Hasta La Ideas

How to fold a flag…(Read…)

Herringbone parquet covers the walls and floor of this photography studio in east London by local design practice Post-Office.

Partitions around retouching booths contain vertical slats covered in grey felt to provide a colour-neutral background for viewing images on a computer screen and dampen the noise from the open workspaces.

The slats are finished in light wood on the side facing the communal areas and can be swivelled to control the levels of light in the booths.

Dark furniture in the reception and communal areas stands out against the wood.

We’ve also featured herringbone parquet on the floor of a Parisian boutique, the walls and ceiling of a personal shopping suite in London and seats in a Zurich cafe.

Post-Office is lead by designer Philippe Malouin and you can see more of his work plus interviews we’ve filmed with him here.

Photographs are by David Giles.

Here’s some text from the designers:

Touch Digital offices, Shoreditch, London.

Post-Office was commissioned to design the new offices of Touch, London’s leading fashion photographic service. Digital retouching agencies need a minimal amount of light in order to correctly visualise the computer screens. This constraint usually makes retouching studios a dark environment. We took this challenge to heart as we wanted communal areas of the new Touch offices to be bright and airy while providing low-light environments to facilitate the retouchers’ work.

The new touch offices maximise the already generous amounts of space and light the warehouse had to offer. The space owes its aesthetic and choice of materials to Scandinavian classic modernism as well as 60s corporate American grandeur and the minimal art movement. The central retouching booths appear as minimal sculptures in a grand setting rather than individual work spaces. All of the retouching environments are lined in grey felt in order to offer a colour-neutral background for the retouchers while helping to noise-proof the open workspaces.

The post Touch Digital
by Post-Office appeared first on Dezeen.

The visual identity of the London Games was uncomfortable, like a shattered stained-glass window. But iconoclasm does have its fans; and the more ways we can look at something, and look through something, the better off we are.

The stated intent of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) was to focus on youth; naturally this extended to the visual identity system, the centerpiece being the logo, which has received little love. The logo’s severe angularity does not mesh with the reality that for virtually everybody (except the parents of athletes) the Olympics constitute a pleasant vacation, or a comfy staycation – they’re not about stress or tension. Television “censorship” attests to this clearly, and this clash might be what puts people off.

To me the logo looks like how middle-aged men (coincidentally my own demographic) tend to feel about teenagers: uncomfortable. The logo also makes me think of the 1980s ski boots I once bought via Craigslist. And the Opening Ceremonies also betrayed the reality of who consumes the Olympics, of who the customer is – and it’s not young people. Looking at it that way, the logo just might be perfect. And adherents of the maxim “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” require no justification beyond the fact that the logo is indeed highly memorable.

2012Headline by Gareth Hague, the official typeface of the 2012 Olympic Games.

What is also memorable is Gareth Hague’s typeface for the London Olympics, 2012Headline. Besides being fervently discussed – and ridiculed – in typographic circles, it was also featured in the mainstream media, both at home and abroad. Unlike the logo however 2012Headline is quite difficult to wrap one’s head around. If you look at it as a formal outgrowth of the logo it just might make perfect sense. But if you look deeper, if you consider its genesis, it feels very different: uncomfortable. Fortunately it has one superb redeeming quality, one that’s highly relevant to the enclave of typeface design…

The logo of the London Olympics is based closely on Hague’s Klute typeface of 1997, a unique design that draws ideas from blackletter and graffiti. And in the context of the Olympics it’s possible to imagine the influence of Ancient Greek lettering on 2012Headline. The inherited visual language of the Olympics also seems to be what caused the “O” and “o” to be circular (inspired by the venerable five-ring symbol), a direct formal contradiction with every other glyph in the font. Hague reveals that the circular “o” was supposed to be an alternate; he had provided the expected angular “o” as the primary form.

It’s easy to agree that using the circular “o” was a confused, bad decision. I figured to see if that’s really true, so I decided to make an angular “o” glyph based on how I interpreted the font’s “internal consistency”. The first one I made didn’t have very happy proportions, so I decided to bend the rules and make a different one, which I found less jarring.

This one I subbed into the logo and was pleasantly surprised to conclude that opting for the circular “o” was a good decision after all – it seems to add a nice softness, whereas the angular one might just make the whole too mechanical. Olympic Games logos come and go, but apparently the rings are forever!

The Redeeming Quality

Although 2012Headline was designed after the logo was approved by LOCOG (so was presumably constrained to being a follower and not a leader) according to Hague himself the only thing the two typefaces share is a general angular spikiness; no blackletter, no graffiti, no Greek. But people will see what they see – the designer is never around to tell them what to think. What I myself see most prominently – something shared by Klute and 2012Headline but virtually no other design – is what motivated me to write this article: it might be a better way to make an italic.

Italic has long been a personal sore spot – to me a sort of drive-by shotgun wedding. Roman and italic might be able to tolerate each other after all these years, but pairing them up was still a bad joke. Now, if they can indeed tolerate each other, why worry? It’s a bit like the search for an energy alternative to fossil fuels, with its tinge of desperation. But to some it does seem like an alternative is the only way forward, or at the very least a break from the despotism of cursiveness being at the heart of emphasis in running text. The unduly reviled slanted roman has had its champions and svengalis, but even if I for one believe that can be an answer, it cannot be the only answer. And one answer might just be rotation, which is essentially what makes 2012Headline (and Klute) so special.

