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design history, graphic design, information design, product design

design history, graphic design, information design, product design

design history, graphic design, information design, product design

Dust or Magic

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

secrets of successful multimedia design

Dust or Magic is a book for people who want to know about or work in the new media. It takes the line of revealing the truth about how multimedia projects really work – pointing to both successes and complete turkeys. Bob Hughes has been active in the field over its last decade, and he discusses a fascinating range of examples – from websites and CD-ROMs to kiosk programs and interactive video.

Dust or MagicHe starts with an account of digital technology from Alan Turing onwards – but the chronology darts backwards and forwards from Russian constructivists to Greek theatre and back again to Richard Wagner. Later, he settles down to a slightly smoother chronology, but without sacrificing his wide range of reference. He offers Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson as key pioneers and presents excellent accounts of their work.

This is followed by detailed sketches of the pioneers of Virtual Reality, Interactive Video, and early hypertext programs such as Guide, Toolbook, and Hypercard – including developments which have been passed by which he claims could be revived with the development of new technology.

There’s something of an intellectual dip in the middle of the book when he compares English revolutionaries of the seventeenth century with the Guerilla Girls, and he celebrates web sites and Hyperstacks which are not much more than collections of idiosyncratic enthusiasms. Fortunately, the level rises again with a whole chapter devoted to Voyager, which he claims made innovations with the bare tools [Hypercard] available at the time.

The latter parts of the book are devoted to accounts of working on multimedia projects – one for the Nationwide Building Society, of all people – and he covers the disaster of the Microsoft ‘Sendak’ project, before passing on to discuss theories of ‘creativity’ and report on forays into the world of advertising. He discusses the psychology of idea-generation, its relation to programming and the world of computer games, the advantages of motion and sounds on screen, and there are some interesting observations on the need for visual ‘transitions’ between one screen of information and another.

Reading all this, you get an invigorating sense of intellectual excitement, the downside of which is that no single idea is pursued to any depth. This is a weakness occasionally reinforced by a surprisingly cavalier attitude towards his readers – ‘sorry – I’ve lost the URL’.

And yet he’s actually gone to the trouble of locating the original authors of some of these programs – an admirable trait in an age when a lot of software has a lifespan of five years or less. He’s very fond of using metaphors to explain his arguments, and there are lots of interesting historical anecdotes woven as side-bars into the text. At its best, he throws up novel connections from different media and sources of technology; at its weakest, he flits from one unexamined generalisation to another.

Apart from concluding that projects are best carried out by small teams, he never seems to get round to explaining the ‘secret’ in his sub-title, but this is a lively and stimulating introduction to the history of software development which should go onto the reading list of anyone who wants to know what happens on real-life projects. It’s a revelation of the costly disasters as well as a celebration of the often unsung heroes of new technology during the last thirty years.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Bob Hughes, Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, London: Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp.264, ISBN: 0201360713


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Filed Under: Information Design, Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Communication, Media, Multimedia, Online learning, Technology

Dynamics in Document Design

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

information layout and management for professionals

Karen Schriver’s Dynamics in Document Design is another strong entry in the Wiley series of books about writing in the marketplace. Schriver does not intend yet another ‘how to’ book for beginning document designers. Such books are plentiful. She assumes her audience is acquainted with the fundamentals of document design and wants more information about the complexities and subtleties of document design. In this area – and many others – Schriver succeeds admirably.

Dynamics in Document DesignSchriver’s book is so rich in insight, information, and innovation that no review will do it justice. One of the book’s many virtues is its presentation of heuristics for making decisions about typography and page-layout grids. A heuristic, as Schriver explains, “is a way of thinking systematically about the key features of a problem.” Schriver’s heuristic for grids includes taking an inventory of all the text elements (photographs, descriptions, captions, etc.) in the document, organizing these text elements into rhetorical clusters, measuring the actual print or display area, dividing the print or display area into columns and rows, considering exceptions and deviations, trying out some optional spatial arrays for the document, and applying the grid to longer sections of the document to see how it works. For someone who has to design a longer document or complicated web site, Schriver’s heuristics are very useful.

