on 8 February 2010
I’m posting this partly to publicise the Hedley Barrel Race and Beer Festival, if anyone’s in the area, and partly for portfolio, because I don’t often get asked to do posters. (Weird how posters are every graphic designer’s favourite show-off medium, yet most of the ones you actually see are horrible.)
The design is within the identity I created for The Feathers Inn*, a 200-year-old Northumbrian pub that’s won just about every award it’s eligible for since being taken over by my wife’s nephew a couple of years ago. Worth a trip into the wilds for.
The logo (in the background here), based on early Victorian engravings, is a knife, fork and spoon bent into the shape of the Prince of Wales feathers; it’s now the pub’s sign too. Type fans will spot Adobe’s excellent Wood Type fonts and ornaments. The other face here is Monotype Fournier, based on cuts just a little bit older than the pub. I love the way it’s elegant and awkward, conservative and quirky, all at the same time.
Tagged as:
Design,
InDesign,
Marketing,
Media,
Photoshop
on 3 February 2010
I watched the launch of the iPad (or iSlatelet, as I’d taken to calling it in the hope that someone would have explained to Steve why iPad was an even less sensible name for a consumer electronics product than Wii) with considerable scepticism, but on reflection, so many aspects of this thing are near enough right.
Who’ll buy it, people ask? I think this will become obvious when it materialises on shelves. Sitting in its optional keyboard dock, it’s a really, really cool desktop computer. You’ll have to look at, and then you’ll have to pick it up - and then (say people who have) you’ll want it. Just because it’s like nothing else. In fact, from a desirability point of view, it’s almost irrelevant that iPad is nominally a computer. It could be a hi-fi or or a TV or a set of kitchen scales, you’d still want it. All you need is an excuse to buy it.
And there are plenty of excuses. You can surf the web with it, do your email, word process, all the things normal people ask if you can do with a computer. And then hundreds of thousands of apps are available to do other stuff – not for £29.95 or £99.95 but a couple of quid, or less. Without even having to shop for them.
Normal people can use it
Yes, ultimately you might wonder about what it can’t do that (other) computers can. But what really makes it unlike any other computer is that it’s not a nightmare. You’ll never install a dodgy program and wish you hadn’t, because all software is pre-vetted. The Windows registry won’t need cleaning. You won’t start having weird problems and have to figure out which apps and which settings are causing them. Your kids won’t drag vital system files to the trash. You won’t have three OS updates to install every day. You’re very unlikely ever to get a virus or have to call tech support. It just works! That’s ‘the computer for the rest of us’, isn’t it?
More than that: it’s the computer for people who didn’t even think they were the rest of us. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Design,
iPad,
iPhone,
iPod,
Mac,
Windows
on 29 January 2010
So I went to see Avatar, a satire on mankind’s acquisitiveness and obsession with technological progress. I wanted to catch it at the IMAX, but the Christmas traffic was too heavy. (If you’re hearing a funny noise in the background, it’s just the alarm on my irony meter.)
It still looked pretty impressive in the local multiplex. Nobody combines exploding CGI mayhem with weepy sentimentality like James Cameron, and Avatar delivers both in even larger bucketloads than Titanic. Challenging? Only in the sense that you’re required to overproduce adrenaline every time the virtual camera swoops through another vertiginous hail of laser-guided missiles, while simultaneously tutting disapproval, which is a tricky form of doublethink. But as entertainment, it works.
Although there’s an obvious and refreshingly un-American message, steering clear of real-world politics allows the film to moralise without theorising. Or maybe to theorise without moralising, I couldn’t quite decide. There’s no doubt that the human expeditionary force invading the remote moon Pandora is up to no good, so we don’t have to question the ethics of the indigenous population choosing to fight fire with fire. Well, not actual fire, which they don’t appear to have discovered (and we’ll come back to that), but spears and such.
Indeed, we can feel relieved that the Na’vi aren’t depicted as Social Science Model innocents, free from constructs like property, war and sex. That would have been dull. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Architecture,
Art,
Film,
Internet,
MacUser,
Media,
Science
on 11 January 2010
Tired? Sluggish? Lost your get-up-and-go? Yes, Mac, we’re talking to you. You use to be so fresh and sprightly. But you’ve been working long hours and not looking after yourself, and now you can’t seem to do things as quickly or reliably as you used to.
Like the liver in journalists, one organ in the Apple corpus is particularly susceptible to deterioration. The hard disk is in many ways unique. While just about everything else inside a computer is an immobile sliver of semiconductor, the hard disk is a big box of spinning plates with the mechanical sophistication of a 1985 Austin Maestro.
And it has, like Peter Mandelson, more jobs than it probably ought to. Most of its time is spent picking up after RAM, catching whatever falls out as we flick between apps and documents and throwing it back when commanded. Exhausting as it is, this is a mere hobby. Its primary function is to store all your stuff, forever. At this it excels, providing the kind of wide open digital spaces that, however long you lived, however many episodes of Lost you downloaded, however many RAW images you shot with your DSLR, would… hang on, it says here it’s full.
