Hasta La Ideas

Meet John White (above). As a busy graphic designer, nothing makes him happier than solving his clients’ problems. Unfortunately, John’s busy schedule of giving Powerpoint presentations and waving a briefcase (briefcase?) in the air at street corners to hail passing cabs can turn him from a stylish designer of graphics into a sweaty beast-man. Hey, it can happen to the best of us. But, sweat ye no longer, practioners of graphic design: John’s solved his own (and your) embarrassing sweat problem and has very kindly begun broadcasting the happy news all over TV – in the form of a new advert for Sure deodorant. Hooray!

Library mural design by Stefan Sagmeister and Yuko Shimizu

CR will be blogging from this year’s Design Indaba in Cape Town this week. Co-host and speaker Michael Bierut kicked off the festival this morning with a deft presentation about how sometimes as a designer it pays to be humble…

Pentagram partner Bierut talked us through a project that he did pro bono for The Robin Hood Foundation, titled The Library Inititive (covered extensively by CR in our July 2006 issue), which invited architects to each design a library for a public school in New York. Bierut was asked to be the graphic designer on the project, which he acknowledged that he initially thought would be easy, with “just a logo” required.

“I thought it was the chance to do something nice but also something easy,” he said. “The architects were doing all the work. I could share in the glory without working too hard.”

Despite this, he delivered an intially complex solution, based around the concept that libraries were innately boring, and thus needed to be entirely rebranded. Surprised that this did not receive the applause he expected, he was then gently guided towards a simpler idea by the Foundation, which should just encourage library use (which many of the kids at the schools had had little experience of, due to poor facilities). This resulted in the logo L!BRARY.

“We were trying to say ‘this is a library with a surprise inside’,” he explained. Bierut thought this would be it, but was faced with seeing the logo evolve out of his hands, with it being adapted by each library, to suit its individual needs. As he discovered to his relief though, his simple use of the exclamation mark allowed consistency despite its different iterations across the libraries.

Library mural design by Dorothy Kretz

From there Bierut’s contribution took a surprising turn, as he became involved with the interior design of the libraries, specifically in filling the space that existed in most between the bookcases and the ceiling. He suggested a mural and the first of these was created by his wife, Dorothy Kretz, who photographed the top students at the school and displayed their images around the space (shown above).

Such was the success of this, that all the architects were keen to include murals inside the various libraries – Bierut insisted each be different and now the mural project includes contributions by photographers, designers, illustrators and artists, all taking a slightly different approach. Stefan Sagmeister, Christoph Niemann, Charles Wilkin, and Maira Kalman have all contributed works to various libraries.

Library mural design by Peter Arkle

Bierut ended the talk by explaining what he had learnt on the project, which had evolved to be far more eclectic and involving than he’d first expected. Here are his five lessons learned…

1. Don’t be so darned clever. Don’t try and outsmart everyone, do something responsible.

2. The more power you give away, the more you get.

3.The real opportunity may not be part of your scope of work.

4. Consistency does not equal sameness.

5. The audience is more wonderful than you think. Keep thinking about them.

More info on the Design Indaba can be found here.

Dynamic content module with text links

A new ‘global visual language’ for the BBC’s online activities by Research Studios is set to be rolled out over the next few months. We have a selection of images from their ongoing work for the network…

The project, won by the studio in August last year, apparently stems from an intention to unify cross-platform concepts – over both bbc.co.uk and bbc.com – and consolidate all design elements, such as typography, colour palette and iconography, into a style guide for the organisation.

News page (left) and embedded player (top right) on baseline grid

From the examples of work that the studio released today, it seems an extensive undertaking, with new grids, templates and fonts emerging, making for much cleaner page layouts. It also suggests a more dynamic approach to incorporating type ontop of imagery and a desire to use ‘carousels’ of scrollable content and some neat-looking embedded media players.

Grid structure

Research Studios worked with the BBC’s various internal teams (including head of user experience and design, Brownyn Van Der Mere, and project lead, Ben Gammon) on News and Sport, Homepage, Search and Search Products, Embedded Media Player (EMP), Global Navigation and Mobile.

News page template

“To have been so intrinsically involved in changing and growing the design and philosophy of the BBC’s digital offering has been amazing”, says RS creative director, Neville Brody. “This point in time is a major juncture not only for the BBC but also for all media publishers, and the new ways in which we will embrace and use information and entertainment in the future are being evolved and invented right now.”

‘Drawers’ device with various typographical styling

“The core approach has been to find a simple, modern and compelling experience based around dramatic and scalable editorial concepts,” continues Brody. “Today, BBC online is an extraordinarily expansive offering with over 400 top-level sites, and this is a clearly a work in progress. I envisage more and more inventions and nuanced ideas coming into play as the project evolves and the design starts to reach into the distant corners of the map.”

Concepts for using type on imagery

“Together with the BBC we have to-date established the central philosophy and core building blocks or DNA, and, we hope, to continue to work closely with the organization in depth across differing and different BBC sites in order to expand the language and establish its scalability.”

As part of the style guide created for the BBC online, Research Studios came up with the following colour wheel and neutral wheel (whites, greys and blacks), gradient usage and colour usage guidlines:

And here’s the series of icons created for use on all the BBC’s online channels:

The studio will add more work as it’s completed to researchstudios.com over the next few months.

When he is not designing books for Isaac Mizrahi, Peter Buchanan-Smith devotes his time to his side project, a range of beautifully crafted axes called Best Made. We want to find out what sidelines you have on the go…

New York-based Best Made Co. was founded by designer and author Peter Buchanan-Smith, and outdoorsman and environmental entrepreneur Graeme Cameron. The pair brought out their first range of hand-crafted choppers last year.

But Buchanan-Smith is far from the first creative type to bring out a sideline. Simon Waterfall (of, until recently, Poke) has his Social Suicide clothing range

while his ex-colleague Nic Roope has his Hulger phones

then there is Digit founder Daljit Singh and his soon-to-be-launched range of sausages, Mr Singh’s Bangras

not to mention Sir John Hegarty’s wine

and various creative types are involved in the high-end cycling wear  range Rapha.

But these are just the better-known examples. We want to find out if any of you also have sideline projects, or if you know of others who do. If we find enough interesting ones, they will feature in a future issue of the magazine. So, please let us know in the comments below, with links.

We want to know what you get up to when you’re not designing/art directing etc etc (or reading this here blog…)

ONull is written in Java and uses Processing as a graphical engine. Awesome vector generator that rasterizes an image to give you a vector output file. You can choose the squares, crosses, circles, etc. or you can import your own vector to use as the “pixels.” Excellent tool.