Schriver has not neglected design issues on the Internet. Her 18-page discussion of a student’s case study of the effectiveness of a web site is worth the entire price of the book. As a practitioner of feedback-driven audience analysis, Schriver had taught the student, Daphne van der Vlist of Holland, procedures for studying user responses to document design. Van der Vlist studied the reactions of seven users to the Virtual Tourist web site.

As happens often in Schriver’s book, real users have rich and informative critiques of real documents. In her study, van der Vlist found that users had trouble with incomplete and illogically clustered headings, information that violated users’ expectations, underdeveloped information, poorly laid out lists, and pictures that narrowed content inappropriately. To aid her readers in understanding the users’ problems, Schriver used a four-page spread of eight screens from the web site, with user annotations in the margins surrounding the centered screen representations. Schriver’s analysis and graphic presentation of her student’s case is exceptionally informative and effective. People designing web sites should read this section.

Another strong section of her book describes one of her own projects-
evaluating government-created drug education brochures aimed at teenagers. Using feedback-driven audience analysis, Schriver and her collaborators gathered 297 students ranging from 11 to 21 years old and asked them to respond to the text and graphics in the brochures that they provided. The students’ responses were very sophisticated and revealing. Schriver presents the responses to several brochures by using the format mentioned earlier. She reproduces the brochure in the center of a single page or a two-page spread and surrounds it with student responses in the margin. She draws lines to connect student responses to specific passages and graphics.

The student responses are very constructive and sophisticated. One complained that a brochure was cliched and suggested that a more effective approach would be to present stories about how drug users died or destroyed their lives. Another student complained of the long paragraphs and suggested a list, which other young people would be more inclined to read. Another said the impact of a brochure would be improved if the authors “use pictures of a dead guy.” The students were especially fond of realism. Many of them disliked the line drawings and preferred photographs of actual drug users suffering the effects of drug abuse.

Schriver also discussed the constraints that the government writers and graphic designers operated under when they developed the drug education literature. Many were reluctant to talk about what they did. Bureaucracy and politics stifle the effectiveness of documents and of open communication between researcher/designers like Schriver and her subjects. A quotation from one person eloquently revealed the stress that some government writers and designers felt:

That brochure is not attributable to anyone. We receive lots of assignments, that was just one of them. We can’t say who wrote it. There are so many hands in the process. And we can’t say that what was printed was what anyone in this office wrote. We have to go now.

Schriver offers an important innovation to document design teachers – her protocol-aided audience-modeling method (PAM), which allows document designers to better anticipate problems that users have with documents. PAM has two steps: (1) The student reads a sample document and lists the problems she thinks the intended audience will have with the text and graphics. (2) The student reads a transcript of a think-aloud protocol created by one of the intended users of the same document. A think-aloud protocol has a user think aloud about any difficulties she or he encounters while reading a document (form, instruction, etc.). In her research, Schriver has found that students using PAM were 62% more accurate than a control group in predicting readers’ problems. PAM, in short, is much better than such traditional methods as audience heuristics, peer-group critiquing, role-playing, and purpose oriented audience analysis.

Yet another valuable innovation is Schriver’s timeline of document design from 1900 to 1995. She devotes forty-four pages to tracing the evolution of five design contexts: education and practice in writing and rhetoric; professional developments in writing and graphic design; education and practice in graphic design; science, technology, and the environment; and society and consumerism. On twenty-two sets of facing pages, Schriver has columns devoted to each of the aforementioned contexts in a given decade of the twentieth century.

