Design Archeology - Focused Culture & Updated Artifacts

I have refined my Nerd Culture down to Geek Culture though they are thought to be simular they are very different in reality. For the purpose of this project I have decided to focus on Geek Culture.

Updated Artifacts List:

Energy Drink (Red Bull Can)
Large Televisions
Videogames (Iconic such as NES)
Black Glasses
Star Wars Merchandise (Toy's)
D20
Books (Science Fiction)
Office Chair
Custom Built PC
External Hardrive

Design Archeology - Values & Artifacts

DIY Hacker

1. Computer Case
2. External Fast Kill Harddrive
3. Flash Drive
4. N Band Modem
5. High Gain WIFI Antenna
6. Power Supply
7. USB 3.0 Cable
8. Firewire
9. Power Cord
10. Flat Screen Monitor
11. Processor
12. Ram Sticks

Values

1. Access to computers should be unlimited and available to everyone. They believe this accessibility gives the masses the ability to take things apart, fix them or improve on them.
2. All information should be free. Like physical computer equipment they also believe that all information like software programs should be free for people to use, fix, improve, or re-invent on. This concept is known as transparency.
3. Mistrust of authority, and strong argument to oppose limits or regulations of information and uses of the internet. They also believe that all governing bodies are flawed.
4. The value of a person is based on skill, and not race, sex, age, or job.
5. Hackers believe that art and beauty can be created on a computer. They believe that code can be beautiful when written properly.
6. Computers can improve your life for the better. They believe that computers enrich their lives and empower them.


Nerd

1. Comic Books
2. Glasses
3. Calculator
4. Computers
5. Video Games
6. Action Figures
7. Pocket Protector
8. Science Fiction Film Collection
9. High Water Pants
10. Textbooks
11. Fantasy Roll Playing Games
12. Badges From Anime Conventions

Values:

1. Intelligent but socially awkward.
2. Indifferent or oblivious to the negative perceptions of themselves.
3. May show an intrest in activities that are viewed by their peers as silly and immature for their age, such as trading cards, comic books, role playing games, or other things pertaining to fantasy and science fiction.
4. Sometimes portrayed as having symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
5. Fantasy escapist cultural connotations. 
6. Some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or boring, or just simply too complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, mathematics and technology.
7. In popular culture have risen to wealth and fame with the tech boom.

Project One: Typographic Campaign (Part 1) - Leo Burnett

Leo Burnett

“What helps people, helps business.”
Leo Burnett, on design

I chose this particular quotation by Leo Burnett because of the raw sensibility and dedication of Burnett's pathos based advertising. This quote is a strong reminder that Graphic Design is a creative field, but it is also very much a business profession. Good design is good business. Without good design we as designers fail to help support good causes, or get products that could be breakthroughs noticed. We exist to help shed light on innovation. Leo Burnett founded his business on the ideal of honest advertising, and celebrating the American spirit. For these reasons I have chosen his quotation for this project.

Leo Burnett was an advertising executive who is responsible for creating the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, Tucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, Pillsbury Doughboy, and the 7up "spot", and Tony the Tiger.

Leo Burnett formed Leo Burnett Company, his own firm based in Chicago which became the 10th largest advertising agency in the world, and the eighth largest in the United States. One of the few not based in New York City. It is best known for major advertising campaigns, grounded in traditional American values, for major American consumer products corporations.

When Burnett first started his business in August 1935 he had one account, a staff of eight, and a bowl of apples on each desk in the reception lobby. The agency's only client was the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, which had been with Burnett's old firm. They had chosen to work with Burnett because the management at Minnesota Valley liked Leo Burnett's personally. "I want the little guy with dandruff and the rumpled suit," said the president of the company. To reward this display of confidence and loyalty, Burnett created the Jolly Green Giant.

Most of the firms of this time were based in trendy New York City, this made the Chicago company something of an oddity. Burnett's ads  reflected reflected a mid-American homeyness rather than an eastern sophistication. The Green Giant and Kellogg campaigns typify use this technique. Both has been historically aimed at the emotions of their respective audiences, portraying the products with a large degree of human warmth.

During the 1950's his company was able to reflect the American values of strength, tradition, comfort, and family in its advertising campaigns. This won a number of new and profitable clients and secured those accounts already in the Burnett agency.