In this article, we’ll find out why Macs grind to a halt and what you can do about it. What’s filling up your hard disk and RAM, and distracting the attention of your CPU? How do you find the culprits, and is it safe to remove them? Can you make more room? And which is healthier, a Burger King or a Subway? All right, not that one.
Read the full article in MacFormat issue 217, on sale now.
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Mac,
MacFormat,
Tutorials
on 1 January 2010
I never fully believed the Apple Tablet was real until I heard these words on my iPhone: ‘It’s [name withheld], I work for Apple and I can confirm that, yes… I’ve read the rumour websites too. We’re all really excited and just waiting for Steve to tell us to start making it.’
Some commentators believe the tablet is the natural successor to the Newton MessagePad. So it’ll arrive five years late, do less than everyone thought and cost a fortune, and the only thing it’ll be remembered for is that Doonesbury took the piss out of it.
Publisher Condé Nast has already announced it’s developing digital magazines for the device, despite not knowing what it is. The company is also said to be looking at a machine created by a woman in Oregon that harnesses the power of crystals… continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Design,
iPhone,
Mac,
MacUser,
Media
on 18 December 2009
Computer Shopper magazine asked me to produce a special Christmas issue on Windows 7. Which was great, except the time frame was less than four weeks, start to finish.
Together with Shopper’s Jim Martin, I collated and commissioned the copy (with contributions from Jim and the excellent Craig Grannell) and organised a kit shoot for the necessary hardware, helpfully supplied by sponsors Mesh. Fortunately my first draft of the layout template was accepted, incorporating a few selected Shopper branding cues into a clean and legible new grid.
The cover went through considerably more development, partly due to the problem of making the brand logo prominent without causing confusion with the current issue of the magazine itself, but in collaboration with Dennis Publishing’s deputy MD of technology titles, John Garewal, I solved it in the end.
I flatplanned, designed and subedited the 96-page edition in Newcastle, and with the indispensable assistance of production wizard Steve Haines in London it went to press on time. It’s on newsstands now, and at £2 a bit of a bargain.
Tagged as:
Computer Shopper,
Computing,
Design,
Microsoft,
Windows
on 20 November 2009
Nobody was shocked when the Secretary of State for Business announced three strikes. There could be a lot more than that by the end of the winter. As it turned out, though, he wasn’t talking about industrial action: Lord Mandelson was resurrecting the proposal to cut off your access to the Internet if you’re accused of infringing copyright. Like privatising the Royal Mail, he probably doesn’t see why this is controversial.
As befits his multi-portfolio portfolio, the First Secretary was speaking at a conference organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the ministry set up to strengthen the bond between the conceptual art and yngling industries. The DCMS project that hosted the event is called – brace yourself for some post-modern Media Studies typographic shenanigans here – ‘c&binet’. See what they did there? Yes, they made up something that sounded cool in a meeting.
It’s supposed to stand for creativity, business and, er, the interwebs or something. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Computing,
Copyright,
Design,
Internet,
Law,
MacUser,
Media
on 19 November 2009
on 19 November 2009
‘I am not an investigative journalist,’ says former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, ‘and I don’t have much time for people like John Pilger and Duncan Campbell.’
If you’re a journalist, you’ll be familiar with Greenslade (now a professor at City University and a prolific media commentator). Did that quote affect your opinion of him?
I’m pondering this after reading Roy’s Guardian article ‘Good sense as judges strike out two “weak” libel actions’, in which Roy praises the recent decisions of Mrs Justice Sharp – the thinking person’s Mr Justice Eady, apparently.
One of the rejected cases was a blatant forum-shopping exercise in which a South African publication was sued in England over an article barely seen here. Fair enough. The other concerned remarks made in a Telegraph diary piece (aka gossip column) about Formula One heiress Petra Ecclestone.
Ecclestone, a fashion designer (really, not in the Coleen sense), was quoted as saying: ‘I am not a veggie and I don’t have much time for people like the McCartneys and Annie Lennox.’ Her lawyers argued that this implied she was ‘disrespectful and dismissive’ of these people ‘to the point of being willing to disparage them publicly for promoting vegetarianism’. For this reason the item was defamatory. Sharp J disagreed, finding that ‘right-thinking members of society’ would think no less of Ecclestone after reading the quote, and that whether or not she actually said it was irrelevant.
‘Heartening news,’ says Greenslade. Yet I have no doubt that he would be mortified to open a national newspaper and read the quote at the top of this post. It is, of course, made up. But that’s irrelevant, right? continue
Tagged as:
Law,
Media
on 12 November 2009
If you spend your day using PCs, dealing with infuriating glitches becomes second nature. But Apple has made things so straightforward that you get used to stuff just working. When it doesn’t, it comes as a nasty shock.
Fortunately, the brick walls you may occasionally run up against will generally turn out, on closer inspection, to be mere ha-has in the garden of Mac. So next time you find yourself staring at the screen with a mounting sense of horror, take a deep breath and read this article.
Read the full article in MacFormat issue 215, on sale now.
*Probably.
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Internet,
Mac,
MacFormat
adambanksdotcom Jesus, her world view is maximally fucked up. Who let her loose on vulnerable women? (Google "barbara harris sterilised") 