Please ignore this post

I'm having a bit of a play with the new Wordpress interface, and I'm just writing this to see what it would look like. How are you? Are you well?

Scotland versus American cultural imperialism

GTAIV, a scathing deconstruction of American culture painted with blood and comedy across a vast fictional cityscape, was created by a primarily Scottish creative team.

Judge Dredd, a scathing deconstruction of American culture painted with blood and comedy across a vast fictional cityscape, was created by a primarily Scottish creative team.

Discuss.

I am now officially a "Pro"

Up until yesterday my office computer was a white 20" iMac. As of today I'm now working on a gleaming behemoth of a Mac Pro. Apparently it's more powerful than our server. I have the most powerful machine of any kind in our building. Crikey.

Some minor quibbles:

  • It's more powerful than my iMac at home, thus creating some split-personality envy issues.
  • Rather than an Apple display, I have an HP one. My desktop is now lacking style and grace.
  • I no longer have admin rights, which means I have to bother an IT bod every time I want to do anything.
  • The DVD drive is really really noisy.
  • It doesn't have a remote control. I don't need a remote control, but I still feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I'll just bluetack my old iPod Shuffle to the side of the display and pretend it's a remote.

Moan moan moan. I'm never happy, am I?

The magic Numbers

In my ongoing quest to spend every penny I have on Apple products, I've finally got myself iWork, and I love it.

I'm currently designing a range of publications that contain a lot (and I mean a lot) of visual data - bar graphs, pie charts, that sort of thing. The original manuscripts arrived with numerous big messy Excel files (all of which seemed to be referencing data from non-existent sheets) and the graphs in that just looked … well they just looked a bit Excely. To prevent me from going mad - and to maintain my self-imposed rule that no Microsoft product should be allowed near my precious iMac* - I thought I'd give iWork's Numbers a go.

And guess what? It's great! It's intuitive from the get-go, and much tidier. Sheets, tables and graphs are much easier to organise, and just appear to be much cleaner. It's really easy to export to high-res PDF for print purposes, and the resulting graphics are perfect for editing in Illustrator.

I'm probably jinxing myself horribly here - I've yet to go to the printers with this job - but for now I'd say iWork is a typically brilliant Apple product. Now if only they could make those bloody iPod headphones usable I'd be really happy …

* This restraining order may well be lifted in a couple of weeks when I get an XBox 360 (I need to play the new Grand Theft Auto game, okay?) and attempt to use the iMac as an HD monitor. I'm still not sure about this though - plugging Microsoft hardware into Apple hardware just seems so very perverse.

Balls

The scroll-ball in my Mac "Mighty" Mouse went completely doolally last week - first it stopped scrolling down, then wouldn't scroll up. Being an Apple product, it's completely impenetrable, so cleaning it is a bit tricky.

Apple's official suggestion is to hold the mouse upside down and give it a good vigorous scroll. Nothing happens. Various Mac forums suggest alcohol or ethanol solutions, or a puff of air from one of those camera-cleaning spray things. Still nothing.

But now I think I've found the answer: spit.

It feels (and sounds) a bit wrong, but covering your finger in spit and then having a bit of a scroll around quickly unclogs whatever was clogging your ball. Simple.

Judging albums by their covers

I buy almost all of my music on iTunes these days, but sometimes I'll be tempted into buying whole albums by artists I love. The thing is, this year all the artists I love have selfishly decided to release their albums at the same time. The least they could do is make an effort with the sleeve design. Let's see what I've got in store …

Beck - Odelay Special Edition
I love this album. And although they've wrapped it in a bit of baking paper, it's good to see they've made an effort with the sleeve by doing the most Beckular thing - taking an existing piece of art and scrawling all over it to create an endearing mess.

Guillemots - Red
I discovered their first album track-by-track over a couple of years, so to suddenly have a whole new body of work thrust on me in one go is a bit intimidating... almost like.. a giant ball of wool. Of course. Bought this on Monday and so far it seems like a grower. Words in particular is amazing.

