when we install software, get a mobile phone, borrow money. I was speculating that if we sincerely want people to understand these things, wouldn't we apply best practice from textbooks - a genre where people genuinely have to and want to understand the content. In a textbook we expect summaries, explanations, definitions, diagrams... and even aims and objectives, and self-test questions. We expect legible type, plenty of white space, and pictures to relieve the tedium. A photo and short biog of the author on the back, too, of course.

Jenny then suggested going one further: if we are really sincere about communicating contract conditions, people should sit an exam before they can sign.

Of course the opposite could equally be true. Instead of sitting an exam at the end of their university course, students could simply sign a declaration: 'I have read and understood this course'. Thank you ma'am: here's your car keys/loan/degree certificate.

Explosive material: even more icons of doom

So I'm just posting these icons of doom, as usual, when Phil Gilbert sends me this one:

I wonder if the context helps? Barely...

Info design cartoons

It occurs to me that an incredible number of cartoons are information design jokes. Most of Roz Chast's output is like that (huge fan). And I had this nice Scott Garrett one from the Indie on Sunday on my notice board for years.

Unclear - just a typo away from oblivion

Discussing ways to simplify consumer contracts recently, the marketing director of a large firm remarked that his firm's contract contained various clauses that they never actually enforce because it would bad for their reputation. He thought they might as well just leave them out. When translated into plain English some contract terms might just seem too toxic to leave in.

It occurs to me that the process of simplification is also a kind of defusing or disarming. The Campaign for Unclear Disarmament, anyone? No, I thought not. That pun will go no further than this blog.

More icons of doom

Thanks to Collin McDougall for this last one.

Icons of doom

Polite notite

People have written 'polite notice' on signs for many years, hoping we'll mistake it for 'police notice' and pay more attention. But the notices themselves are rarely convincing. Which is why this one, seen near Paddington Station, is quite impressive. Using the Transport font, in the right shade of blue, and built like the real thing, it's the best I've seen.

Icon crazy

Andrew Belsey spotted this symbol. It was accompanied by some words, but have a go at interpreting it before clicking here for the answer.

You can't see them but they can see you

I always feel there must be a story behind every informal notice you see stuck up around a building.

Seen at the Royal College of Art.

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.

Typeface test

Do you prefer (a)

or (b)?

Accessible or not

This taped-over access button at Camden Arts Centre looks a little callous until you see it's at the top of a flight of steps. Good luck getting your wheelchair through that door.

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).

Yellow Pages shrinks further

The once mighty Yellow Pages is shrinking in the face of internet competition, and now they've literally shrunk the book itself. Ours arrived today and the print is so small I thought it was a contract needing my signature.

Odd thing is that the paper edition is really only useful for people without a PC, many of whom are elderly... who happen to be just that part of the population who struggle with tiny type.

One good thing is that most of the opticians seem to be on to this and have large print ads.

Instant coffee an oxymoron?

Seen in our office coffee room: 'Nescafé Café Parisien: L'experience des cafés français'.

On an unrelated note, who was it who said that when hearing a political speech, one should always ask oneself 'why is this lying liar lying to me?'.

Question 17: Que?

From the Scottish census website

 Well, I've got to question 17 OK.

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
 

Murdoch's firewall. I don't mind paying but I want to be able to share

"A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the “governors” and the “governed” and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project. Or not.

I read that in a paper by Professor David Held, of the London School of Economics, and it may, just possibly, be the wisest observation on politics that I have yet come across. But it also might not be. I can’t be sure because I haven’t got the first clue what the professor is going on about.
...
It is a frustrating feature of much academic political science that reasonably simple points are made in an impossibly complicated way — presumably to make them sound more profound. Straightforward distinctions between people who imprison dissidents and others who think that this is not a very good idea disappear in a mass of verbiage. And everything sounds reasonable. Or not."

So wrote Daniel Finkelstein in a really perceptive column in The Times today entitled "The LSE scandal is intellectual, not financial".

Unfortunately if you follow this link, you won't be allowed in without a subscription, because it's behind Rupert Murdoch's firewall. I don't actually object to paying for news, and contributing to Daniel's salary - I have a subscription. But it's a massive pity not to be able to share gems like this column. So I've torn the article out and shared some of it here.

Marital status a la census

Gay marriage is called civil partnership in the UK, I believe as a compromise to respect religious sensitivities. But, as the 2011 census form shows, it seems we haven't yet evolved words for when it ends.

Whatever the status of the word 'marriage' can we not just stretch the meaning of the words 'divorced' and 'widowed', for goodness sake? Particularly 'widowed'.

Census form arrives - oh joy!

Got the census form - long, intrusive and slightly daft at times. Question 17 is bizarre - presumably there was a question that was deleted, but they couldn't face changing all the other question numbers.

Caps Lock jammed on?

Notice in our local shopping centre car park. I'm trying to imagine the stylesheets they used to design this:
Important stuff
Really important stuff
Vital safety stuff
Important vital stuff
Shouting