Burnett also went on to create the Marlboro Man in 1954, which without a doubt became his most successful advertising campaign.

Burnett also created the following slogans:

"Fly the Friendly Skies" - United Airlines
"The best to you each morning" - Kellogg's
"You're in good hands" - Allstate Insurance

He was also named Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people for the 20th century.

More Information:

Leoburnett.com
Art Directors Club

Illustration for Pete Yorn and Ben Kweller @ House of Blues Houston

Illustration for Pete Yorn and Ben Kweller
House of Blues Houston show 04/14/11

The completed poster will be for sale at Sid's Lagoon
(3622-E Main Street Houston, TX 77002) and Chazbro.com

Tip-Top Gallery - Found Free Art Poster Tube

I found this Tip-Top Gallery Free Art Tube during First Friday last week! I saw it sticking out of a bush when I was walking down the street! 

They really put some time into the design and the concept. 

This is one really well designed tube!

The card included in the tube w/ explanation. 

Full set w/ a really nice print #2 of 100 by Jane Kortright titled "Ponce"

Alpaca / Walker Lukens Gig Poster - NYC

Quick little fun first gig poster of the year for a few friends of mine in New York.

Jim (Alpaca) and Walker Lukens are playing a show on January 12th at the Local 269 in NYC.

New York people hit this one up!

The Marber Grid

 See full article here

"In 1961, impressed by Marber’s covers for The Economist, Facetti commissioned him to design covers for Simeon Potter’s Our Language and Language in the Modern World. He then asked Marber to propose a new cover approach for the Penguin Crime series. Derek Birdsall and John Sewell (who died in 1981) were also asked to make proposals. Marber’s solution was accepted and he went on to design dozens of crime fiction covers. Seen as a series, these emerge as one of the outstanding achievements of British book cover design. Marber’s basic design was so successful that Facetti applied it, effectively unchanged, to the blue Pelicans and to the orange covers of Penguin fiction. Before long, its spirit pervaded the entire list.

Marber’s contribution is known, but from the outset it has never received as much acknowledgement as it deserves. In 1962, Herbert Spencer researched and wrote a sixteen-page article for Typographica magazine tracing the history and development of Penguin cover designs. Although seven of Marber’s Penguin Crime covers were shown and credited to him as individual designs, the new format devised by Marber was attributed to Facetti. After some deliberation, and having taken advice from colleagues, Marber sent a brief note to Spencer pointing out the oversight. He recalls that Spencer contacted former art director Hans Schmoller at Penguin, who confirmed that the new design was Marber’s work. In the following issue, Spencer went to the unusual length of publishing a two-page correction, which included copies of Marber’s handwritten proposal and cover grid, and a letter from Facetti. ‘There is an omission in your otherwise admirable piece on Penguins in Typographica 5 which I should have hastened to amend at proof stage,’ writes Facetti. ‘I should be grateful if, in fairness to Marber and for the historical record, you could print a correction . . .’

Marber’s design has an impeccable logic. It is based on a careful analysis of what needed to be retained and replaced. Penguin’s Mystery and Crime series, which followed Edward Young’s famous typographic design based on Gill Sans, had remained largely unchanged for 25 years. Even when Schmoller made some small adjustments around 1960, increasing the size of the title and author’s name and ranging them left, the three horizontal bands survived. Penguin had made a previous attempt to introduce pictorial covers. As consultant art director from 1956 to 1958, Abram Games designed a series of illustrated covers with a white band at the top carrying the title, author’s name and the Penguin colophon, but the publisher did not pursue it.

Two key observations guided Marber’s proposal. First, that ‘The Penguin identity is synonymous with the goodwill to Penguin which has been created over many years.’ Second, that Penguin Crime books are an integral part of this identity. For this reason, Marber decided to retain green as the series colour, though he chose a fresher shade, and he kept the horizontal banding. The image occupies just over two-thirds of the space, while the title section at the top is divided into three bands carrying colophon / series name / price, the title and the author’s name, with the type ranged left. Marber planned to use white at the top of the cover, referring to the central white title panel on Young’s design, before introducing all-green covers at a later date. In practice, though, both white-topped and all-green covers were published from 1961 until what is probably Marber’s final crime cover, for Ellery Queen’s The Scarlet Letters, in 1965. In either case, the author’s name is in white reversed out of green. Rules are used as needed to divide the bands. Marber chose the sans serif Standard (Akzidenz Grotesk), to preserve continuity with the earlier use of Gill. Setting the titles in all-lowercase after the initial cap, except for proper nouns, added to the books’ modernity. Marber was conscious of the Swiss Style, to which his typography is clearly indebted, but a visit to Switzerland, he says, ‘put me off Swiss design slightly’. He felt that the imposition of Swiss grids led to a lack of vitality.