The Long Blondes - Couples
Interesting. Still going with a horrible narrow typeface, but at least this time they've got a zebra on the cover. Saw them last week at Fibbers (York's premier music venue) and the new stuff sounds good good good. I stand by my judgment that they sound like Blondie and Pulp sharing a caravan whilst on holiday in St Etienne. Whilst wearing berets.

Portishead - 3
At bloody last. Good to see they're still going with the big P. And that teal colour just looks like how they sound, doesn't it? Or is that just me?

The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely
Despite the fact this was rush-released this Tuesday, my local Sainsburys had it at number 26 in their charts on Monday. Hmm. Nice cover - no doubt chock-full of symbolism and obscure cultural references.

R.E.M. - Accelerate
After the "slap it through Photoshop" cover of Around The Sun, it's good to see a scruffier back-to-basics cover (which, judging by the reviews, reflects the nature of the album itself). Like all R.E.M. albums I'll end up buying the expensive special edition which I'll pore over for a couple of days and then put on a shelf to gather dust for the rest of time.

Thoughts on Helvetica: The Motion Picture

So I finally got round to watching Helvetica last night. Although some people I know (friends, family, girlfriend… okay, everyone I know) think that the idea of a feature-length documentary about a typeface is a bit stupid, I absolutely loved it. I feel all tingly and inspired.

Some thoughts/obsrevations:

  • Helvetica is even more ubiquitous than I thought.
  • Michael C Place (and his cat) are just lovely.
  • Paula Scher is a bit of a hypocrite. Judging by the film, she wouldn’t touch Helvetica with yours (blaming it for the Vietnam and Iraq wars), but now she’s selling templates that incorporate it.
  • Michael Bierut (my favourite design writer, thanks to his brilliant Seventy-nine short essays on design) should steer clear of caffeine.
  • I love that upper-case R more than ever.
  • Someone should make a much cheaper, poorly edited film called Arial.
  • David Carson looks exactly how I imagined him to look.
  • I want a Freitag bag. Now.

My name is Daniel and I am a redesigner

I can't stop redesigning. I don't mean in a fun way, where you play around with reimagining an existing concept. I mean I never know when to leave something I've done, to accept it as complete. It's not productive.

This mostly happens with self-assigned work, things where I'm my own client. For example, if you've visited this website more than once, chances are it's looked slightly/totally different each time. TypePad (the blogging tool I use to run this little site) doesn't have many design-editing options, but it has enough for me to look at my site and want to just give it a tweak here and a tweak there.

Tweaking generally leads to full-on redesignment. And then worrying. And then more imaginary tweaks are made in my head when I'm trying to get to sleep. And then I'll be happy with it all for approximately a week.

Then it starts all over again.

Right now, I'm pretty happy with the "look and feel" (yucky term) of ol' Binks, so I'm going to try to leave it for a month without making a single change - just adding posts and links. It'll be hard, but I have to break this cycle of redesignment and get on with some real work.

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Lost and Ffffound

For today (and only today) Ben Terrett has done an interesting thing with his blog, Noisy Decent Graphics. Basically, he's opened it up for all and sundry to post on. Jumping at any chance to make a mess of the Internet, I of course threw some words up there - nothing particularly enlightening, just noting that Terrett's profile picture looked like the shadow of Stanley Tucci. I also briefly mentioned that I was after an invitation to to Ffffound, an invite-only image-bookmarking site. Moments later, I had received one from mysterious benefactor "Caren".

The internet can be a lovely, unpredictable thing sometimes.

Ffffound is a simple concept, but an incredibly useful one. You can bookmark any images you find on any website, and they're automatically collated in a single place. Ffffound will then recommend other images that you might like based on the preferences of others. Have a look here for my first few bookmarked images and to understand what the hell I'm blithering on about.

And, simply to justify the title of this post, here is a map of the Lost island. What is that four-toed statue-foot thing all about?

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The new me

So I have a new passport. The last one didn't technically need to be replaced, but of the selection of photos I'd supplied, they'd decided to use the one of me with my eyes closed. Ten years ago that may have been okay, but nowadays it'd probably get me locked up in an interview room for ten hours, culminating in some intimate glove-love.

