Logo Love

I have a deep, abiding love of abstraction, limits, and logos that afford creative application.
Designed by DJ Stout of Pentagram, the playful logo for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History reflects the institution’s early roots as a children’s museum and their comittement to learning. The logo was also inspired by the design of the new building. Architect Ricardo Legorretta is known for his bold Mexican-influenced color palette and recurring use of the square as a design motif.

Is it abstract?
Look at all those squares! It’s just a bunch of colored shapes, and it’s a set of letters. The designers developed not only the letters within the logo, but an entire alphabet composed exclusively of . . .


On Limits:
Look at all those squares! And right angles. All in three colors. Each letter is contained within a solid, identically sized square with counters and negative space formed by squares or groups of squares.

Creativity is often seen as a product of freedom, while the vital role of restriction is overlooked. Restriction is the obstacle that must be overcome, the problem that must be solved. Limits allow creativity to shine in this work.

Creative Application:
Thinking of a logo as a building block, a sort of Lego you can play with and rearrange to create new interest is not an analogy but a literal description of this design. In the museum monogram above, the logo work beautifully in a vertical format as well as horizontally. Go to Pentagram’s site and see this design in line form on a van, integrated with graphics on a poster, and proposed as various three-dimensional objects.

Really Great Beginnings

Great Beginnings is a mid-1980’s collaboration between Paula Scher and Steven Koppel. In beginning a new design studio, they believed that their strength and the reason that clients would hire them was their flexible, expressive typographic style. To sell the great beginnings of their new studio, they created a small self-promotional book that featured the first two paragraphs of famous novels. Each chapter opener was designed in the graphic style from the period in which the novel was written.

The designs are bold, the type functions both as form and content, the graphic elements are seamlessly combined with the type, and the minimal color pallet unifies the stylistically diverse spreads. The concept as a self-promotion for a new firm is excellent and portrays the designers as intelligent, tasteful, and culturally and visually literate.

The production of the book—a 5” x 7” two-color, perfect-bound piece—was both economical and effective in attracting and maintaining attention. The booklet attracted attention stylistically: in the context of the 80’s the all-type, historically informed designs were innovative. The booklet maintained attention as a physical object: Scher remarks that in all her years of receiving promotional material, she never threw away perfect-bound booklets.

Scher and Koppel printed and mailed six thousand copies of the book to potential clients. The promotion proved successful and they received calls for new buisness almost immediately. An unintended consequence of the booklet, however, was that many clients viewed it as a catalog of style. They assumed that Koppel & Scher were a period design group, that they'd be ordering a constructivist or art nouveau design. Scher writes, “All through the eighties clients seemed to believe they were buying style, not thinking.”





Images and quote from Make It Bigger, Paula Scher, pp66–69, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

ALL ONE!

Behold the magic soap that unites mankind, spaceship earth, genuine compassion, a "more is more" philosophy when it comes to copywriting, and dreadful typography — ALL ONE! First, I need to mention that this is great soap. I am especially fond of the peppermint (pictured). In reviewing the documentary "Doctor Bronner's Magic Soapbox" David White had this to say: "(I)t's great soap. You should buy some. Just make sure you follow the directions on the manifesto-crammed label ("DILUTE! DILUTE! DILUTE!") or your 'undercarriage' will sting like crazy. "

About the label. (Click on the image to see it larger.) The layout ignores any and all typographic conventions such as readable line lengths. (The longest line lengths are 50+ words.) Focus on a concise message is also out the window as the ruling principle seems to be, "Why waste space by leaving it empty?"

Doctor Bronner (It may surprise you to hear that he wasn't really a doctor.) wrote the copy using a curious strain of English that I'll call Bronglish. Bronglish employs unique sentence structure, odd abbreviations (Thos. for Thomas), creative hyphenation, and a general substitution of exclamation marks for periods. Below is an example that illustrates most of the above. I have been careful to maintain the "formatting."
5th: Whatever unites mankind is better than whatever divides us! Yet, if absolute-unselfish I am not for me, I'm not but classless, raceless, starving masses, never free nor brave! Only if constructive selfish I work hard perfecting first me, like Mark Spitz - arctic owls - penguin - pilot - cat - swallow - beaver, bee, can I teach the MORAL ABC's ALL - GOD - FAITH, that lightning-like unites the human race! For we're ALL-ONE or NONE! "listen children eternal father eternally one!" EXCEPTIONS ETERNALLY? ABSOLUTE NONE!A team of graphic designers and copywriters would have never allowed this. It's good we didn't touch the project. All these quirks are now hallmarks of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. "Oh, yeah! The soap with all the writing on it," people will say. The label is unique, recognizable, and distinguishes itself from other products.

But packaging and typography weren't important to Bronner. Even the soap was secondary to his message of teaching the moral ABC and uniting spaceship earth. Emmanuel Bronner traveled the country, spreading his teachings and distributing his soap until his death in 1997. His eldest son, Ralph, now does the same.

All this and more about the soap, the maker, the message, the company, and how they have been and continue to be a true force for good in the world are include in the documentary, Doctor Bronner's Magic Soapbox. The documentary is produced and directed by Sarah Lamm with graphic design by Dmitri Siegel.The basic message of both the documentary and the over 30,000 words on the soap bottle are summarized on the company's activism page:
1. Constructive capitalism is where you share the profit with the workers and the earth from which you made it.

