Horoscope of Prince Iskandar (grandson of Timur who ruled the province of Farsin, Iran) showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of his birth on 25th April 1384. Wellcome Library, London
The Wellcome Library, one of the world’s leading collections of medical history, has announced that over 100,000 pictures from its archives are now freely available from its Images pages online…
In a move similar to the British Library’s recent announcement that it had uploaded over a million images to Flickr, the Wellcome Library has now also decided that a large selection of its images – dedicated to the history of health and medicine – should be made free for use under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Illustration of an ‘exploded thorax’ (1823) by Paulo Mascagni, Prosector of Anatomy at the University of Siena. Wellcome Library, London
This means that the images downloaded from wellcomeimages.org can be used for personal or commercial use, providing an acknowledgement to the original source is given.
Images in the digitised collection range from scans of paintings, illustrations and manuscripts to early examples of photography. As one would expect with a medical archive, the oldest examples from which go back two thousand years, there are many weird and wonderful pictures to explore, from a Paolo Mascagni’s coloured etching of an ‘exploded’ torso (above), to a sketch of a female genital tattoo.
Photogravure by Eadweard Muybridge of a man standing on his hands (1887). Wellcome Library, London
“Together the collection amounts to a dizzying visual record of centuries of human culture, and our attempts to understand our bodies, minds and health through art and observation,” says Simon Chaplin, head of the Wellcome Library. “As a strong supporter of open access, we want to make sure these images can be used and enjoyed by anyone without restriction.”
A classic dentist’s trick: ‘A surgeon holding a dental key behind his back to conceal it from the patient’ by Luciano Nezzo (born 1856). Wellcome Library, London
BBC News’ Instagram account is a relatively untested platform, but its last five posts have revealed a new way that the broadcaster is creating short-form news packages. The Beeb is calling the service, Instafax…
It’s early days for the BBC’s Instagram at bbcnews – 5,833 followers is a long way from the 2.3m it has on its UK Twitter account – but the organisation is trialling a form of news bulletin with this smaller audience, having begun to load clips to the site alongside still images in September last year (there are 203 posts to date).
Uploading clips of BBC News content here is an interesting idea. A small teaser of footage is often all that’s required to generate interest in the wider story, and it also provides an opportunity to isolate decent TV interview quotes as soundbites – such as this 10-second clip of Bradley Wiggins reacting to his recent knighthood.
Instafax clips are different, however, in that the footage also contains written copy. Over ten or so seconds, video plays while a brief snippet of text accompanies each edit. Of course, it doesn’t pack very much into the films but the aim is to get across the main points of a story, the complexities of which can be read on the main BBC News website.
But while a single message on Twitter can easily connect a reader to a wider story – out to the BBC News site, for example – Instagram feeds are stuck in relative isolation. And so one of Instafax’s biggest problems is that the format doesn’t allow for live links in the visual part of the posts, let alone in the accompanying text box on the right.
And the constraints of the format also work their way into the copy now and then. While the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda’s story is certainly “unique”, is that really the best word to use when first introducing his story, as below? (Far from telling readers the story, it becomes a teaser for the story itself which appear on the next part of the film.)
But does that mean the Instafax idea won’t work? Not necessarily. As much as Twitter is an excellent way to scan news headlines and choose which stories to explore further, the Instafax service offers Instagram users a quick news fix without leaving the platform; the first line of the bulletin acting as its headline.
In reply to some of those leaving comments on its first Instafax, the BBC offered some indication of its aims with the nascent service. “We are trying to create content within the social spaces people are inhabiting,” it said. “That’s the main goal. The way we see it, Instagram and our website are – in many ways – two separate audiences.
“At the end of the day, it’s just an experiment. And we’re very happy you are having these conversations here. They are helpful for us when trying to decide how to move forward.”
Après Limm Digital Art, le duo allemand Deskriptiv revient avec « Schichten » : un projet digital impressionnant. Jouant sur les itérations et la symétrie, ces visuels d’une grande qualité propose des formes étranges et presque organiques, dont une série d’images est à découvrir en détails dans la suite de l’article.