Here's my new pic. My sister reckons I look like a seventies bank robber. I'm going to claim that this is deliberate, and that I'm perfecting a kind of Life On Mars thing (when actually I'm attempting to go for an Almost Famous thing, but failing considerably).

Anyway, the scary thing about the new passport is that it's one of those new fangled 'biometric' ones. This means that there's a tiny chip embedded in the back page, as well as an antenna. An actual antenna. Quite what this is for I'm not sure. An antenna.

And yes, my fingernails are a bit stumpy at the moment.

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Zawi?

There’s been a lot of public debate about inept branding this year - that Olympics thing, the new Wacom identity, Adobe’s bizarre Photoshop logo. Now, as 2007 draws to a close, Popjustice have a good point and laugh at one of the most inept attempts at rebranding I’ve seen in a long time: Zavvi.

What they don’t mention, although it’s apparent throughout, is that those two Vs next to each other look an awful lot like a W. Surely somebody noticed this when they made that stupid word up?

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Circus envy

Whilst reading Jeremy Leslie's excellent MagCulture blog (and basically seeing if anyone was responding to a minor rant I'd left on there about Creative Review's recent coverless issue) I clicked another commenter's link and found myself in a beautiful new world: Boicozine.

Michael Bojkowski's design blog is one of the most - no, wait, drop the "one of" - is the most beautiful, well designed blogs I've ever seen. The layout, the use of colour, the type: it's all gorgeous. Oh, and the content is jolly good too.

One day I'll learn how to design webularly (rather than my current method of smacking someone else's CSS repeatedly with a spanner until it does what I want it to) and have a site like this. Or maybe I could sneak into Bojkowski's site in the dead of night and replace all of his content with my own. Hmm …

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Popworld Pulp: what the hell went wrong?

Popworld Pulp has been axed after just one week. Despite an initial print run of 130,000, they only managed to sell 9,000. Is this symptomatic of the whole “end of print” thing, with the magazine’s target audience of 16-24 year olds heading to the Internet for their music news? Or did something else go wrong?

As an attempted buyer of Popworld Pulp, I’ll offer my theory: terrible marketing. You could make the best magazine in the world, but if you don’t pay up for an obscene amount of launch publicity then initial sales are guaranteed to be paltry. Titles like Heat and Grazia will be paying off their start-up costs for a long time, but they succesfully positioned themselves in the market and each have a healthy circulation.

I chose to buy the new magazine based on some kind of brand loyalty to the Popworld TV show, rather than the shitty (and solitary) advert I saw. I then popped into Borders and… where was it? With the music magazines? With the teenie magazine? After several laps of the periodicals section I gave up.

Later, I tried two branches of WHSmiths, still no joy. Given that the magazine was essentially invisible on the high street, I’m impressed that as many as 9,000 people managed to buy it! I don’t know if they had distribution problems or if the stockists weren’t sure how to position it, but something went very very wrong.

Bad day

Before today I had never heard of blogger and author Kathy Sierra was.

Then this morning I read this news story on the Beeb about a campaign of death threats against her appearing on the web. I’m not just talking about the odd bit of slagging-off, these are actual death threats.  The whole concept of blogging and commenting has developed its own weird etiquette that has unfortunately given people the feeling that they are unaccountable for their actions and statements.

I know I’ve been rude about complete strangers in the past (apologies to Angelina Jolie’s agent, for one) whilst writing online - far ruder than if I were face-to-face with them. But these people threatening Sierra have clearly crossed a line, and should face some real legal consequences.

I worry that episodes like this will result in knee-jerk responses and censorship (that we’re still living in a post-Janet’s breast world of media sensitivity is utterly ludicrous in my opnion) that can only damage the democracy and freedoms of blogging.

Hang on in there Kathy - don’t let the bastards grind you down.

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King of Comedy

I recently rented the first series of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie and, to my surprsie, this twenty-year-old series is still incredibly fresh and funny today. Amdist a host of other sketch shows in the 80s, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie created amzingly absurd yet intelligent comedy.