2. We are all brothers and sisters and we should take care of each other and spaceship earth.
And last, a picture of Doc Bronner, uniting spaceship earth with his cool and tingly peppermint soap.

We Are (Miriam's drawings)

This is the start of a new series. Each piece is executed in Rapidograph pen on 6” x 9” card stock with torn edges. You can click on the images to see them more clearly. I’ve also included a detail of each piece. Each drawing show a physical space and configuration of figures that depicts an emotional space and some elements of work or play, ease or difficulty of a relationship. The font is a hand-drawn Bodoni.

“We are in the garden” represents leisure and life’s pleasures. The image is structured after Lucas Cranach the younger's variation on Adam and Eve (1537). I’ve substituted beer and pie for fig leaves, the car for the deer in the background, and (my favorite) the garden hose as the snake.



“We are in different rooms” represents conflict and difference in a symmetrical image differentiated by value reversal and opposites—dark and light, night and day, and lights on and off.



“We are in the kitchen” represents necessity—cleaning, doing the dishes, taking out the trash. The image is about harmonious effort and the mundane.



The finished series will have six drawings, followed by stylistic and format variations.

I Heart MG

I have recently become infatuated with Milton Glaser. And my husband's fine with it; in fact, he got me all the books I've been pouring over. In case you're not familiar with Milton Glaser or his work, above is probably his most famous design. I'm not crazy about the NY logo but I really like what Glaser wrote about it: "[This piece] has become so much a part of the general language that it's hard to imagine that it was designed by someone and did not always exist."

What's funny is that it is in relation to this design that I first encountered Milton Glaser and my response was, "Someone designed that?" Below are some of Glaser's other works and the real reason for why "I Heart Milton Glaser." I've focused on typographic pieces that play with both form and language.

This design is like little poem. It has words within words, all of which can be arranged and combined in different ways to create different meanings that relate to each other and to the subtext. The subtext (hard to read at this scale) says: "There are some things that make life worth living, and some things you can't live without."

My favorite thing about "Old/New" it that it uses an old-style, serif font for "OLD" and a bold sans for "NEW." Typo-historically (I just made up that word.), sans serif are comparatively new.

Next design.
First reaction, after seeing the top three lines: Wow! I can't believe how readable this is!
Second reaction, after reading "remains": OMG! It's so true! Art is what remains, incomplete in the memory but somehow still creating an impact. How cool that the letters create this message formally as well as literally.
Lastly: I'm loving the pile of debris at the bottom of the design, the remains of the statement, implying that ideas, like living beings, one day have an end.
At the end of "Art is Work" is an essay by Glaser for AIGA Journal, 2000. He writes, "[R]ead the following chart to determine how far down on the road to Hell you are willing to go." Click the image to get a larger, more readable image.
And lastly, a "content guide" for design . . . out of 250.05%.

All images from Art is Work, Milton Glaser, 2000, Overlook Press, NY.

Hey, Penguin Fans!

If you have a soft spot for old Penguin book covers, you'll enjoy these parodys by M. S. Corley. He has redesigned the seven Harry Potter books in the manner of vintage Penguins. Admittedly, my interest in these is also due to being a Harry Potter fan. The choice of subject matter and imagery is really appropriate to each book. Below are two favorites.
I prefer this stylistic treatment to the actual illustrations for Harry Potter. In their generality and reduction, these images are more universal and call forth larger themes in the books. The cover for The Chamber of Secrets shows the classic subjects of vanquisher and foe, knight and dragon, menace and victory. The Deathly Hallows cover is very psychological, addressing issues of fear and isolation. Who knew that we'd end up feeling sorry for "you know who." See the whole series.

Paper, Plastic, or Canvas?

There is a great article on Design Observer on canvas totes, design, and environmental concerns. I’ve included two pictures from the post along with some summary quotes. If you’re interested, check out the whole article.
I'm Not a Plastic Bag, tote bag, Anya Hindmarch, 2007
Resistance is Fertile, tote bag, Adrian Johnson, 2008

“The environmental promise of reusable bags becomes pretty dubious when there are closets and drawers full of them in every home. This contradiction can largely be traced back to the influence of graphic design. Once this gorgeous flat surface presented itself, it quickly became simply a substrate for messaging, branding, promotion, etc. Judging by the cost, producing one tote is roughly equivalent to producing 400 plastic bags. That’s fine if you actually use the tote 400 times, but what if you just end up with 40 totes in your closet? Once the emphasis shifts from reusing a bag to having a bag that reflects your status or personality, the environmental goal starts drifting out of sight.”

“The designs that make each bag unique contribute to an over-abundance of things that are essentially identical and the constant stream of newness discourages reuse.”

The gist of the article: it is tricky to solve a consumption problem with more consumption. What the canvas bag did well was create awareness: “The aesthetic power of a single design raised more awareness about the impact of plastic bags on our environment than any government or non-governmental organization. On the other hand, it is unclear that a consumable can counteract the effects of consumption.”