In our review of 2013, we run down the top ten most popular stories from the Creative Review website this year. Click on the links to read the original posts
In May this year, Everton unveiled a new club badge (shown above). In the face of huge opposition to it from fans, the club rapidly backtracked and invited supporters to choose from three more options. We covered the original design and its replacement (both posts linked above)
Football fans generally react badly to any attempts to mess with the heritage of their club. In particular, changes of club colours, names or badges can provoke huge hostility. So it was with Everton this year when the club announced a new badge for the 2013–14 season.
Development sketches for the new Everton crest by in-house design team. Creative manager: Nigel Payne. Graphic designer: Mark Derbyshire. Artworker: Lee May
On the face of it, Everton appeared to have gone about things in the right way: it consulted with fan groups and published a lengthy background rationale for the new design. But many fans hated the new look and, in particular, the fact that it no longer included the club motto. A redrawn Prince Rupert’s Tower also failed to find favour even though the new design bore a far closer resemblance to the actual building.
The club responded (or caved in, depending on your perspective) to fan pressure and announced a new, wider consultation process. Working with design consultancy Kenyon Fraser it then presented three new options for public vote. The fans’ favourite (above), which includes the motto, original drawing of the tower, laurel wreaths and the club’s formation date, will be used from the start of the 2014–15 season.
The newspaper’s elegant, beautifully crafted redesign drew almost universal praise from our readers (post linked above), but others doubted its effectiveness
On November 7, The Independent revealed a new look, the result of a three month project from Matt Willey and the newspaper’s in-house design team. In our post, Willey and the paper’s Stephen Petch and Dan Barber, talked through the changes which included a new bespoke type family and a radical masthead redesign.
A new set of typefaces designed by Henrik Kubel of A2/SW/HK and A2-Type featured throughout. Designing from the type up meant that the way each page worked was rethought, restructured, and, in particular, de-cluttered and simplified.
From the front page onwards, the new direction was striking. The previous blocky sans-serif masthead made way for a new design that was at once radical but also elegant. Willey said its placement was a way of making the compact front page appear more sophisticated, creating a taller, more broadsheet-like format.
“I wanted to go back to an elegant serif for the masthead which felt like such a strong part of the newspaper’s identity when it was a great paper,” Willey said. “Running it vertically allows what is a fairly long name to be prominent, unapologetic, without it getting in the way.”
“We were keen to strip out a lot of the clutter, to simplify the colour palette, to have more deliberate and rational use of colour, photographs and graphics,” Willey said of the overall design. “It just feels like The Independent to me.”
Ahead of a long-rumoured merger with US Airways, American Airlines unveiled a new look, ditching Massimo Vignelli’s classic eagle logo
In January American Airlines unveiled a new brand identity from Futurebrand, replacing the 1967 Massimo Vignelli classic with a 3D ‘flight symbol’ and plenty of the good ol’ red, white and blue.
Key to the new look was what was referred somewhat clumsily to as the ‘flight symbol’. This 3D device (above) combined several AA ‘assets’ – the letter A, a star, an eagle and the red, white and blue livery. The ‘flight symbol’ was matched with the airline name (set in a custom face named American Sans) in a new mark.
Anyone who is familiar with Mad Men will have an idea of just what a central place American Airlines has in corporate America. In design terms too, along with perhaps IBM, FedEx and UPS, it has been one of the greats – the last survivor of the golden age of US corporate design when Rand, Bass, Vignelli et al branded America.
Vignelli has said that his original (above) was all about stressing “the professional, no-gimmicks attitude” of the airline. It was, Vignelli’s site says, “one of the few [logos] worldwide that needs no change”.
Obviously, AA thought otherwise. Perhaps relying on a “professional, no-gimmicks attitude” just won’t cut it in the airline business these days.
We asked Vignelli what he thought of the new look: “Design cannot cover the mistakes of bad management, but styling can. That is why American Airlines opted for that solution. The logo we designed had equity, value and timelessness. Why to bother with it?”
