BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services
An interesting post about the BBC's project to redesign their website(s).
(del.icio.us tags: BBC design )
cloth tickets – a set on Flickr
"These large gummed labels – known as cloth tickets, shippers tickets, or bolt tickets – were attached to bales of printed cotton cloth for export from Britain (read 'Manchester' in many cases). They were designed by British artists who depended on information from company agents in the various territories [...]
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice – ChronicleReview.com
'The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.'
(del.icio.us tags: grammar )
Keep [...]
English Things – a set on Flickr
illustrations of British food brands, curiously fascinating even for me. 'if you're English these are things you might have grown up with & therefore you feel is insignificant. They are new and fascinating to me.' via Coudal
(del.icio.us tags: packaging design )
Swearing in the Guardian, 1998 – 2008 on Flickr [...]
Caustic Cover Critic: Zolarama
Emile Zola gets the pulp treatment.
(del.icio.us tags: design books covers )
I went to ‘Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism’ at Tate Modern today. I’ve seen quite a few exhibitions in the past few years that feature Aleksandr Rodchenko*, so I wasn’t really sure how much I would get out of it, but in the event I enjoyed it. Firstly I didn’t know anything about Liubov Popova, and [...]
Notgeld – Pre-Inflationary German Currency – a set on Flickr
Extraordinary collection of interwar German currency. Via Metafilter.
(del.icio.us tags: money banknotes Germany design )
Finding Veronese « Dulwich OnView
'Xavier F. Salomon, Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, describes how he discovered a missing fragment of Veronese’s Petrobelli Altarpiece, thought lost.'
(del.icio.us tags: Veronese DulwichPictureGallery )
british wrestling posters – a set on Flickr
British wrestling posters from c. 1960s – 1990s
(del.icio.us tags: posters wrestling design )
CERN Document Server: Drawings of the elements of [...]
The Book Cover Archive
It’s what it says it is.
(del.icio.us tags: books design covers )
Wine and Water
‘As I wait, a young gentleman receives his book from Special Collections. It comes in a little packet, and when he pulls it out, I can see that it is smaller than his thumbnail. The look on his face, somewhere between surprise and annoyance, is priceless. He tries, momentarily, to read it, but [...]
Flickr: wackystuff’s Photostream
via Martin Klasch, a great selection of ephemera on Flickr.
(del.icio.us tags: ephemera design )
StrangeHarvest.com::Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
'The BBCs Euro 2008 studio is a glass box overlooking the rooftops of Vienna… But it's the table that's of primary interest. It displays the unusual usual tropes of that tiny genre of design: football tournament desk design.'
(del.icio.us tags: design football television )
Moving On Up!
Via Pharyngula: Jack Chick explains evolution. Which is weirdly fascinating.
(del.icio.us tags: comics evolution propaganda religion )
Japanese Matches – Too Cute To Burn
‘It is hard to believe they are real matches and not little edible sugar-candies. Of course that isn’t likely as it wouldn’t go over well with parents, but, on the other hand, [...]
I realised that Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 – 1937 was about to close, so I popped in today for a quick gander. As ever at the BL, the range of material was impressive: they really do own a lot of stuff. Eliot, Bretton, Man Ray, Lorca, Mayakovsky, [...]
I made a super-large iTunes icon for Leopard’s coverflow mode, based on Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works 85-92.
I went to see Helvetica today. It is, as the name suggests, a documentary about the typeface, which is 50 years old this year.
I enjoyed it. My usual feeling with factual-type documentaries like this (as opposed to narrative-type documentaries like, say, Spellbound) is that they are very slow; that given the same amount of information [...]
I’m itching to do yet another site redesign—I have a pretty good idea of what I want and a working test version of it, allowing for a bit of tweaking—but I think it makes sense to wait until the release of WordPress 2.3 so I don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues. I’m considering [...]
I’ve been reading The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. When I ordered it, I noticed the mild coincidence that the author has the same name as the chap who translated the poetry of the Haida (the native inhabitants of the Queen Charlotte islands in the Pacific Northwest). As it turns out, though, it’s [...]
Last week I went to ‘Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design‘ at the V&A. It explores the influence of Surrealist art on design, and demonstrates how quickly surrealist imagery was recycled as a design style; initially in very chic and expensive contexts and then in mass-market commercial design. And demonstrated in the process that it’s a [...]
As regular readers probably know, I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the London Olympics. But I’ve always had my own particular private worry about them. Not transport problems or cost overruns; no, what I’ve always had a nagging worry about is the opening ceremony.
There have been two big international sporting events held in the UK in [...]
Parakeet feather on Moleskine
I bought a new notebook yesterday for my upcoming trip to Crete. This is the previous one, with a feather I found near the birdfeeders, presumably from a parakeet. I do like Moleskine notebooks. I’ve used masses of different notebooks of various kinds over the years both for birdwatching and poetry, but [...]
Smilies used to really irritate me. But I’ve been persuaded. So much online communication now is chit-chat, banter and small talk. And informal conversation is driven as much by tone of voice as by actual words. A real example. Someone leaves a nice comment on this blog, and I don’t really have anything to say [...]