Intelligent Design

Squire's honesty

Squirelogo

Leading on from the Australian rant from yesterday, I found this little beer boklet while cleaning out my desk today. I was going to have a stab at how aussie the type is and have another whinge, but I'm in a good mood, so I thought I would talk positive about this.

Squireinside

Squirebeers

I'm not to thrilled about the faux woodblock/old shorthands used for each beer logo (we've all done it) or the glass text shapes. I guess they could have had a bitmore rusticana thrown in. But what I absolutely love is the beer map.

Squiremap_2

I've never had a good wine palette. I like wine, but I can never remember what a Pinot or a Merlot is supposed to taste like. I've done a bit of tasting and try as I might, as soon as its gone I just can't remember. Suddenly, where supposed to be doing the same thing with beer and I just feel lost. I know what I like, I just don't know why. But here, it makes it so simple, so easy for me to navigate gourmet beers of todays day and age.

I don't really like Squire but I love what they've done here showing all the other beers on a cartographic grid. Divided alongst colour - Black to Pale to Amber Brown on the X axis with Ales and Larger on the Y. Dividing it down the centre outwards is the flavour scale of Hoppy and Malty on the left, Bitter and Sweet at the top.

I feel like a beer now, but at least I know what I want.

Posted on October 02, 2007 in Intelligent Design | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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The Citizenship Test

Citizenship_3

Howardism and its followers left another mark on Australia today with the introduction of the new Citizenship test. While I would love to get stuck into the politics behind it, believe me I would, I have a much more personal gripe against this test.

Surely as a nation, we can do better than Gill Sans?

Yet I find it all too fitting that the most British of typefaces is used here. From the stark white background, the proudly waving flag, to the authorative yet calming centred layout, this is a perfect piece of Howard era Australiana. Menzies would be proud. They even managed to sneak in some green and gold to show how true blue it is.

Citizenship3

This is why we need our Gill, more than ever. This isn't representative of Australian culture. This is all British stiff upper lip. Where's the typographic larrikinism? Mateship? Where's the sense of 'she'll be right' in all of this? Everyone talks about Australian Design, but where's Australian typography in all of this? Why hasn't our own (albeit colonial) vernacular been pillaged for the sake of type. If New York has its Gotham, why don't we have a Bruce? A pavlova? A hills hoist? Fuck, I'd even settle for an Aussie Battler Sans. Surely the type revivalist trend of the past few years would have turned out one textface with Aussie sensibilities.

Instead we're stuck with this design equivalent of a White Australia.

Citizenship2


Posted on October 01, 2007 in Intelligent Design | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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The problem with mimicry


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Not the first time I've seen this kind of thing done, but I find this example especially saddening. James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" was a landmark book when it came out (at the right time no less), overturning conventional wisdom about organisational theory, economic and political systems and human behaviour, and how best to use the information he presents. The cover perfectly represents the books concepts in a clean crisp format, with its surprisingly no nonsense use of Mrs Eaves and a well dispersed crowd, letting the symmetrical and asymmetrical aspects of the layout play against each other.

But its such a shame that "A Crowd of One" copies it so blatantly. While the book isn't as groundbreaking as The Wisdom of Crowds (it got there first), it covers almost completely different ground, focusing more on the nature of identity and how it has and will play out in the years to come. Sure, if the Wisdom of Crowds had a different cover, then this would have been a suitable choice for a cover. And its such a shame that either the publisher or designer chose such a blatant rip off, right down to Mrs Eaves, not to mention not being as well designed as its predecessor. Its sad because it cheapens itself, and removes the validity of the book and the author, made even worse considering the point of his book - Identity.

Posted on August 14, 2007 in Intelligent Design | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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More cigarettes

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I have done market research for cigarettes, both flavour and packaging, and they are both always very controlled. Whenever I've done packaging for market research, its always a gradual process, with hardly any differentiation between style, colour and type. I could always pick out the differences, seeing which market they were thinking of moving into. A bit more of a hand cursive script, less gold and more yellow and presto, Benson & Hedges were instantly a sassy summery smoke. A metal special edition case, and Winfield just got a whole lot tougher. I always felt a touch smug knowing that my brand, my beloved Bank would never change. Sure, let the others stumble over each trying to come out with special editions. Drum, the blandest of all rolling tobaccos played around with special editions, oh so cool taglines, and a fairly nifty new packaging material. But never Bank. For so many years I had identified myself through its never changing, solid, comfortable and simple packaging. Its semiotics and me had formed a perfect symbiotic relationship. We even got through the horrible picture warnings together. I mean sure, I could have done with a bit more authentico trimmings and a little less Arial on the scroll, but I was happy.