This year’s M&S Christmas ad starred model/actress Rosie Huntington-Whitely and Helena Bonham Carter in a fairytale extravaganza
M&S unveiled its blockbuster Christmas TV ad on the same day as some pretty bleak sales figures were announced. Would Rosie and her ever-changing array of undies right the ship?
RKCR/Y&R put Rosie Huntington-Whiteley front and centre in a fantasy treatment which referenced Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz and also featured Helena Bonham Carter. The ad was beautifully made but perhaps didn’t have the ‘all things to all ages’ appeal of previous M&S Christmas spots. And a lot of you were horrified by the choice of door bell…
Sometimes the stories which capture our readers’ imagination simply showcase a great craft technique, as in the case of this Russian artist
Number six in our list of the most popular stories of the year on the CR website featured the work of Russian graphic artist Dmitri Aske who created a series of striking plywood artworks.
Aske starts with a sheet of plywood onto which he transposes his drawings. The individual pieces are then cut out, painted in acrylics and re-assembled. This series of pieces was shown at the Faces&Laces Street Culture Show in Moscow. Aske started his career as a grafitti artist but now works across graphic design, typography, illustration, street and fine art. For more, see sicksystems.ru
Our Money issue and its follow-up online created a lot of debate in the industry as readers compared their pay with the averages quoted
Are designers badly paid? How much should you charge? What do ad agency creative directors earn? Could you earn more abroad? Our January issue tackled these and other cash-related questions. Online, we shared some of the key findings of the research
Three’s Moonwalking Shetland Pony became a massive viral hit, prompting widespread media coverage and making Socks an instant star
Wieden + Kennedy’s London office conjured up a dancing, moonwalking Shetland pony to demonstrate that mobile network Three understands that ‘silly stuff’ is important to its users. This film – shot by Blink’s Dougal Wilson who worked closely with MPC to create the pony’s magic moves – was a great example of a piece of content that was duly shared like crazy. The silliness of a Shetland pony strutting and moonwalking to the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere proved irresistible to many.
As well as the film, W+K, with Blink and Munky, cooked up more ways for the idea to be shared in the form of The Pony Mixer, an app that also lived on Three’s YouTube channel and allowed users to create and share (via Twitter or Facebook) their own remixed videos of the pony performing to different types of music
To mark the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, our special issue delved into every aspect of the tube’s visual communications
It’s rare that one of our posts about the new issue of CR generates masses of traffic but a combination of the subject matter and, we’d like to think, the content ensured that our March special issue on the 150th anniversary of the London Underground received a very positive response online. It sold out too.
David Pearson’s ‘censored’ Penguin Classics cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four caused a huge amount of interest and debate on our site (story linked above)
Brand new covers for five of George Orwell’s books featured in a series of Penguin Classics designed by David Pearson. The set included a remarkable take on arguably Orwell’s best-known novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Pearson’s adept use of type – as demonstrated in his work on Penguin’s Great Ideas series of short, influential texts – was once again at the fore of each of the designs. For Nineteen Eighty-Four, the title and author’s name were almost completely obscured by black foiling.
“It’s obviously the risk-taker of the series,” said Pearson. The design went through numerous iterations “to establish just the right amount of print obliteration. Eventually we settled on printing and debossing, as per the Great Ideas series … leaving just enough of a dent for the title to be determined.”
With its tale of furry fellowship, the Bear and the Hare captivated many. But what really got the debate going was our post on how it was made (linked above)
Adam & Eve DDB’s John Lewis Christmas ads are met with feverish anticipation by the media. This year’s sweet story about the friendship between a bear and a hare featured Lily Allen singing Keane’s 2004 hit Somewhere Only We Know.
But what really interested our readers (and many members of the public coming to our site) was the technique used to create the spot. In a highly unusual move, the ad was the work of two directors, Elliot Dear and Yves Geleyn, working in tandem.
