Hasta La Ideas

There are definitely some standout designers in the comics industry, ones who really know how to make comic book cover pop, but it’s still kind of sad that a well-designed comic cover is so infrequent in such a design-heavy field. And usually it’s the less-mainstream books that have more room to be creative with their cover designs, away from the stereotypical smorgasbords of superheroes. So imagine my surprise when I saw the cover for one of Marvel’s newest flagship titles, Wolverine and the X-Men, which looks like someone actually made some conscious design choices here!

That person is Eisner-nominated comic book letterer Jared K. Fletcher. Fletcher was tasked with corralling the plethora of Marvel’s X-Men titles under one central logo that could be tailored to fit the specific X-title, creating a family of X-Men logos. This is a sharp change from the past standard of each X-Men title having its own logo and branding, leading to confusion about which of the various X-titles fit into the overall X-Men universe.

Fletcher tracked down every old X-Men logo he could find, from comic books to video games. The general trend in the history of the comic’s logo was to separate the letter “X” from the “Men” and really emphasize the hyphen. Titles on the periphery, such as New Mutants or Wolverine, eliminated the “X-Men” entirely. Perhaps the most clever and iconic logo was Richard Starking’s New X-Men logo that reads the same upside down (i.e. it’s an ambigram).

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Apple’s designer Jonathan Ive is to receive a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. Ive has said that he is “both humbled and sincerely grateful” for the award.

Apple’s senior vice president, industrial design, will receive the KBE for “services to design and enterprise”. He had previously received the CBE.

Ive joined Apple in 1992, becoming head of industrial design in 1998, the year in which the original iMac (below) was launched. Ive’s team went on to design the iPod, iPhone and iPad – a succession of beautiful, seductive products that are as intuitive to use as they are attractive to look at. But, at a time when designers are feeling grossly undervalued, it is to be hoped that Ive’s knighthood will bring recognition for perhaps a more enduring contribution to his field – in demonstrating the importance of design to the success of business, or, indeed, any organisation.

That importance wasn’t always understood, even at Apple. Before Steve Jobs’ return to the company he had founded in 1996, Ive had been feeling frustrated. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, in the period that Jobs was away from the company, engineers would hand over the guts of a machine and expect the designers just to put it all in a box. Under Jobs, design became integral to the entire process of product development.

Certainly Ive enjoyed an extremely close working relationship with Jobs. The latter is quoted as saying “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony”. It’s remarkable just how much time Jobs and Ive apparently spent together: Isaacson says they would have lunch most days that Jobs was in the office and Jobs would routinely spend afternoons in Ive’s studio studying models and concepts.

But it was not all sweetness and light: according to Isaacson, Ive “got upset with Jobs for taking too much credit” for some ideas. “It hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs,” Isaacson quotes Ive as saying.

Of course, others have accused Ive of borrowing from Dieter Rams. For his part, Ive has always acknowledged his admiration for Rams and his ability to produce consistent, considered and beautiful products. Writing for the Telegraph last year, Rams noted one key similarity between them – that both enjoyed very close relationships with the heads of the businesses they worked for. “At Braun I always reported to Erwin and Artur Braun or, after their departure, the chairman of the board. It is the same in my relationship with the furniture manufacturer, Vitsoe, where I worked closely with the founder Niels Vitsoe and, since his death, Mark Adams,” Rams said.

The key question now is whether Ive will enjoy the same relationship with Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook as he did with Jobs. Some had predicted that Ive would step up to take on Jobs’ mantle at Apple himself instead of Cook. There were even (unsubstantiated) rumours in the UK press earlier in the year that Ive was considering returning to the UK. Ive’s knighthood comes at an intriguing time for both himself and the company he has done so much for.

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Graham Bleathman is nearly synonymous with Gerry Anderson, pioneer of a plethora of marionette “supermarionation” sci-fi children’s shows in the 1960’s. But Bleathman did not get involved in the worlds of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and Stingray until three decades later when he started to provide illustrations for their revival comic book series.

Thunderbirds made a bit of a comeback in the 2000’s, including a film with Ben Kingsley that is best forgotten, but also with a fantastic book of cross-sections all by Bleathman. He soon followed this up with another book featuring cross-sections of vehicles from the whole range of supermarionation shows.

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To mark its 50th birthday, D&AD is delving into its archive to highlight significant pieces of work that have featured in the awards. We will be publishing one a week. This time, it’s the turn of Design Research Unit’s radically modern symbol for British Rail, first awarded by D&AD in 1966

The arrows of indecision. The barbed wire. The crow’s feet. In the 50 years since he drew up one of the UK’s most recognisable symbols while working at Design Research Unit, designer Gerry Barney has heard them all. But he doesn’t mind. While the public was to gradually fall out of love with British Rail as an organisation, its double arrow logo carried on, quietly working away as a beautifully simple and remarkably relevant piece of design.

The symbol was third in CR’s list of our 20 favourite logos, published in our April 2011 issue. You can read the full article on the symbol, including and interview with Barney and archive images, here

Related Content

Read the first post on this series, on Barrie Bates’ 1963 A union, Jack! poster, here

And the second post, on Derek BIrdsall’s covers for Penguin books, here

And the third, on the Go to Work on an Egg ad campaign here

D&AD’s 50-year timeline of landmark work is here

Creative Review’s February issue will feature our 20 favoruite slogans of all time

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

I discovered the work of Yoshohiro Inomoto in a Japanese book from 1986 called Illustrated Transportation that I found buried in the stacks at The Strand Bookstore. While there are a variety of artists featured in the book, with each given about a page, Inomoto has most of a chapter devoted to his photorealistic cutaways of cars, motorcycles, and engines.

Inomoto was mainly a self-taught artist who in 1952 began working for the Toyo Kogyo Company, which would later become Mazda, working on designing new cars. In 1957, he left for Nissan’s advertising branch and about two decades later started his career as a freelance illustrator. He has apparently been named “The Cutaway King” by Road & Track magazine.

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