The evolution of education and practice in writing and rhetoric is fascinating by itself. Schriver begins in 1900 with the instructional emphasis on usage, grammar, and mechanics. “Students are expected to adapt their texts for an audience and to find an original thesis, but they are not taught explicit ways to do so.” In 1904, one of the first technical writing courses in the twentieth century was taught at Tufts College. In 1939, “teaching technical writing or composition at the college level is considered ‘professional suicide’.” In the 1950’s, college instructors finally begin to pay some attention to audience analysis and the relations between writers and readers. In 1955 and later, technical communication courses begin to show interest in teaching graphics. In the 1970’s, some technical communications professors finally begin to get tenure for work in their specialties. In 1994, academics and industry experts express concern that literature professors have too much say in tenuring and promoting writing, rhetoric, and technical communication faculty.

Again, this review cannot pretend to do justice to the many virtues and innovations in Karen Schriver’s excellent book. Even though she aims her book more at experienced document designers and information architects, beginners and students can also profit from reading it. If you design documents for paper or electronic publication, buy this book. You will not be disappointed.

© Patrick Moore 1997

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Karen A. Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design, NewYork/London: John Wiley & Sons: 1997, pp.560, ISBN: 0471306363


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Filed Under: Information Design Tagged With: Data management, Data visualization, Document design, Information design

E McKnight Kauffer Design

June 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Anglo-American modernism and graphic design

Edward Kauffer (the McKnight was added later) was an American artist from a relatively poor background in Montana USA who compensated for a lonely childhood by his interest in drawing and art. He was fortunate enough to see the famous 1913 Armory Show of contemporary European art in Chicago and shortly afterwards he left for a brief version of the Grand Tour in Munich and Paris. This was curtailed by the outbreak of war – so he ended up in England. Via a series of very fortunate connections he secured a position working for London Underground, and produced a series of posters advertising the pleasures of suburbia and the countryside at the end of the line. E. McKnight Kauffer Design is an elegantly illustrated introduction to the full range of his work.

E. McKnight KaufferThese images made him famous, and the style he developed is now reproduced as exemplars of both good design and instant nostalgia. He was influenced by his studies of Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and the Sachplakat style he had seen first hand in Germany. Strongly shaped design, flat colours, and bold outlines were the hallmarks of these works.

He was also influenced by geometry (“We live in a scientific age, an age of T-squares and compasses”) plus Cubism and Orphism (as propounded by Robert Delauney). Following the establishment of his reputation in England, he also produced bibliographic designs for the Nonesuch Press and the Hogarth Press.

E. McKnight Kauffer - British Rail posterWith the outbreak of the second world war however, these commissions dried up, so he returned to America. But because his reputation by that time was an English designer, he found it difficult to become established again in his homeland. As Peyton Skipwith explains in his introductory essay to this collection of Kauffer’s work, “Like many another expatriate, his reputation seems to have got stuck somewhere in mid-Atlantic”

But he designed book jackets for Alfred Knopf, Harcourt Brace, and Random House and his career did finish on something of a high note with a series of posters for American Airlines which definitely do have a more national style.

E. McKnight Kauffer - Hogarth Press book jacketSome of the English book illustrations become slightly bucolic and whimsical, but wherever he asserts his appreciation of modernism (and the influence of The New Typography and Russian constructivism) the results are very powerful. Kauffer lived at a time when the term used to describe such work was the rather slighting ‘commercial art’ – but we would now call it ‘graphic design’.

The series of design monographs of which this volume is part feature very high design and production values. They are slim but beautifully stylish productions, each with an introductory essay, and all the illustrative material is fully referenced.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Brian Webb and Peyton Skipwith, E. McKnight Kauffer: Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2007, pp.96, ISBN: 1851495207


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Edward Bawden design

December 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

modern romantic design and illustrations

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) was a graphic designer and illustrator of the English romantic-nostalgic school. He is best known for his book jacket designs and murals in public buildings, but he worked in a number of different visual media – ranging from advertising posters to wallpaper design and the labels for beer bottles.

Edward Bawden

He was born in Braintree in Essex, going from local education to Cambridge School of Art. From there he went on a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he met his lifelong friend and fellow illustrator, Eric Ravilious. They both studied under the supervision of painter Paul Nash.