Gareth Hague might not have invented the idea. The passing of time has only cemented Frederic Goudy’s “the old fellows stole all our best ideas” and this is probably no exception. One can easily imagine the ATF boys making rotated glyphs a century ago with a quick adjustment of the pantograph – they certainly did everything else with it. Also, neither Klute nor 2012Headline can serve for emphasis since they have no roman. Rotation as a means of emphasis – dubbed “rotalic” – seems to have first been floated by Filip Tydén, but that was a decade after Klute. Also, virtually all rotalic fonts have been created via brute mechanical rotation, and thus deserve the derision they typically engender. This is clearly not the case with 2012Headline – it’s been designed with intent. So Hague deserves credit for applying the idea quite early with Klute, and maturing it before anybody else with 2012Headline.

Jackson Cavanaugh plays with an italic from his Harriet Series.

As with any novelty, rotalic’s potential for ridicule is great; people like to have fun. This is the sort of ridicule reserved for things that can be consciously evaluated by everybody: display fonts. The magic of text face design kicks in when novelties are applied so subtly as to escape general rejection… although there is no escape from rejection by some fellow type designers. We are now seeing a trickle of rotalic fonts including one that elevates the style to a fully respectable level: TypeTogether’s Eskapade.

Perhaps unsure what to do with the unusual orientation of 2012Headline, Olympics designers often resorted to a rotated baseline.

For many people however letters that seem to be falling over are… uncomfortable. So much so that many applications of 2012Headline – including high-profile ones – have resorted to rotating lines of type counter-clockwise, effectively eliminating the slant, even though the result is an often awkward “uphill” line of type. Then there’s Hubert Jocham’s Keks: older than 2012Headline but more recent than Klute, it seems to vie for the same sort of angularity, but critically without the “discomfort” of rotation. In a way Keks is to 2012Headline what Excoffon’s Chambord is to Peignot: they share a style, but the former avoids the latter’s iconoclasm (Cassandre’s design was nothing less than an effort at alphabet reform), resulting in something easier to sell. In fact it’s nice to imagine a retrofit of 2012Headline that would serve as an italic for Keks (similar to the genesis of Triplex Italic), which might become a first in terms of having a roman and an italic that are equally slanted!

It’s not possible to see 2012Headline as a text face, or even as an italic for a text face. But anybody who can see in it something that will enrich typeface design, that will perhaps propel a new generation of italics, is better off. To quote from a poster made by Hague promoting Klute: “It’s not what this is that’s important, it’s what it could or might be”. This is nicely parallel to a founding principle of the Olympics: “The most important thing is not to win but to take part.” Let’s not worry merely about making sellable fonts – let’s see where 2012Headline can take us.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Apple is still KING of hardware design when it comes to smartphones. Yes Samsung and HTC have beautiful phones but they lack precision and a refined elegance. The latest Nokias are stunning and in some cases, rival their fruity competitor in design. It seems the Scandinavians are the only ones that really know how to design a smartphone. Minimalism has pretty much become their domain and if the Nokias aren’t proof, check out the Lumigon T2.

It’s gorgeous and made of steel – yes you read right, STEEL. The body is perfectly smooth. The sides cleverly hide all the ports so all you see is a steel frame, strong enough for you to stand on. For serious! They even say so in the press release. Powered by a 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processor combined with expandable 8 GB of memory and you’ve got a middle to high end performing smartphone. All this with a coat of Android Ice Cream Sandwich on top.

The two most impressive tidbits are the audio and software. Audio comes from a Bang & Olufsen MS3 chip (thanks Dutchies!) and Android’s overly complicated and cluttered interface has been refined to sit somewhere in between iOS and WindowsPhone.

No idea how much it’ll cost but the T2 launches this autumn in Europe, Asia, and independent online shops. I can’t wait to get my hands on one for review. For now if you want more info, hit up the site and sign up for more info.

Designer: Lumigon

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
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(Lumigon T2 Smartphone was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Catch up on part one if you missed it. In part two, I went back to see Curtis at the Micklish workshop and watched him make quick work of the metal legs. Most of the sideboard is complete. Each leg will consist of 3 metal rods welded to a plate that’ll be attached to the sideboard at delivery.

I had never seen welding work in person so it was a treat to see how deceptively easy it looked. There wasn’t much noise, just an intense light I was instructed not to look directly at, though I couldn’t help snap a few shots with my camera.

The really interesting bit were the tools he used to cut and position the rods at the correct angles. I expected some kind of complex ruler with precise measurement ticks. Instead, he used a scrap wood block as a guide and a clamp to hold the rods down during the welding process. No doubt a skill that comes natural to him since he’s been doing this as a kid.

Curtis ended up making two sets of legs. The one you see in these photos are thinner. We ended up going with the thicker rods for enhanced stability. Come back next week to see the completed sideboard and its sidekick – the matching box air conditioning cover!

Designer: Micklish, Facebook

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(Commissioning Work: Micklish Part 2 was originally posted on Yanko Design)

Related posts:

1. Commissioning Work: Micklish Part 1
2. Between Art and Work
3. Work Your Bod at Work