Everything is a Remix Remastered
/I'm a fan of Kirby Ferguson and have shared his work before. Here is a remastered version of his series Everything is a Remix, that is worth revisiting.
Swiss font legend Adrian Frutiger dies
/The internationally renowned Bernese designer who created the famous Univers typeface passed away on September 12 in Bern at the age of 87.
He was one of the few typographers whose worked with hot metal, photographic and digital typesetting during his long career. Besides his well-known Univers family of sans serif typefaces, Frutiger designed over 50 other fonts like Roissy, Avenir, Centennial, Egyptienne, Glyphia, Seifa and Versailles. He was also the man behind OCR-B, the standard alphabet for optical character recognition.
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Univers was one of the first breakthroughs of the new system of phototypesetting that soon supplanted the old and expensive method of casting a font in lead. It offered a whole set of variations to the blossoming global advertising industry which helped make it enormously popular. He did well from the advertising boom by creating his own studio in 1960 and working for clients such as Air France, IBM and the Swiss Post.
A Classic: Saul Bass Pitch Video for Bell System Logo Redesign
/From the AT&T Archives: Saul Bass' work in logo design and movie title credit sequences spanned the latter half of the 20th century, with prominent work in each field.
The World Of Professional Creativity
/The intersection between commerce, technology and culture has long been a place of anxiety and foreboding. Marxist critics in the 1940s denounced the assembly-line approach to filmmaking that Hollywood had pioneered; in the ’60s, we feared the rise of television’s ‘‘vast wasteland’’; the ’80s demonized the record executives who were making money off violent rap lyrics and ‘‘Darling Nikki’’; in the ’90s, critics accused bookstore chains and Walmart of undermining the subtle curations of independent bookshops and record stores.
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Take a look at your own media consumption, and you can most likely see the logic of the argument. Just calculate for a second how many things you used to pay for that now arrive free of charge: all those Spotify playlists that were once $15 CDs; the countless hours of YouTube videos your kids watch each week; online articles that once required a magazine subscription or a few bucks at the newsstand. And even when you do manage to pull out a credit card, the amounts are shrinking: $9 for an e-book that used to be a $20 hardcover. If the prices of traditional media keep falling, then it seems logical to critics that we will end up in a world in which no one has an economic incentive to follow creative passions. The thrust of this argument is simple and bleak: that the digital economy creates a kind of structural impossibility that art will make money in the future. The world of professional creativity, the critics fear, will soon be swallowed by the profusion of amateurs, or the collapse of prices in an age of infinite and instant reproduction will cheapen art so that no one will be able to quit their day jobs to make it — or both.
And yet Steven Johnson, in The New York Times, continues this essay by making the argument for the creative apocalypse that wasn't: "in the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways."
Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions — in design and life
/Book designer Chip Kidd knows all too well how often we judge things by first appearances. In this hilarious, fast-paced talk, he explains the two techniques designers use to communicate instantly — clarity and mystery — and when, why and how they work. He celebrates beautiful, useful pieces of design, skewers less successful work, and shares the thinking behind some of his own iconic book covers.