Shortly after graduation he was fortunate enough to receive a number of commissions. First for decorative tiles for the London Underground, then a mural for the refectory at Morley College. He began to work one day a week as an illustrator (along with Ravilious and Nash) at the Curwen Press, which produced high-quality colour lithography and short runs of specialist publications. Bawden designed decorative borders, endpapers, and illustrations – a foundation which he continued into his later life with work for Faber and Faber.

Following his marriage to a fellow RCA student Charlotte Epton, he moved from London back to Essex, where he developed a strong attachment to the countryside and began to produce watercolour paintings. This led to one-man exhibitions at both the Zwemmer and the Leicester Galleries.

Edward Bawden

The Queen’s Garden – Kew

During the Second World War he served with the British army as an official war artist – first in France, then in the Middle East. Returning from Cairo, his ship was torpedoed and he spent several days in an open lifeboat before being picked up by the (Vichy) French navy. This resulted in his being held prisoner in an internment camp in Casablanca.

After the war he designed fabrics and murals for cruise ships, and he participated actively in designs for the Festival of Britain. These led to big public commissions for the BBC, the British Council, and London Transport.

It has to be said that part of Bawden’s success was his ability to work in any number of different visual media — linocuts, engraving, lithographic prints, watercolour, or line drawing. This supported his willingness to undertake the most humble commissions. His work includes not only large-scale public works, but dust jackets and illustrations for recipe books, and promotional materials for Fortnum and Mason – even down to the design for biscuit tins.

© Roy Johnson 2016

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Brian Webb and Peyton Skipworth, Edward Bawden Design, Suffolk: ACC Art Books, 2015, pp.96, ISBN: 1851498397


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El Lissitzky Design

June 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

design , modernism, and Russian Suprematism

El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was one of the pioneers of the modernist movement in Russian art which flourished in the period 1915-1925. He was one of the most graphically radical of his era, and yet only a few years earlier he was painting rather conventional landscape paintings in the tradition of Russian realism. El Lissitzky’s earliest creative period was spent at Vitebsk working with Mark Chagall and Kasimir Malevich. With the latter he spearheaded to Suprematist movement. His geometric constructions developed from two to three dimensions and became a sort of theoretical architecture – shapes which float in space. He called the works ‘Proun’ – an invented word which means ‘Project for asserting the New’. El Lissitzky Design is an elegantly illustrated introduction to all this work.

El Lissitzky He is best known for his propaganda painting ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ of 1919 – a work which very typically for its time was geometric in form, non-representational, and included typographical elements in the same style as his contemporaries Alexander Rodchenko and Malevich. At the same time he also started producing abstract constructions in two and three dimensions which were (like Rodchenko’s) geometrically based, but more mature and developed than any works of this kind that had emerged up to this date.

El Lissitzky: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

His finest work seems to have been produced in an amazing creative outburst between 1917 and 1925 – just at the point where unfettered Russian modernist art theory was taking off alongside the political revolution in its positive and expansive phase.

When El Lissitzky crossed the line between art and work after 1917, he became an international social activist promoting a political message. Like the Russian Constructivists that he admired, he sought to use his creative energy to help design a new social structure in which the new engineer-architect-artist could erase old boundaries.

El Lissitzky was fortunate to be at his creative peak at a time when foreign travel was still possible in the USSR. He took exhibitions to Germany and mixed with other modernists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Kurt Schwitters. He had connection with the De Stijl group in Holland, and he taught at the Bahaus.

El LissitzkyBut it’s amazing to realise in how short a creative lifespan artists like El Lissitzky (and Rodchenko) had when they exerted such a powerful influence on the modernist movement. The images, paintings, typography, and ‘designs for projects’ illustrated in this collection are almost all from the 1920s. By the following decade El Lissitzky had become little more than an exhibition organiser. He was working for the State – but by the 1930s the dead hand of totalitarian control had stifled all originality from the arts, and his interesting designs for the Kremlin were replaced by the sort of drab architecture that became the norm under Stalin.

