A poster designer from the past

I'm currently reading The History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs and have just come across a cool poster designer of note. His name is A M Cassandre and he's done a lot of very cool posters. He's particularly famous for posters of European rail and cruise lines. If you'd like to know more, here's his Wiki entry: A M Cassandre

And some examples of his work:

• posted by Greg

But does it work?

Similar to posters, billboards must intrigue viewers and communicate a message. Billboards, however, have far less time to do so, as viewers pass by at 60+ mph.

Interesting, quirky billboards will definitely grab commuters' attention, but is it good design? An article about this clever billboard makes a good point - will you actually remember that this ad is for toothpaste? Or just that it's a fun idea?

It's a good reminder that designers should constantly be thinking about the efficacy of their message - and not how cool it will look on the way to work.

(Post by E. Noelle)

The importance of hierarchy in graphic design...

Posted by Neal.

Hand made type poster...

Image from http://www.jvallee.com. Awesome work. Posted by Neal.

Poster Exhibition

For the last two years I have attended an exhibition back home about poster design. This is the website of last year's participants: http://www.bienalcartel.org.mx/seleccionados.htm

This one was my favorite in 2006. It received Mention Distinction. It was designed by Anne Giangiulio, an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Texas El Paso.

[Posted by Sergio]

Rock Concerts

Poster art lives strong among rock concert promoters and artists. I stumbled upon some recent concert posters at this site, http://www.posterdistrict.com/?cat=9, including this interesting one from the Pearl Jam's August Chicago show. The creature kind of reminds me of Chicago's Science Museum old heart exhibit.

- Elise M.

Posters

Thinking about posters always makes me think of this guy, Jason Munn. He runs a screen printing poster shop, The Small Stakes. I've got a couple of his posters and his clean sense of design and immaculate printing skills are completely enviable. Plus he gets to design posters for cool bands all the time, what's not to envy about that?

Here's his site: The Small Stakes

And a couple examples of his work to pique your interest:

Mono-licious

Just checking out design/branding/ad agency mono's work - look at their non-traditional work; it's cool to see how they creatively communicate their clients' messages (with beautiful design work as well).

(The image won't load because it's a flash player, but click, I promise it's good!)

(Post by E. Noelle)

I really liked the imagery of this poster. I think it makes a very bold statement. Inspirational for our upcoming poster design.

posted by Scott.

The London Olympic event pictograms have been released, and since we have been discussing their logo, these seem relevant. I thought it was interesting that they had a high contrast version of each for navigation, and a "london underground map" inspired version for publications.

Check it out!

-Tony C

Interesting idea about color

I know color was a couple of weeks ago, but I posted about type, so now I'm going to post about color. Here's an interesting exercise to get us thinking about colors differently.

100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days

Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing. I have selected my favorite forty, titling each writing with the number of the day it was written (out of 100) and the name of the color from that day’s paint chip. This project was generated in Michael Bierut’s 100 Day Workshop at the Yale School of Art. ...

• posted by Greg

What Are We Saying?

This is an interesting article which looks at both sides of a visual message, though this time this is breaking down "design for a cause".

It puts out the question: what are we saying that we're not intending to say? Visual communication is powerful, and we have to remember that our work - personal or for clients - has an impact beyond the demographic we're targeting (and perhaps within it as well).

Sometimes we need to step back and think about what we're doing, even if we do it - as this article points out - with good intentions.

(Posted by E. Noelle)

Type Radio

For those more interested in hearing about fonts/typefaces than reading about them, then Type Radio may be for you. There most recent segment (9/16/09) is on Robert Meek who's with Fontstruct, a font creation online site.

Elise

Creative Characters & Rising Stars

I stumbled upon this site, http://new.myfonts.com/newsletters, where every month they feature a font creator in their Creative Characters newsletter... for type diehards this is like the old VH1 "Behind the Music" segments except on fonts. Font creators both dead and alive are highlighted, including gill sans creator Eric Gill who was said to be "...a man in love with letters and life." That's deep.

