How to create your own planet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umwNZ5U2nMs
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Letterbox is a Melbourne based type-design studio established by Stephen Banham in 1991
http://www.letterbox.net.au/
A bold type of guy
May 19, 2004
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Stephen Banham, whose obsession with typography has led him into storytelling. |
Stephen Banham was in a city cafe the other day when a man in a suit sidled up, looking at him strangely. "Hey," the man exclaimed. "You're that guy who hates Helvetica!"
"I'd never seen him in my life," Banham says, understandably bemused. The Melbourne-based graphic designer might well be the first person in history to have been recognised in the street as a campaigner against a typeface.
Most graphic designers are interested in type; they work with it every day. But Banham is obsessed. For him, type is more than just the shape of letters. It's a crucial part of the urban experience.
Last year Banham caused a furore - or what passes for a furore in typographic circles - with his book, Grand, a denunciation of the sans serif typeface, Helvetica.
He argued that Helvetica was a kind of plague, a bland, ubiquitous typeface that had become the crown-of- thorns starfish of type, strangling Melbourne's rich variety of lettering and disfiguring the streetscape.
That hatred for Helvetica still burns within, but Banham is reluctant to discuss it now. "You get pigeon-holed by people," he says.
"I think it's the price you pay for taking a stance. I've had strangers on trams tell me how much they hate Helvetica. I'll even get people guiltily confessing to me that they use Helvetica. It's a bit unnerving, really."
He still accepts mail orders for his "Death to Helvetica" T-shirts, but Banham has moved on.
His latest book, Fancy, is a collection of stories and snippets of esoterica relating to typefaces.
There's Roman Kingsley, a South Australian man who trained a flock of geese to do skywriting - or "birdtyping" - by flying in formations which spelt out corporate logos.
"There were a few teething problems," Kingsley told Banham. "Trying to get the birds to spell properly was a bit difficult."
Banham might well be the first person in history to have been recognised in the street as a campaigner against a typeface.
There's the story of Arthur Stace, the man who famously devoted his life to writing the word "Eternity" in elegant copperplate on Sydney pavements; there's the story of The Guardiannewspaper's special liftout on the little-known Indian Ocean island republic of Sans Seriffe, an elaborate typographic hoax that gulled thousands of readers in 1977.
On one level, Fancy is itself a hoax: some of the stories are truer than others. Some, in fact, are not true at all. But the idea isn't to trick people, Banham says.
"Graphic designers are conditioned to lie, exaggerate or embellish. The book is playing with that notion that designers are often asked to lie. Whether these stories are true or not isn't that important."
So believe, if you wish, that late last year, a group of night cleaners in Melbourne's Rialto towers illuminated the windows in such a way that, to a spectator standing in King Street, the words U.S. + THEM were spelt out down the sides of the office buildings.
According to Fancy, it wasn't the cleaners' first typographic experiment with window lighting. The first message produced with lit windows was a waggish joke: WASH ME, it said. Or tried to say - the message was blurred somewhat by light leaking from adjoining windows.
True or not, the fact is that if anyone in Melbourne was going to witness or invent such a spectacle, it would be Banham. Now 36, Banham has lived and worked in Melbourne all his life. He caught the type bug when he was working in the ad department at The Herald and Weekly Times, trying to cram "stupid amounts of ridiculously small type" into little boxes. He began reading about type and collecting samples.
In 1991, Banham opened his one-man graphic design studio, Letterbox, in Flinders Lane. Since then, he hasn't had a dull moment with type. He works on corporate designs and creates his own typefaces. He lectures in typography at RMIT. He can't imagine doing anything else, or anywhere else he'd rather do it.
"Melbourne has a wonderful complexity to its structure, and I think that complexity is a metaphor for the city itself," Banham says, gazing out of the studio's windows across the rooftops of Elizabeth Street.
"It's a very creative place, I think." He is particularly devoted to the city's streets and laneways. He wanders them constantly, savouring the layers of lore, type and architectural detail like a latter-day flaneur.
