The London Design Festival 2011 ends this weekend, at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Brilliant logos.
The London Design Festival 2011 ends this weekend, at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Brilliant logos.
Actually I really like this new logo. At first glance, I found it had nothing special. Now the more I look at it, and the more I find it's... an aircraft. With a nice red tail. Peaceful and dynamic at the same time. Really nice. Staring at it, I really can't find anything I'd like to improve here. That's a pretty good feeling.
Google just released Earth 6, with the Street View feature. I haven't found how to disable the Drunk Effect option, but I confess I had much fun taking these screenshots. Art for the lazy! Random art continues to fascinate me.
So, where in the world? As far as I remember: Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu. Not in this order, that would be too easy. I've got another series of these, for a future post. In the meantime please drive safe.
See also in this blog:
Shooting (Pictures of) Bugs in 3D Games
Trust Your Luck
Stunning visual representations of Inception's twisted story.
Inception by Rick Slusher (see fastcodesign.com for large version and details).
Shahed Syed's version below, not less remarkable (see his website).
If anyone knows whether this has been done for Twelve Monkeys, drop me a mail, I'd love to see that. Also, if you liked these movies, try the brilliant novels by Christopher Priest, in particular The Affirmation and The Glamour. There's another one titled A Dream of Wessex, which seems to have directly inspired the script for Inception.
Note: in French these books are respectively titled La Fontaine Pétrifiante, Le Don (or Le Glamour), and Futur Intérieur.
Last week, on the 14th, mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot died.
Digital artists widely honoured fractal geometry, his major contribution. In a nutshell, fractals are curves made of smaller replicas of themselves. Maybe I should say in a seashell... You know, the story of the tree that forks into branches that fork into branches that... Mandelbrot's statement was that some chaotic things in nature look so only because we fail to see the laws that organize them. Easy in the case of a tree, but Mandelbrot claimed that clouds, rocks, galaxies obeyed similar repetitive patterns.
There are funny things to note with these strange objects: a fractal shape normally can't be measured, because any section you attempt to start with turns out to be more sinuous than you expected, looking at it carefully. So you need a longer ruler. No matter how close you get to the object, there is always a new bend that bends into more bends, and so on. As a result the 'coast' is always longer than it seems. Another trick is that it's impossible to say how much you have zoomed in, since the shape is self-contained and repeats itself at all scales. So it's a looping zoom. Scary, isn't it?
The theory of fractals has been tried in various fields, where they help us understand how complex phenomena evolve, and whether they could be predicted or generated artificially. Various degrees of success have been obtained in biology, medical research, finance, cinema (special effects), radio-transmission, astronomy, etc.
Above: a computer-generated fractal object (image from Wikipedia)
Above: a real Romanesco cabbage (photograph from Fourmilab)
I like the works of Yang Liu, a young Chinese graphic designer educated and based in Germany. In 2009 she published a funny and smart little book called East meets West, where she uses strong metaphors to highlight differences between the chinese society (red pages) and the german one (blue pages).
For most topics, the german version applies to the western culture in general. Except for the one where Yang Liu suggests that Chinese people are less sharp on time than the Germans. Maybe, but not true anymore when compared to the French!
Particularly striking are illustrations for topics "Me", "Sunday on the street", "Boss", "Travel" (an eye for Germans and a camera for Chinese) and "Dealing with problems" (picture above).
Yang Liu also designs beautiful posters.
Via Brain Pickings
Going through an old issue of the excellent Creative Review magazine, I found an article about the 2008 redesign of Coca-Cola's visual identity. Extremely simple, just plain red and white, ditching all the gratuitous clutter. These designers who remove and clean up rather than creating on top of their predecessors' work always impress me.
It seems that it was quite a marathon to get the proposal approved. Design firm Turner Duckworth and their client contact Pio Schunker struggled for about 18 months to convince the brand's marketers that, YES, Coke should dare to go back to its iconic roots, and NO, Coke logo didn't need any "starbursts, drop shadows, or gradients". And no, it wasn't important to have "a picture of some bubbles on the side of the can. People know Coke is a fizzy drink".
So, is that genius, or too easy? How can such a no-design cost so much to win the client's acceptance, and by the way, several awards? How creative is that?
Well, that's the point: design is not always meant to be a piece of art, demonstrate one's Photoshop skills, or one's effervescent imagination. It has to fulfill the client's communication requirements. You get paid to solve a problem; if you conclude that the solution is technically simple, then that's good news. The bad news is that you might need to focus all of your energy on proving it!
A bit like the doctor that recommends: "Dear Mr. Smith, all you need is a good rest and less food."
"But... you don't give me any medicine?"
"No. It's not what you need. Trust me."
Based on Patrick Burgoyne's article "Coke: a simple story" in Creative Review, August 2009.
Photographer and graphic designer Robert Overweg takes stunning pictures of defects in computer 3D games.
Sometimes beauty lies in the uniqueness of things, in the fact that they're unexpected and impossible to reproduce. In addition, Overweg works arouse because of the tension they create. The world shown looks real, but obviously it's not!
Image via Robert Overweg.
See also Trust Your Luck in this blog.
Example of details that make a UI more compelling than another!
Page corners that really follow your finger. Bookshelves that flip to the bookstore side. The flip effect is common on iPhone, usually to reveal a settings screen; except that here, the view is THICK as real wooden shelves. Useless? I would have agreed, not long ago. But I must admit this is cool. Details like that give more presence to the application, and help you immerse in it. Simple feeling to get closer, to control better, that something's alive in there. And what's more, the pleasure of surprise.
So consider bringing a bit of the physical world to your interfaces, and keep some surprises for your users. Discovering cool yet unexpected things is always rewarding. However there are 2 things you don't want to compromise:
Workflow and concentration
You don't want to distract your user's attention to the extent that they lose focus on their task. In the iBooks example above, the page animation as well as the bookshelves effect do not hurt; this happens in less than a second and doesn't make the application harder to use.
Performance
Ensure it does not eat your whole budget in development. Ensure that it runs smooth and does not kill the device's battery.