Marber’s grid allows for different placements of title and author’s name depending on the length of the title and the needs of the design as a whole. There are small inconsistencies in some of the vertical measurements on a few of the books, probably due to printer’s error, but the basic design is sufficiently robust that it does not matter. Marber says that he received no brief from Facetti for the redesign. ‘It had nothing to do with him. He was only the person who actually commissioned me to do it.’ His proposal, which included five cover designs, was accepted as submitted, with no request for further refinements. Facetti then asked him to design twenty covers and all of these were accepted. Once printed, they were tested at airports and railway stations, which led to retailers sending the old designs back and requesting copies of the new covers instead. "

Links of Interest: 
Olly Moss's Video Game Coveres Using the Grid
Romek Marber's Wikipedia Page
Marber Grid Pelican Books
Ministry of Type

Effective Simplicity

This article is by The Ministry of Type
See the article for a link to the original designer.

 "A few people tweeted links to this brilliant collection of packaging redesigns by Antrepo — they’re done as an exercise to illustrate the idea of reducing the design of the labelling to its simplest form, while also showing an intermediary step of a ‘partially simplified’ design. It’s interesting the effect it has on the different products. Some gain a sense of being a premium, high-value product, while others start to resemble economy, basic versions. The Pringles packs look pretty basic; with the full-colour printing gone, the basic nature of the cardboard tube stands out, and with the simple black printing it looks like a supermarket own-brand or something bulk-bought by caterers. On the other end of the scale you have Nutella and the Schweppes drinks — both of them look like the kind of ‘artisanal’ packaging you’d see featured on the Dieline or similar targeted at people who want the same old stuff but to feel a bit special about buying it. And having said that, the Corn Flakes one is just great. It’s absolutely perfect — if I ate cereal then packaging like that would definitely have shelf appeal with that beautifully simple and stark lettering, and how. It reminds me a little of the General Mills Kix packaging, which I also like a lot.

Visit Antrepo’s site for more info and links to the full set.

Of course, packaging for most fast moving consumer goods is brightly coloured and covered in imagery for a reason — it’s to draw the eye and make its purpose, contents or intended use immediately obvious to the shopper. Without going into some kind of pop-psychology analysis of consumer habits, it’s interesting to think what the manufacturers are intending with each package. The simplified Mr Muscle one looks great, but on the original you can easily tell it’s for windows and tiles even without reading any of the words. Similarly for the Durex boxes, I’d hazard a guess and say the orange box contains flavoured ones — the word ‘select’ hardly makes that clear — again, the original packaging wins out.
The food ones all have some kind of serving suggestion (albeit a ridiculous one in the case of the Corn Flakes, I mean, that’s quite a tempest going in the bowl) designed to put the image of the food in your mind, a simple association that makes you more likely to buy it. The only one I think where that doesn’t happen is with the Schweppes bottles. The type is pretty small on the simplified one, but it’s a hell of a lot more legible than the original. Given that you’re likely to see bottles like these in a fridge behind a bar, you’re going to be hard-pressed to read the label and form an idea in your mind that maybe you’d want mandarin as the mixer in your drink, as opposed to orange juice, say. You’re going to look and see confusing labels all done up with sparkles and images of bubbles, and not know if it’s soda and plain old OJ in them or something more special. You’d just end up asking for something generic, and end up (in a lot of British pubs at least) with some rank pre-mix out of a tap on the bar. I could mention at this point that Red Bull might be considered drinkable by some, and therefore a food. It’s not, but it is easily recognisable in a behind-the-bar fridge, which tells you something about British pubs and the drinking culture they encourage, but that’s an entirely different rant.
So yes, beautifully simple packaging is a wonderful idea, but I doubt we’ll see many big manufacturers opting for it, sadly."