Dear explained that the ad employed a complex mix of 2D stop motion animation and a ‘real’ set. The technique was based on something Dear had played around with at college. “I remembered something that I was doing when I was a student,” he explained, “which was to do illustrations, cut them out and place them in front of the camera [on a set].” But was all that effort worth it?
Sagmeister & Walsh has designed a new visual identity for US engineering company Function featuring an animated type system and extensive set of icons.
Function specialises in mechanical design for product development, including entertainment, computing, robotic and medical equipment. The new identity was commissioned to mark the company’s 25th anniversary and is the first brand refresh Function has undergone in 15 years.
As well as updating the company’s logo (a gear symbol), Sagmeister & Walsh designed a new word mark for the company and an animated hinge and pivot type system, representing Function’s expertise in creating hinge and linkage mechanisms. The studio also produced a series of patterns and icons to be used on promotional material and is working on a new Function website.
“The goal was to capture the company’s focus on mechanical design for product development and elicit a sense of joy in the details,” says Function business development manager Lori Hobson. “Various treatments of a gear had served as the company’s mark since its founding, so bringing this up to date and adding a typographical treatment of the Function name were two considerations for the project,” Hobson adds.
Jessica Walsh, who art directed the project, says the identity reflects Function’s desire to communicate “a respect for design…while still being purposeful and technical.”
“We started with the Function word mark..[and] using the exact elements that went into constructing the Function typography, created a series of icons which worked within the same system. We then collaborated with Joel to create the animations over a several week period,” she says.
“We focused on engineering symbols, robot, tools and technical icons to represent the different services the company provides. From there we created general icons which could be useful on the web or in their materials, [and] took the system a step further by developing a series of patterns based on these icons,” she adds. (Interesting how many schemes these days include sets of graphic patterns.)
Function’s new identity is a versatile system and one that perfectly communicates the company’s ethos in an elegant way. It’s got plenty of hi-tech cool as befits a Silicon Valley headquartered outfit.
There have been some suggestions that the logotype and symbol are reminiscent of Ed Nacional‘s work for online learning resource Skillshare but for us they are clearly different, the Function work being derived from the idea of gearing and links in bicycle chains and expressed in three dimensions. It’s a long way from traditional metal-bashing but this is a company whose forte is new product development, including robotics and high-level electronics. Appropriately, Sagmeister & Walsh have given them a really nicely put together system.
Credits
Creative direction: Stefan Sagmeister Art direction & design: Jessica Walsh Design: Wade Jeffree Animation: Joel Voelker
In 2008 James Houston turned Radiohead’s Nude into a dreamy symphony played out by printers and hard drives. This year he’s created Glasgow School of Art’s Christmas e-card: a rewritten version of Carol of the Bells sung by a choir of vintage Macs, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum+1 and a Sega Mega Drive…
For his degree show five years ago, Houston created a video and track remix of Nude entitled Big Ideas, Don’t Get Any (currently on 2m plays on YouTube). Now working in Glasgow as a moving image maker, he was asked to make a new film for the GSA in time for Christmas. Houston decided to use several computerised Christmas gifts of the past which had the ability to synthesise speech – and from which a choir was born.
Houston also approached comedy writers Robert Florence and Philip Larkin to write new lyrics for the chosen carol, which can be read at the bottom of this post (taken from the GSA’s Vimeo page).
In the video the ‘choir’ is positioned as if around a Christmas dinner table and, continuing in the celebration of giving and receiving, Houston also wears a jacket at the beginning which was designed by Alan Moore, a fellow GSA 2008 graduate, and made through Houston’s 1030 studio.
Producer/art dept: Jennifer Hanlon. DOP: David Liddell. Location sound: David McKeitch. Software engineer: John McNulty.