He lived until 1943, but there is very little that he produced after the mid 1920s that stands up to any degree of scrutiny today. What he produced before then was awe inspiring – and remains so to this day.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


John Milner, El Lissitzky – Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2009, pp.96, ISBN: 185149619X


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Emotional Design

July 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

why we love (and hate) the everyday objects we use

Donald Norman is famous for The Design of Everyday Things – a best-selling study of the need for functionality in consumer product design. It’s no good having tea pots that don’t pour properly, chairs you can’t sit in, or doorknobs that don’t open the door. Emotional Design is his follow up to that study, in which he revises his views. He confesses that he had previous under-rated the importance of emotions and aesthetics:

Product Design

in writing The Design of Everyday Things I didn’t take emotions into account … But now I have changed … Sure, utility and usability are important, but without fun and pleasure, joy and excitement…our lives would be incomplete. Along with our emotions, there is one other point as well: aesthetics, attractiveness, and beauty.

The first part of the book is actually concerned with the psychology of our response to objects. He suggests that we perceive them at a visceral, behavioural ,and a reflective level. That is – Do I like it? Does it work? and Will I use it again? The first is instinctive, the second rational, the third a combination of experience and cultural influence, rather like the super-ego.

The second part of the book applies these principles to product design. His examples range from mineral water bottles to web sites, and from hiking boots to industrial vacuum cleaners.

What he does here is to emphasise the desirability of good shape and satisfying textures. The rest is a repeat of what he argued in the earlier book. The product must work easily, and ideally it should be tested for usability (presumably by a company such as the Nielsen-Norman Group).

He is still generally on the side of functionality, but now appears to be prepared to defend the appeal of glamorous surfaces. However, you do begin to wonder about his judgements when he gets excited about owning one of those Martian-looking Philippe Starck lemon juicers which even the designer confesses were “not designed to squeeze lemons [but] to start conversations.”

He gets so carried away that when he comes to analyse the social interactions of text messaging and mobile phone conversations, it’s hard to see what it has to do with design, and much of what he has to say should be fairly obvious to everyone conversant with their advantages and limitations.

He eventually blends this interest in emotions and design by considering the future of robots which have been programmed to have emotions. Not necessarily human emotions, but appropriate for their function and survival.

Strangely enough, the rationale for all this is given in an epilogue which traces the development of his professional career. He has latterly been working with psychologists and now sees that human choices are made on more than functionality alone. [One wonders whether his business partner, the ultra-functionalist Jakob Nielsen is persuaded by this approach.]

This is a lively, thought-provoking study of design principles. Donald Norman writes in a friendly, jargon-free style, and he communicates a humane enthusiasm for his subject. I doubt that this will dislodge The Design of Everyday Things from the top of the Design Classics list, but it is one which anyone with an interest in design will not want to miss.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday things, New York: Basic Books, 2003, pp.257, ISBN: 0465051359.


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Emotional Digital

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a sourcebook of contemporary typographics

If you are the slightest bit interested in font design – get hold of this book. It’s both a stylish introduction and a compendium of the best in modern typography. It’s a collection of designs from font companies and individual typographists. Designers from the most prestigious studios were invited to submit examples of their type in commercial use. These include traditional designers such as Gerard Unger, Sumner Stone, and Matthew Carter – but the main emphasis is on influential young typographists such as Neville Brody, Zuzana Liko, David Carson, and Erik van Blockland.

Emotional DigitalThere are potted accounts of each company, so you get an idea of the intellectual context out of which each set of designs arises. For instance, fonts such as Bitstream’s ‘Galaxy’ which was used for the StarTrek films. The designs are shown in use in a huge variety of forms – letterheads, posters, printed books, commercial stationery, and advertising flyers. It even includes examples of typographic jewellery.

[It’s a] snapshot of the current state of typography: it provides an overview of the international type scene … and serves as a history book and future-oriented reference work in one.

There are also mini-essays by prominent designers punctuating the entries. These vary from brief individual polemics to thorough technical articles such as Zuzana Liko’s account of designing a series of fonts for the Emigré website.

