Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government’s websites into a single site.

“There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one,” says Terrett. “The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn’t have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it’s there. They don’t have to know which department has what information.”

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. “People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he says. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need.”

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK’s road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: “There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work,” he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network. “The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we’re doing.”

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. “Something we’re trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want,” Terrett says. “You shouldn’t come to the website and go: ‘wow, look at the graphic design’. We haven’t yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they’re still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that.”

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. “Google Glass and other things that we don’t know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff,” he says. “But there’s a long way to go and I think it’s a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge.”

The Gov.uk website is shortlisted for this year’s Designs of the Year award, alongside high-profile projects such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “We’re trying to get design
out of the way” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg discusses synthetic biology – a new field of science that could see designers creating artificial lifeforms.

For example, bacteria could one day be developed to excrete brightly coloured pigments when they detect disease inside your body, alerting you via vividly coloured poo.

Synthetic biology is a development of the age-old practice of selective breeding, Ginsberg explains: “We’ve been designing biology for 10,000 years or more,” she says. “Every crop, or your pet dog – it has all been designed in a way. It’s been iterated and iterated by human decisions into the thing that we want. The idea behind synthetic biology is that you can get much more control and start moving things across living kingdoms that haven’t interacted at a genetic level before.”

Ginsberg gives the example of E.chromi, a project she worked on with fellow designer James King and undergraduate students at Cambridge University, which won the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in 2009. “It’s a competition where thousands of students from around the world get together to design a bacteria that does something cool,” she explains. “We were working with students at Cambridge who were designing bacteria that produce different coloured pigments.”

As part of the project, Ginsberg and her team considered the possible future applications and implications of their work. “We imagined that in about 2039 it would become culturally acceptable to drink a Yakult-type yoghurt laced with E.chromi bacteria that would start to detect diseases in your gut,” she says. “If you had a disease they’d start producing a corresponding coloured pigment. So coloured poo is the thing that everyone has taken from this project, as a new kind of interface for biological computing.”

Not content to simply present the project as a series of diagrams, Ginsberg and King created a mock-up of what the imagined excrement might look like. “We wanted to challenge the scientists and engineers who are actually inventing the technology with what we thought was an interesting aesthetic response,” She explains. “They’re representing it as cogs and machines, but this is biology. We shouldn’t be shy or coy about talking about what’s unique about this technology.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “We’ve been designing biology
for 10,000 years” appeared first on Dezeen.

News: British graphic design studio IDO has redesigned the logo and website for the estate of Gerry Anderson, the creator of classic puppet television series Thunderbirds and Stingray (+ movie).

Led by designer Dave Low, IDO created a red, black and white A-shaped logo for all Anderson Entertainment websites and printed materials.

The letter is defined by a silhouette of a rocket blasting off towards the moon and stars, referencing the space-age machines that fascinated British television producer Anderson, who died last year.

The studio stripped back the logo to a simple tessellating A-shape to create white and grey backgrounds (below) for the website, and produced a series of teaser movies using stills from each of Anderson’s television series, including Captain Scarlet and Joe 90.

“We opted for flat colours and an illustrative style, giving a slightly retro look that would sit well with the legacy shows but at the same time look to the future and a new audience to convey that a new, exciting adventure was beginning,” Low explained.

“I loved watching Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 as a kid and am delighted to have been involved in bringing the exciting news that new Gerry Anderson projects are on their way.”

Earlier today we reported on graphic designer Shepard Fairey’s new mission badge for astronauts on the International Space Station – see all graphic design.

Here’s some more information from IDO:

IDO creates new identity for Gerry Anderson.

We’re very excited to reveal that IDO has been working with the estate of Gerry Anderson on an extensive rebrand, encompassing all of its online and social media channels and to coincide with the news that brand-new and official Gerry Anderson productions are on their way!

We went through a number of iterations, rejecting some things, keeping others and fine-tuning – back and forth until it felt right. We wanted to create something that was bold and unmistakably Gerry Anderson. It had to look good on the website and social media as well as printed material – cards, T-shirts, merchandise and the like.

Ten teaser videos, icons, backgrounds, wallpaper, text, photos, branded assets for Facebook and Youtube have been produced and the website and social channels are now live.

The post New logo for Thunderbirds
creator Gerry Anderson appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview at Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura, partner at creative agency PARTY, explains the process behind a television commercial he made featuring dancing sperm.

Kawamura describes how he was approached by a Japanese music television company called Space Shower TV to produce a commercial for their Music Saves Tomorrow campaign, a response to the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. “There were a couple of other directors working on it and they were doing very serious, dramatic, emotional commercials,” Kawamura explains. “But I wanted to do something more fun, just to bring back the smiles to the people.”

All Kawamura had to work with was the Music Saves Tomorrow tagline. “For me, ‘tomorrow’ meant the next generation and the children, but I didn’t want to show kids in a TV commercial,” he says. “So I was thinking if there was any other way to visualise these seeds of tomorrow and I thought, well, what if I went a step further and not show kids but show sperm?”

In the 60-second commercial that Kawamura came up with, animated sperm dance in formation to music. Kawamura describes the unusual lengths he and his team went to to create it. “We looked around and there was an all-male crew, so we decided to collect our sperm and bring it to a bio lab,” he says. “We scanned it and motion-captured our sperm and used that data to create the animations. I think nobody else has done that in history.”

Watch the full commercial here.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “I think we were the first in history to
motion-capture our own sperm” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: recent design graduate Leanie van der Vyver speaks to us about her project Scary Beautiful, a pair of extreme, back-to-front high heels, which she presented at Design Indaba in Cape Town. 

Van der Vyver, who comes from Cape Town originally, explains the concept behind the shoes, which she developed as part of her graduation project while at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. “In my thesis I wrote about how humans are constantly trying to reach perfection and the different ways that we practice control over our bodies,” she says. “I looked at what the high heel is traditionally doing and I pushed it over to see where sexy ends and grotesque begins.”

The project drew gasps and laughs from the Design Indaba audience in equal measure when van der Vyver showed video footage of a model walking in the shoes as part of her PechaKucha talk. She explains that the contorting effect they have on the wearer was a key part of the project.

“The effect of the shoe became more important than the shoe, so the shoe became a kind of accessory to the posture,” she says. “What was interesting was that it became an amplification of what the high heel does. So if the girl’s butt is slightly pushed out [when wearing high heels], in these ones she’s almost raring to go, with her butt lewdly sticking out and her legs animalistically flexed.”

Scary Beautiful followed on from an earlier project of van der Vyver’s, a pair of trainers designed to “inflict a gangster swagger” on the wearer (below). It was this project, she says, that made her realise that “you can actually do a lot more with fashion in terms of it altering the body and its performance.”

But while neither project is a serious proposal for new footwear, van der Vyver was surprised by the response Scary Beautiful received from the fashion industry. “People reacted in a positive way from the fashion side of things, they were very excited about it,” she says. “But the general public, not so much.” Read more about Scary Beautiful in our earlier story about the project.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “I wanted to see where sexy ends
and grotesque begins” appeared first on Dezeen.