If you imagined that typography would be a lonely passion, you'd be wrong. Banham says he thrives on the enthusiasm of his students and is in constant contact with fellow designers and type nuts around the world. He sells more books overseas than he does here.
And Letterbox does a lively trade in international mail-order items, such as T-shirts ("Helvetica Thin: Just Say No") and stickers featuring typographic jokes.
Until now, most of the books Banham has self-published since 1991 have been pitched at that black-skivvy crowd. Several have won awards in Europe and America, but they're all small in scale - Type and the Recession (1994), for instance, is barely the size of a book of stamps - and have print runs of only 500 copies.
But his ambition is growing. With its true-or-false stories, Fancy is a deliberate step out of the studio and into the reality that letters describe. It's an attempt to restore storytelling to the world of design.
"Designers need to embrace content rather than just form," Banham says. "Otherwise we end up sounding like a bunch of hairdressers."
But why does type really matter? Because, Banham believes, the variety and richness of type reflects the vitality of our imagination.
In Fancy, letters are tangible and protean; they're the climbing frames of our dreams.
Or nightmares, as in the case of failed Hollywood starlet Peg Entwistle. On the night of September 18, 1932, the 24-year-old actress struggled up the Griffith Park slope to the iconic Hollywood sign. She folded her coat and placed it on the ground with her purse. Then she climbed the giant letter H and threw herself to her death from its crossbar.
A sad story, Banham says. "And especially fascinating from a typographical point of view. Extraordinary. If you look at all the letters, the H is clearly the best letter to jump off because of the height from the middle stroke. We'll never know whether it was a fortunate circumstance that Peg approached it from the H end of the sign, or whether she deliberately chose the H."
Banham shakes his head in wonder. "She's the only person we know of who has killed herself using type."
And she's proof of what Banham has always known: type can be a matter of life and death.
Article from: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/18/1084783500044.html
Monday, September 5, 2011
IS THERE ANYTHING FUNNY ABOUT GRAPHIC DESIGN? Article by Steven HellerNovember 11, 2008.
from: http://www.aiga.org/is-there-anything-funny-about-graphic-design/
Article by Steven HellerNovember 11, 2008.True wit depends on the mastery of various languages. The witty writer is a verbal acrobat who relies on precision timing and acute understanding. The great humorous writers are known for crafting figures of speech into vivid mental pictures. As a classic example, let's take the phrase dog bites man, which is neither funny nor news. Conversely, man bites dog is both news and somewhat funny because it twists the ordinary. But, more to the point,man bites man is not only a surprising concept but a vividly absurd picture revealing two simultaneous concepts. At the risk of committing humorcide through over-analysis, I submit that in this phrase one man is not only physically assaulting the other in a rather unconventional manner, but that since the word “bite” also suggests ridicule or criticism, it gives the phrase an additional level of meaning, causing it to be more ironic than its literal content suggests. Another example of such skillful verbiage comes from the mid-20th century critic Max Eastman, who quotes a young WW I soldier after the latter's first visit to Paris's legendary Folies Bergere: “I never saw such sad faces or such gay behinds.” This is a sage observation conjuring a real-life portrait of the vivacious but overworked sex objects who danced the famous can-can night after endless night in the Parisian nightclub. What these examples suggest is that the most skillful wit must appear effortless while being loaded with meaning.
Graphic wit is no exception. The best design solutions must be effortless and free from the self-conscious and tired conceits of all belabored humor. Yet if this is true, then why is it that the pun is one of the most significant components of graphic wit and design humor? As the oldest form of humor, the pun is also considered in the world of letters—as in the world—to be the lowest form. There is no kind of false wit that has been ridiculed as much as the pun. Yet a pun, the dictionary tells us, is “the humorous use of a word or words which are formed or sound alike but have different meanings, in such a way as to play on two or more of the possible applications; a pun is a play on words.” Edgar Allan Poe complained, “The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.” An old English proverb goes, “Who makes a pun will pick a pocket.” And who can forget that old grade-school put-down, “P.U. (you stink),” which is two-thirds of a pun. Indeed, throughout the ages this venerable form has been so abused that The New York Times forbids puns in its headlines unless the word substitution is so inextricably linked to the meaning of the story that the pun is incidental.