The site's Rising Star section highlights different fonts, which is fun to look through. I liked the elegant look of the Mussica font in this month's (October 2009) issue.

Elise M.

Here are a few good blogs/websites for design and typography that I find interesting, I hope you do to:

http://www.typography.com/home/index.php?affiliateID=
http://www.typotheque.com/site/index.php
http://www.gestalten.com/


-Michaela

Type is Art

Some of you have probably seen this before, but I remembered I saw this website some time ago. It is a "public interactive project" where you can play with different elements of typography. You can also save your designs and see what others have done in the gallery.

Check it here: Type is Art

[Posted by Sergio]

Why I like UPS....

Posted by Neal.

Typeface Classification Wheel

I ran across this set of typeface classification posters. I thought they were interesting but I don't know much about them because I can't read French.

[Posted by Jon]

Naming fonts

Found (and read) this article about the names and naming systems (which are fairly ambiguous) used for type faces. I remember there was a brief tangent in class a while back about Aksidenz-Grotesk and I think this article shed some light about how some names as such came to be. Interesting read for typophiles.

"Antique Gothic Grotesque: Deciphering the Typeface Name Game

The vocabulary of type is mysterious at best, and nowhere is this more true than in how typefaces are labeled. Yet knowing how typefaces are named and categorized has very practical benefits. ..." (Article in full here)

Written by James Felici on October 5, 2009

• posted by Greg

Designing Within Constraints

Here is an interesting series of minimalist movie posters from graphic nothing, made with the stipulations that they include:
-a circle
-lowercase text
-1-2 images not from the film

See, rules are good, because they'll push one to creatively solve the problem in a number of different ways. Note especially that the color selections set a definite tone to the movie being promoted.

My favorites are the Star Wars & Annie Hall posters: simple, clear shapes that sift down core themes from the movies. Nice.

(Post by E. Noelle)

Applicant City Logos

I found this roundup of Applicant City logos for the 2016 olympics. It's interesting how they all have similar "olympic" color palettes except for Rio. Seeing them all together makes me wonder how much influence (even if only subconscious) these logos really have on the Olympic committee's eventual decision.

[Posted by Jon]

Rio 2016

Apparently the 2016 Olympics will be in Rio. Today was the first time I saw the "candidate city" logo, and it leaves me wondering why the designer chose to do the things they did with color and form. The "heart" shaped icon is a confusing choice, and it's placement makes the entire mark feel unstable to me. The color choices in the icon and the text are also confusing. Are similarly colored type and graphic elements related in some way? Is "16" more important than "2000"?

I thought this was interesting in light of our discussion about the London 2012 logo.

[Posted by Jon]

Color Trends in Logo Design

The Museum of London logo is a trend of 2009. The voalris logo is a trend of 2008. I like how they both make effective use of different colors as well as opacities.

[Posted by Sergio]

I thought this was a great use of type as a logo. And it's orange. I'm into orange.

posted Scott F.

Speaking of a redesigned logo...

I thought this was appropriate given our current assignment, also it's kind of funny.
I copied this from a post in the Under Consideration: Brand blog
(http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/wisconsin_gets_jiggy_with_acronyms.php)

In Brief BY Armin

Wisconsin Gets Jiggy with Acronyms

Who would have thought that a web site called Your Logo Makes me Barf would one day influence the identity design of a state-level organization? This past July, when YLMMB added the logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation (WTF) to its list of victims — along with the inevitable post title of “WTF Wisconsin?! — the change was set in motion. Yesterday, Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel reported that WTF had changed its logo to avoid the now infamous acronym of the words “What”, “The,” and “Fuck.” From now on they are to be known as the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin (TFW) with a logo to match. Besides the question of why not fix their visually painful logo while they are at it, I can’t help but point out this missed opportunity: If web lingo has taken you down, embrace it and change it from Wisconsin Tourism Federation to, say, Federation of Tourism of Wisconsin. You know… FTW. For the Win!

• posted by Greg