And now I'm going to have a bit of a rant.

The problem with British comedy today is that, post-Fast Show, sketch shows have been reduced to simple, crude repetition. Don't get me wrong - I love The Fast Show, and have a lot of time for Little Britain, but I don't think comedians as talented as David Walliams and Matt Lucas are doing themselves any favours by restricting themselves to only a handful of characters.

Take Catherine Tate for example. She's managed to wring three series of sketches out of repeating the same seven or eight jokes over and over again. Is this down to lazy writing, or is there pressure from the Beeb to create a lucrative catchphrase-based commodity? Of course, basing comedy around a handful of characters is the stuff of sitcoms - but Tate et al aren't interested in characters, rather caricatures. Scratch the surface (or rather the increasingly relied-upon latex) and there's nothing there.

Hopefully there'll be something as great as A Bit Of Fry And Laurie again. Mitchell and Webb have the potential, but have already fallen into the BBC catchphrase trap.

Okay, rant over. And now here's the reason I started writing this post in the first place: a classic bit of Hugh Laurie, from way back in 1987 …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__DrJI7mTHQ&w=552&h=444]

And performing the same thing Inside The Actors' Studio last year …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UES4IBxCzfc&w=552&h=444]

Country feedback

Listen here all you British types - a young gentleman by the name of Steven Taylor has initiated one of these new-fangled Number 10 E-Petitions to protect the rights of photographers. Taylor has written in detail about the increasing threat to photographic freedom on his website, but here's the general gist of it:

There are a number of moves promoting the requirement of 'ID' cards to allow photographers to operate in a public place. It is a fundamental right of a UK citizen to use a camera in a public place, indeed there is no right to privacy when in a public place. These moves have developed from paranoia and only promote suspicion towards genuine people following their hobby or profession.

Now go and throw your signature at the E-Petition. At the time of writing there are 59,166 signatures, so the government may take notice.

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On the Oscars (specifically Sky One’s highlights show)

The Oscars are the one big sporting event of the year that I get really excited about. Without any access to Sky Movies, this year I had to resort to watching the two-hour highlights show on Sky One, a hastily stitched-together abridged version of the night’s events.

Some observations:

  • All the frocks were really quite dull. Worst dress of the night has to go to Kirsten Dunst, but even that was a bit dull. I say bring back Cher and Bjork. 
  • Weren’t there a lot of lesbians?
  • Jack Nicholson is quite, quite terrifying without any hair. 
  • In a fantastic year for us brits, who do Sky One send as our emmisary on the red carpet? Someone with a bit of class, a bit of style? No. They sent Fearne Cotton. Claudia Winkelman and Cat Deeley should sue. 
  • This years’ interminable performance-art thing was just some people doing shadow-play. Surely they should have reserved this for a year when there were lots of films about rabbits and butterflys? 
  • A PowerPoint presentation won two Oscars. How weird is that? 
  • Sky One producerperson: “I know, rather than the Best Foreign Language Film or the Lifetime Achievement Award, what people will really want to see is an inexplicable musical number with Will Ferrell and Jack Black trying to persuade the world that they’re funny. Yeah, that’ll definitley be the best use of our limited running time.”
  • Eddie Murphy is an egomaniacal nobchops and was taking the whole thing way too seriously. 
  • There were too many nominees giving out awards. They get a chance to be on stage when it comes round to their category - give someone else a chnace to shine. It kind of implies that there are only ever twenty actors in existence at any one time. 
  • Babel didn’t deserve anything, and it din’t get anything. Good. 
  • For about half an hour the show turned into Dreamgirls. This was not a good thing. 
  • Jermeny Piven should have presented something, in character as Avi from Entourage. 
  • Seeing Martin Scorsese receiving his Oscar from The Beards was quite moving. 
  • Ellen wasn’t terrible as a host, but then again she wasn’t brilliant either. This kind of sums up the whole ceremony - medicrity was kind of a running theme throughout the night. 

In summary: give it back to the Beeb at once.

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