The axis is very much Germany, London, and both coasts of America, but en passant the collection also takes in Russia, France, and Spain.

All the fonts illustrated are meticulously identified by named designer and date, and full details of all the designers are given, including their email address and websites.

If you are interested in fonts, typography, or graphic design, this book is a treat from start to finish. Thames and Hudson specialise in good quality design manuals, but they have surpassed themselves with this one.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Alexander Branczyk et al, Emotional Digital: A sourcebook of contemporary typographics, London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, pp.312, ISBN: 0500283109


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Envisioning Information

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

Over the last twenty years, Edward Tufte has published three impressive volumes setting forth his ideas on information design. The first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was designated as ‘pictures of numbers’ and dealt with statistical charts, graphs, and tables. This second volume deals with ‘pictures of nouns’, which is his metaphorical way of describing the ‘strategies for high-dimensional data, and how to increase information depth on paper and computer’.

To envisage information…is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art

Envisioning InformationHe makes a persuasive case for layering, colour, and separation as a means of clarifying information when it is rendered in two dimensions – principally on the printed page. What he calls an ‘escape from flatland’ is illustrated in a series of wonderfully complex diagrams: a Javanese railway timetable shows departures and arrivals, distance, altitude, and even facilities at each station.

He explores the interesting notion that in a world of marks on paper, good presentation is affected by the rule that ‘1 + 1 = 3 or more’. That is, even two simple lines become three visual units because of the space between them – and he provides plenty of information to prove his case, illustrated with such diverse materials as old maps, musical notation, and even medical records.

His argument that small multiple images are the best way to reveal differences is beautifully illuminated by photographs of Chinese calligraphy and nineteenth century engravings of fly fishing lures, but it doesn’t seem altogether convincing – and as in the other volumes of this trilogy, some of the bad examples are just as visually attractive as the good – which appears to spoil the point he’s trying to make.

He’s much more persuasive on the use of colour to impart information, although at some points, even if the prints and engravings are stunning, the reading is not easy:

Transparent and effective deployment of redundant signals requires, first, the need – an ambiguity or confusion in seeing data display that can in fact be diminished by multiplicity – and, second, the appropriate choice of design technique (from among all the various methods of signal reinforcement) that will work to minimize the ambiguity of reading.

For somebody who claims to be aiming for clarity in communication, this reads like a bad example out of a writer’s style manual.

He keeps coming back, as do many other theorists of two-dimensional spatial design, to one of the most interesting challenges of all – the notation of dance. Cue eighteenth-century engravings of dancing masters with fancy hats and weird hieroglyphics trailing out of their feet. Other examples in the book range from flight schedules from Czech airways to Japanese railway timetables, rowing contests, and even a diagram of Wagner’s operas.

If we want to take a robust line on someone who is obviously very successful, it’s possible to argue that Tufte designs more successfully than he writes. Much of the time, his text reads as if it has been badly translated from German; yet if ever he issues his books in paperback, they are so attractive he’ll be able to retire on the proceeds.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990, pp.126, ISBN: 0961392118


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Fresh Styles for Web Designers

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new web design strategies and techniques

So far, web design theory has been split between usability minimalism as urged by gurus such as Jakob Nielsen at one end of the spectrum, and the bandwidth-hogging graphic designs of David Siegel at the other. Now Curt Cloninger suggests we can combine the two approaches – and he shows how it can be done. This is one of those Web strategy guides which assume you know the details of designing pages.

Fresh Styles for Web Designers What it offers is a survey of new strategies in structure and graphic presentation – some of them on the edge of the avant garde. Cloninger takes the line that these are the early days of the Web, that there are severe limitations on what is possible, but that inventive designers will embrace the limitations and turn them into positives.

The reasons he offers are that not all sites are driven by e-commerce or a desire to maximise hits. Some are exhibition or display sites; galleries or individual portfolios of work – something like an elaborate visiting card. There is no reason why such sites shouldn’t indulge themselves with the sorts of glamorous graphics and ‘entry pages’ supported by designers such as David Siegel.