And then one day I was horrified to find the abberation below replacing its usual packaging. I mean Engravers Gothic? And the Airplane? Where the hell did that come from? I mean, I love a good Engraving Gothic when it suits (hint, look up), but not on my Bank. There was nothing gradual about this at all, unless you count the colour, that was the only thing that didn't change alot. The species in between these two would have been a lovely solution, instead I'm stuck with this this inorganic designed piece of packaging. Its a good thing they're addictive.
Banknew_4

Posted on August 08, 2007 in Intelligent Design | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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    Elsewhere

    • Twenty years fore and aft
      Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.
    • The movie set that ate itself
      One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss.
    • A critique on the critical
      Critical design cannot predict the future. Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!). It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present.
    • How algorithms shape our world
      And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight.
    • Inside the mind of an octopus
      Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.
    • Innovation Starvation
      SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
    • The Elusive Big Idea
      And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.
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      Which is why I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it. On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word.
    • Network Realism
      So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter. The stream contains references, mixed up, to Prada shoes and Idoru dancers. All links. All references, premade scenes waiting to be pulled into the flow of fiction. When the Festo drones appear in the text, they appear in the same location, same architecture as in those product videos. The network’s readymades. Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.) ... it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.
    • Is 2011 a year that will change the world?
      For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” John Harris

    The Gentleman's Library

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      Traversing through four different modes of experience the book centres around a cholera outbreak of 1854. Acting as the unifier, the map provides a visual thesis to the long zoom approach taken with both the story and the solutions needed to understand not only the disease, but germs in general.

    • Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

      The power of organizing without organizations

      As the printing press and radio had profound changes by amplifying the flow of one way communication, the internet is now having even deeper changes in the amplification of group communication. The impact that new modes of communication will create won't be properly felt until the technology ceases to be exciting and becomes banal and invisible.

    • Thomas De Zengotita: Mediated

      How the Media Shape Your World

      A sophisticated and highly inventive look at the affects of the saturation post-modernity has had on our daily lives, and possibly the last great book to do so. Immersed in options and unable to discern the authentic from representations, we're helplessly self conscious and unable to prevent ourselves from treating our lives as performance. Thankfully the book is loaded with satire and irony to help navigate the self-referentially loaded book.

    • John Man: Alpha Beta

      How our alphabet shaped the western world

      Tracks the history of the latin alphabet as it trickles down through history. At each transitory phase the alphabet is given new meaning and power, and in turn provides the culture with a new set of tools to define themselves with. The strength of the alphabet lies in it's simplicity and it's ability to adapt to new circumstances and environments.

    • Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You

      How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter

      While many show open contempt for the perceived dumbing down of culture by mindless entertainment, the book argues the opposite. Instead of looking at the content, the book looks at the increasing complexity and thinking needed to participate with today's video games, movies and tv shows. Our brains are happiest when searching for increased intricacy, adding to the feedback loop making our amusements much more interesting.

    • Steven Johnson: Emergence

      The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software

      The metaphor for the world has previously been viewed through the prism of the tree, mechanical clockwork and the atom. Now the humble slime mould with it's bottom up organisation will prove a fitting image for how we see the world in coming decades. As simple rules can account for breathtaking complexity that can be viewed across diverse disciplines, this book acts as a massive precursor to his theory of the long zoom.

    • Daniel Harris: Cute Quaint, Hungry and Romantic

      The Aesthetics of Consumerism

      A fairly thorough critique at not just the visual aesthetics of consumerism but the hidden nuance of scent, tactility, sound and many other details usually lacking from books of this kind. While limited to the low brow the book is scathingly sardonic across all fronts, not just those covered in the title.

    • John Henry Clippinger: A Crowd of One

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      Acknowledging the progress brought on by the Enlightenment, the author contends that its overbearing legacy of the Individual needs reconsidering. Looking at evolutionary biology,
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      More of his work can be found here.

    • James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds

      Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations

      While a bit of a love in for free markets, the book successfully manages to argue the assumption made in the subtitle. Looking at wide ranging anecdotes, he breaks up crowd wisdom into three distinct advantages – cognition, coordination and cooperation. Coupled with the four fundamentals needed for an intelligent crowd – diversity, independence, decentralisation and aggregation –
      the central thesis seems more prescient as time goes on.

    • Robert Kinross: Unjustified Texts

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      Why the rich get richer, cheats get caught and your neighbor usually looks like you

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      As expected the author has set up a blog to further the ideas in the book.