Why are puns necessary in graphic wit and humor? The rules that govern verbal language do not translate precisely into visual language. Thus, The New York Times has no rules governing visual puns. Graphic designers' canon of usage is different because our means of communication—our language, syntax and grammar—are different. A picture is worth a thousand words because so much more information can be evoked through one image than in a sentence or paragraph. In visual language, it often is necessary to substitute one image for another, or one symbol for another—not just for purposes of jest, but to enhance meaning. Therefore, the pun—at best a kind of shorthand, at worst a strained contortion—describes graphic symbols used to simplify complex concepts into accessible, often memorable images.
Paul Rand, in A Designer's Art (Yale University Press, 1985), says visual puns are the keys to some of his most successful designs, since “they amuse as they inform.” The elevation of the pun from jest to graphic communications tool must also be credited to one of Rand's former Yale University students, Eli Kince, whoseVisual Puns in Design (Watson-Guptill, 1982), argues that a pun is the conveyor of credible visual messages. If the pun is the lowest form of verbal humor, Kince reasons, this may beg question, “Is graphic humor at the low end of the evolutionary scale?” Charles Lamb wrote that puns are “a pistol let off at the ear, not a feather to tickle the intellect.” Remember too that the best verbal puns are not simple-minded rhymes but truly surprising (even shocking), yet decidedly logical, manipulations of language.
Families logo by Herb Lubalin.
The best visual puns have a similar effect on perception as, say, a right cross to the chin. Ouch! With the logo for Families magazine, the late typemaster Herb Lubalin created a rather literal symbol for family out of the letter ili resulting in a memorable icon. For the reader or viewer, it was also a rebus, which, when recognized, added another level of appreciation. When a visual pun works-specifically, when two distinct entities merge to form one idea-the effect stimulates thought and sensation.
Groucho Marx's description of diversity in verbal humor applies as well to graphic wit and humor, but one difference between verbal and design humor is apparent: the latter cannot always be measured by laughter alone. As a selling tool, graphic design humor might be described as a loss leader—a means to grab attention and lure the customer or client into the store. Humor, then, cannot be too outrageous, lest the purpose be defeated. Even as a political weapon, humor similarly functions to sell a message, sometimes by ridicule, but is often subtle or sardonic, not side-splittingly funny. At best, humorous design will force a laugh, bring a smile or cause a double-take, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, like hypnotic suggestions, the goal of graphic wit and design humor is to subvert the subconscious and thereby earn a market share of memory.
A.M. Cassandre's 1932 Dubonnet ad.
Humor is a mnemonic—something that helps (or forces) us to recollect. This can be manifest in wordplay, like a slogan or jingle, or picture play, such as a logo or trademark. An historical example of picture play is a three-panel Dubonnet poster designed by A. M. Cassandre in 1932, which even today is memorable for its playful wit. In his marriage of word and image, Cassandre's comic trade character the “Dubonnet Man” sits drinking the wine at a café table. In panel one, he is rendered mostly in outline, his partially painted arm outstretched with glass in hand; underneath, the word DUBONNET is rendered half in bold, the rest in outline, focusing the viewer's eye on DUBO. In the second panel, the character is drinking as his outlined body begins to fill with color and detail, and another letter, the N, is now bold, revealing DUBON. And in the last panel, a completely rendered character is pouring from a bottle to refill his glass, and the DUBONNET is completely bold. This brilliant visual “jingle” has multiple levels of meaning: in French, dubo means “something liquid,” dubon means “something good,” and Dubonnet is indeed a wonderful wine. The fast cadence of DUBO, DUBON, DUBONNET is appealing for its almost rhythmic syncopation, but there is something else going on here—in addition to the sophisticated verbal and graphic tricks, Cassandre used a more fundamental aspect of humor to achieve the final result, an activity called the “play principle.”
