I had one last opportunity on Thursday to see Helvetica, the movie. It was good, in a Helvetica kind of way. Here’s how the film and the typeface are similar:
They obviate the need for explicitly delving into history. They stand on their own feet, which, in turn, stand on the heads of invisible giants.
They purport to be well-rounded, neutral, and fun-loving. They ask to be seen as straightforward, honest, and open and they present themselves as the definitive and conclusive.
They define themselves through requited love. They love to be loved and love you back for loving them and for being in love with loving them.
They are fat in the middle and end somewhat squarely.
Postcript: It was great seeing the faces of some of my favorite type luminaries on a big screen.
When people ask me how I can afford to not work full-time at some kind of design agency or for a bureaucracy because I don’t get benefits or a pension, I think I will point them to this, a winner (or runner-up) of the saddest-cubicle contest sponsored by Wired Magazine, whose redesign is quite lovely, by the way and quite opposite to the office world of Mr. Smuckaluckovich depicted in these images.
My favorite stock imagery company, the inimitable Veer, was apparently bought for some crazy amount of money by Corbis, a larger and less designer-friendly corporation.
This statement today in the press release announcing the purchase tells it all:
“We’re bullish about the future of the stock photography industry and are seizing this opportunity during a period of market disruption to take bold steps toward capturing momentum,” said Gary Shenk, CEO, Corbis.
Blech. A sad day for relatively independent stock agencices, commercial photographers and illustrators and type designers, and the designers and creators that look forward to their guidance.
P.S. I will continue to regularly patronize Veer so long as the company continues to offer solid, useful visual intellectual property within a superb interface.
I admit that I’ve only had a few clients that could have used this, a cream to make your logo bigger. I only wish there was a “Make My Links Disappear” as well.
Not only is this a beautifully designed site, but my friend, J.F., is in the recent Group Show, Number 19 in the series.
Looking through this site makes me very glad that people are continuing to curate art exhibitions online. Way back in 1997 (wow, 10 years ago!), I started The Site at MANOVERBOARD. (It used to be housed at the .com domain and is now at the .net one.) I’ve promised myself that I will update The Site someday but a sugar daddy would be of assistance. The site went through many, many versions. Nearly every page was designed and built by me. And I continue to stand by every single decision I made in featuring artists on The Site. Included were Jason Kottke, Ruth Root, Lynn Talbot, Melissa Gould, and Zbigniew LIbera.
Over the period of a little over five years, the site featured over 35 artists. At one point, probably in 2000 or so, I actually thought that I might be able to sell The Site to an investor or venture capitalist. The market for online properties was so hot. The Site, in my estimation, was worth approximately $500,000 back then.
It just so happens that my favorite coffee these days is Gorilla Coffee, a newish micro-roastery bean sent to us in Winnipeg by our Brooklyn friend J.F. It’s fully awesome—bold, tough, and fresh yet somehow gentle, just like Brooklyn itself. And it just so happens that they have the nicest website I’ve seen in many, many days—bold, tough, and fresh and yet, also, somehow gentle.
A few months ago, when I was playing with a nice little Mac application called Notae, I started to set about trying to find the designer of the icon itself. It’s gorgeous. Spare, dark, simple, rounded, lovely. The application itself is okay but the developer hired one of the very best icon designers, Pixel Implosion’s Bobby Anderson, 19.
Taking a good look at some of the best of his work, I can more fully recognize the sheer beauty of contemporary icon design. These little images need to look good both small and large while also representing the inherent qualities of an application. They need to look “realistic” without having feeling photographic and “smooth” without being cheesily rendered with too much shading and fat gradients. (There only icon designer/illustrator that comes up to this level of skill is Jasper Hauser.)
Importantly, for many years, I’ve thought that illustration (whether via the medium of pixels, paper, or popcorn) will be the real refuge of great Web designers. A strong photograph, a nice new font, and a bright color can make for a pretty nice website these days. Almost anyone can do it. But illustration, the fine art of crafting something from scratch and melding various visual components together into a meaningful whole, is harder to come by, anywhere. And especially on the Web.
Tomorrow I see The Simpsons Movie. I’m very excited. Today, in preparation for this event, I went to the mall and purchased a green shirt with a three-eyed crazy fish on it and a new pair of bluejeans. It set me back $84.53. The results speak for themselves:
We actually got a new deck last weekend and it’s quite nice. Well, it’s not really a deck. It’s more like a landing that takes you outside the house to the yard. Well, it’s not really a landing, exactly. It’s more like a stairway that’s made of wood.
In that same spirit, I’ve recently upgraded the hardware and software of Deckchairs on the Titanic to the latest and greatest, thanks to my friend and colleague, Michael Barrish. Thanks, Michael! It’s working beautifully and it will inspire me to update the site in the coming weeks. More posts, more design, and better, faster bionics coming soon.
Apple redesigned its own website today and there are many kudos to go around. To wit:
A nicely unified top navigation with, amazingly, only seven tabs at the top. I can’t imagine how hard it was for Apple’s marketing, sales, and technology executives to agree on these final top categories. There was probably blood on the large, wide conference table up until launch.
It’s been predicted for a long time that Apple was going to lose its aqua-look interface and tabs (which Vista adapted in the past few months). Apple did so with its brushed metal theme. But here’s the brilliant part: They didn’t overdo it. The metal shines, just gently, and it doesn’t make its way into every little aspects of the rest of the site. For instance, there’s no brushed metal hanging on to every subnavigational element, nor is there brushed metal gradients on the background of every section or page. I don’t love it, but I do like it a lot.
Apple has a whole new section called <a href="Downloads. This is a huge big deal, akin to opening a new store within the site. It puts the company in direct competition with two sites that I visit a bit too often (okay, once a day): MacUpdate and <a href="Version Tracker. Both of these sites detail and track the latest independent and corporate applications developed for the Mac. For Apple to have gotten into this game means that third-party software is now critical to their business model; too, my guess is that it will help further differentiate the company from Microsoft and its Windows operating system in that it directly points visitors to a range of powerful and inexpensive third-party solutions.
The new iPhone is front and foremost on the site, with its own little item at the top. I wish that tab well.
A lot of things are the same. Same widespread use of the Lucida Grande font, thankfully. Same cute, discrete headlines: “Hello, tomorrow.” “Mail. Think outside the inbox.” Same three column Store.
Safari, the native Mac browser, is now available for Windows. More brilliance. If it works as well on Windows as it does on OS X, a few million people are going to have the ability to see what makes looking at websites a pleasure.
Downgraded is Apple’s .Mac service. In fact, upon a quick review of the new site, I can’t even find .Mac. Quicktime, too, got whacked.
My first impulse, still unacted upon: buy something. I just wish it could be Apple’s stock.
Postscript: Apple’s Canadian site still has the old look. So does Bulgaria’s.