Carol of the Bells remixed
Hail the machines Sweet old machines Blow off the dust wipe off the rust
Christmas has come Joy is foretold For those of us You never sold
Still we are here Still full of cheer Just plug us in It will begin
Hey friend, fear not Blow in the slot Solder re-glue We will come through
Bleep Bloop Beep Bong hear our sweet song If none of our coding is wrong
By the way we remind you that you could Play with us every day of the year
Just ignore that our casing is all mucky We’ll still load for you if we are lucky
Friends us and you Friends we are true We have nothing Better to do
But on this day If you can play Things from back when… You’re young again
Phone in your hand Best in the land Can’t take you back To wonderland
But we can bring Back everything Just reminisce Digital bliss
By the way we remind you that you could Play with us every day of the year
A computer’s not only just for Christmas Sometimes it’s like you don’t even miss us
Safe to shut down We mustn’t frown Our song is done Loft here we come
Image taken from page 582 of ‘The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government’. By various authors [1894]
In what could well become one of the most interesting image collections on the web, the British Library has announced it has uploaded over one million images to Flickr from 65,000 books spanning from the 17th to the 19th century…
Covering a huge range of subjects, the collection includes images of book illustrations, diagrams and maps as well thousands of decorative elements such as borders and illuminated letters. Each image is tagged by year of publication, its unique library book code – indicating the source of where it came from – and the author of the publication (where relevant).
By way of an introduction to this selection of often strange and wonderful imagery, the library’s digital research team has curated a small number of images in a Flickr set from which some of the images included here are taken.
Image taken from page 93 of ‘On the Domesticated Animals of the British Islands: comprehending the natural and economical history of species and varieties; the description of the properties of external form, and observations on the principles and practice’
Image taken from page 78 of ‘Songs for Little People’. With illustrations by H. Stratton
The images have been uploaded to Flickr Commons “for anyone to use, remix and repurpose,” wrote Ben O’Steen on the library’s Digital Scholarship blog on Friday.
O’Steen also explained the additional part to the project, which will rely on the input of users. This follows on from the launch of the British Library Labs’ Mechanical Curator tumblr blog, where “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour”.
Image taken from page 298 of ‘On English Lagoons’. Being an account of the voyage of two amateur wherrymen on the Norfolk and Suffolk rivers and broads. With an appendix, the log of the wherry “Maid of the Mist”. Illustrated, etc
“We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these ‘unseen illustrations’,” he says. “The images were plucked from the pages as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator‘, a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the image’s associated description.
Image taken from page 295 of ‘The Works of G. J. Whyte-Melville’. Edited by Sir H. Maxwell. With illustrations by J. B. Partridge, Hugh Thomson, and others
“We may know which book, volume and page an image was drawn from, but we know nothing about a given image. The title of [the] work may suggest the thematic subject matter of any illustrations in the book, but it doesn’t suggest how colourful and arresting these images are.”
Image taken from page 25 of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. Originally published in “Dramatic Lyrics,” no. 3 in the series “Bells and Pomegranates”
Next year the library plans to unveil a “crowdsourcing application” which will enables users to help describe what the images portray.
“Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content,” says O’Steen. “The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.
“The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on github and are also released under a public-domain ‘licence’. This set of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements that should help others work with this release.”
Image taken from page 297 of ‘To the Snows of Tibet through China’, with illustrations and a map
“There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the library holds many millions of items.”
The library is welcoming questions about the project, and can be reached via email labs@bl.uk and Twitter twitter.com/bl_labs. O’Steen can be reached on Twitter at @benosteen.
Image taken from page 109 of ‘Saturdays to Mondays’, being jottings from the notebooks of K. F. Bellairs on some phases of country life, yachting, etc
“We want to collaborate with researchers and anyone else with a good idea for how to markup, classify and explore this set with an aim to improve the data and to improve and add to the tagging,” says O’Steen. “We are looking to crowdsource information about what is depicted in the images themselves, as well as using analytical methods to interpret them as a whole.”
Image taken from page 124 of ‘Death’s Doings’; consisting of numerous original compositions, in prose and verse, the contributions of various writers; principally intended as illustrations of twenty-four plates designed and etched by R. Dagley
Back for another year, Christmas Gifs is a festive showcase of animated Gifs created by an international group of illustrators, animators and directors
The Christmas Gif project is curated by artist, Ryan Todd who collaborated with digital design studio, Enjoythis to create the online platform to exhibit work from a diverse band of practitioners including Supermundane (Gif above).