Play is a kind of abandon, yet, as we know from small children, play is their work. In the initial stages of a project (and possibly throughout), the designer ostensibly becomes an adult child, allowing attachments to shift capriciously from one plaything to another. In design, however, playthings are type and image, which are really puzzle pieces to be more or less instinctively moved, juxtaposed, and even mangled and distorted until a serendipitous relationship between formal and contextual problems is achieved. Even the most rigidly systematic design solutions are born of play.
Many otherwise very talented designers are unable to translate a good verbal sense of humor into visuals—some have the knack, others do not. The exemplars are those who invent new forms rather than conforming to tried and true formulae. They might take chances with subjects and themes that have traditionally defied humorous treatment, like annual reports, and they realize that the easy solution is not necessarily the best, and that effective humor is not always an easy solution. While certain formal characteristics are common to all humor in design, like exaggerated scale, odd juxtapositions, and ironic relationships, these same traits also apply to “straight” design. To be certain, a big head placed atop a little body does not ensure hilarity, and a piece of nostalgic clip art used in a work does not a priori make it funny. Humor in design is an art, not a set of unfunny rules.
This article is adapted from a chapter in Steven Heller's Design Humor: The Art of Graphic Wit(2002).
Thumbail image: Poster Boy and Aakash Nihalani subway collaboration (photo: Poster Boy NYC).
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Film Makers Turn to iPad for Interactive Storytelling
Film Makers Turn to iPad for Interactive Storytelling
The app is based on the animated short film of the same title, in which a book lover finds himself catapulted into a world where books are alive, capable of flying, dancing and playing piano. It’s an interesting metaphor, especially during times where some people bemoan the supposed death of the traditional paper book in light of the growing importance of tablets and e-readers.
“An iPad app book is sort of like a book that flies,” said Moonbot Studios co-founder Brandon Oldenburg when I talked to him and two of his colleagues on the phone today. However, Moonbot didn’t mean to provide cultural commentary with its app; instead, the company just tried to explore new avenues of interactive storytelling. Check out a trailer for the app below:
Moonbot Studios was in the midst of producing the short film when Apple introduced its first iPad about a year ago. The team initially wanted to just turn the movie into a traditional book, but they immediately realized an iPad version would offer a unique opportunity. “We thought: This is a game changer, this is exciting,” remembered Oldenburg.
This one is for you, animation buffs: Moonbot Studios decided to share some previously unreleased raw production footage with us. This short clip shows a model of the French Quarter...
Using the iPad to essentially produce an interactive book was particularly interesting because it fits into a pattern of combining old and new media to tell a story. “We used the most advanced CG technology,” Moonbot illustrator Joe Bluhm explained. At the same time, it relied on hand-drawn illustrations and hand-built miniature sets. (Check out some of the footage of these sets that didn’t make it into the final short film on the right.)
... and this is a shot of Morris Lessmore's study.
One of the issues that film makers have to deal with when working on a new platform like the iPad is that there are so many possibilities. The app published this week features a piano that can be played by the user as well as interactive animations that can be explored by tilting the screen. How does one stop short and not use every single feature possible?
Initially, the team planned for five times as many interactive features as it eventually pursued, I was told by Moonbot co-founder Lampton Enochs. But scaling that back and leaving some pages of the book made more sense. “It felt very freeing rather than tempting,” to explore these possibilities, remembered Enochs.
So where do film makers like the folks at Moonbot come down on the book v. tablet debate, especially after turning a book lover’s fantasy digital? “Most of us straddle both of those worlds,” Enochs said. Moonbot plans to eventually publish the paper edition of the short film, but it is also looking to bring some of the depth of story telling for old media into the digital space. “A movie can make you cry,” said Oldenburg. “Why can’t an app do the same?”
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Article From:
http://gigaom.com/video/ipad-interactive-storytelling/
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