He categorises sites as ‘Gothic’, ‘Grid-based’, ‘Grunge’, ‘Mondrian poster’, ‘Paper Bag’, and ‘HTMinimaLism’ – and despite his post-hippy approach these distinctions do eventually make sense. Designers in these camps treat the page design, the Web strategy, and the visitor experience in significantly different ways.

One of my favourites was the minimalist style – sites from the competition www.the5K.org which feature pages of games, puzzles and art collections the total size which must come in under five kilobytes. [Try it!] The other was the sci-fi look of what he calls ‘Drafting/Table Transformer’ style led by Mike Young, whose work is featured in the recently published book of animated graphics.

Each chapter describes the features of one style. It then analyses examples, with well-produced screenshots of sites which are often private and experimental. Then he tells you how to achieve these effects. It’s a very good formula – no matter what you think of the sites.

He’s quite keen on distressed backgrounds and the grunge typography of designers such as David Carson – and he tells you how to create the effects. This will appeal to those who want to make a visual impact. He has favoured designers who he claims have been influential – Mike Cina, Miika Saksi, and a Chicago design group 37signals.

There’s a lot of detailed instruction on how to achieve special effects – most of them done in Photoshop. The general strategy is to maximise visual effects whilst minimising download time. And it has to be said that all the effects are beautifully illustrated, with full pages of elegantly presented coding.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Curt Cloninger, Fresh Styles for Web Designers, Indianapolis IN: New Riders, 2001, pp.211, ISBN: 0735710740


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GPO Design

November 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

posters and propaganda for the post office 1930-1970

GPO Design is a very stylishly produced collection of posters and information graphics commissioned for the postal services between 1930 and 1970. It’s supported by a well-informed essay on the relations between government, propaganda quangos, and the world of what was then called ‘commercial art’. It has always been a mystery to me why a monopoly should feel the need to advertise its services. Mrs Average of Pinner, Middlesex has until very recently had no alternative but to use Royal Mail to deliver her birthday cards and letters to friends. The same has also been true for gas, water, and electricity. Nobody had access to alternative services, so why bother to advertise their virtues?

GPO DesignBut the GPO has from its earliest years made a habit of commissioning artists to design posters to promote its services and reminding us to post early for Xmas. In fact there has been a quite deliberate campaign to both educate the public and promote an impression of efficient, modern technology driving communications at a national level. This has been coupled ideologically with folksy images of the village postman delivering letters in all weathers, and at the same time promoting an empire of connectivity that embraced the globe.

But not all the postal service’s posters and advertising campaigns were corporate vanity. The campaign to advertise postage stamps in little booklets was apparently an attempt to reduce the waiting time spent queuing to buy a single stamp.

It’s not surprising that all decision making in matters of acceptability was in the hands of establishment appointees who despite their efforts to employ modern artists, generated an output that was pretty near indistinguishable from Soviet propaganda posters of the same era

Hans SchlegerThe range of artists and designers they did use included E.McKnight Kauffer, Graham Sutherland, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell. But the most artistically advanced was Hans (Zero) Schleger, one of the many European immigrants who fled to Britain during the inter-war years.

Paul Rennie suggests however in his contribution to the elegant Design series that their work was more successful politically and technologically than their Soviet and Nazi counterparts. He also points out that the GPO’s emphasis on the modern technology of communication – cars, boats, trains, telephones – was a distinctly progressive and modernist theme radiated into society by its educational and service-promoting publicity.

The examples in this collection from the award-winning series are drawn from the poster collection of the British Postal Museum and Archive in London. It sits very neatly alongside its recent fellow publications on David Gentleman, El Lissitzsky, and Alexander Rodchenko.

GPO Design   Buy the book at Amazon UK

GPO Design   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Paul Rennie, GPO: Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2010, pp.96, ISBN: 1851495967


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Filed Under: Graphic design Tagged With: Art, Cultural history, Graphic design, Media

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