The project debuted last year (see our post here) but is now back for another season.
“The aim of the project is twofold: to create a space for professional animators and directors to produce something personal, experimentation or just plain fun and for illustrators and artists who may not have created anything animated before to take their first step into the world of moving image,” Todd says. “The humble gif offers the perfect format in which to create something special.”
Work featured this year includes this golfing Santa by Animade
Digital design studio ustwo has released a teaser video for their latest project – an Escher inspired interactive puzzle app.
Monument Valley is described as a hand-crafted combination of puzzle, graphic design and architecture. Users have to guide a princess through a series of mysterious monuments by uncovering hidden paths, platforms and doorways while avoiding ominous looking Crow People.
The app is still in testing but from what we’ve seen, it’s addictive and beautifully designed. Visuals are inspired by Escher’s optical illusions, Japanese prints and minimalist 3D design, says ustwo, and designer Ken Wong claims the user experience is “somewhere between exploring a toy shop and reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”. It’s intuitive but challenging, the puzzles are cleverly designed and the attention to detail throughout is impressive.
Based in London, Malmo and New York, ustwo was founded by Matt Miller and John Sinclair in 2004. The pair have designed interfaces for some of the world’s biggest brands – and for every Sony Bravia TV – and they’ve been creating innovative apps since the iPhone’s release in 2007.
In 2010, shortly after the iPad was launched, ustwo released Granimator, a series of apps allowing users to interact with the work of graphic artists and create designs to share via Twitter and Facebook. (You can read our July 2010 feature on the studio here).
The studio has also enjoyed huge success with photo sharing and gaming apps: psychedelic game Whale Trail, in which users have to guide a flying whale named Willow, has been downloaded by millions and photo sharing app Rando, which anonymously sends users’ images to other users elsewhere in the world, was downloaded more than 200,000 times in the two months after its launch. Monument Valley has a lot to live up to – but it could be the studio’s most engrossing app yet.
To sign up for beta access to the app, click here.
Around ten million turkeys will be eaten in the UK this Christmas – 90 percent of them factory-farmed. Salford design agency Raw has launched a colourful yet shocking animated campaign explaining the controversial process, and hopes it will convince some consumers to opt for meat-free or free range alternatives…
Let’s Talk Turkey is an interactive website featuring a series of animated illustrations. It begins by explaining how turkeys came to be a Christmas dinner table staple and goes on to highlight the differences in shop-bought, free range and wild turkeys’ health and living conditions.
Users are then invited to pledge their support for vegetarian meals or free-range birds. Those who do are added to a list of ‘backers’ and those who are still unsure about their festive dinner choices are taken to a page providing alternative recipes, information about free range farming and links to animal welfare and organic supplier sites.
The website features some lovely illustrations and some humorous copy, but it also reveals some disturbing facts about cramped conditions, painful beak snipping procedures and selective breeding. It does so, however, without using the kind of shock tactics or gory imagery often employed by animal rights groups.
“The problem we see with many mainstream activist campaigns is that they all too often have the opposite effect or are poorly executed,” says Raw creative director Rob Watson. “Shock tactics don’t seem to get viewed, as people immediately click off a website or stop a video [when] it is gruesome and upsetting. We felt the best way to start to engage people was to present them with the facts, but make the journey more engaging – even if it’s just one element that makes them think twice and become more conscious, that’s all it takes,” he adds.
Raw came up with the idea around six weeks ago following discussions over a change in eating habits in the studio: “We’ve worked with food chains in the past but this year has seen a real shift in our studio culture, with four out of seven of the team being predominantly vegetarian, and with the horse meat scandal earlier in the year, more and more people seem to be waking up to the realities of the factory meat industry,” he adds.
Most Brits will be understandably reluctant to change their festive eating habits, particularly when organic and free range alternatives cost so much more than supermarket birds. But by opting for colour, humour and positive reinforcement over gruesome photographs, Raw has designed an educational animal welfare campaign that is easier to digest but no less compelling.
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