Two reasons why you shouldn't double space

1. It's anachronistic
Unless you're working on a typewriter, there is absolutely no need to smack that space bar more than once. Don't take my word for it – behold the wisdom of Robert Bringhurst, from the Elements of Typographic Style:

“In the 19th century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of 20th century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period [full stop]. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation.”

2. It really gets my goat
And you wouldn't like me when I've got my goat.

Linefeed's City of London typosurvey

I dare say you all know about Michael Bojkowski's Linefeed, one of the best design blogs out there (and the one I've probably been reading the longest, in various incarnations). If you don't, pop over there and have a peruse – it's well worth a few units your precious webtime.

One of the highlights is his ongoing typosurvey of the City of London, where he casts his eye on those little designy gems scattered about the sprawl. I'm particularly looking forward to his forthcoming photographic adventure around Golden Lane Estate and the Barbican (one of my favourite places on earth). Now that the sun has come out, I'll have to pop out onto the streets of York and do my own typosurvey at some point.

Spin the black circle

So tomorrow is Record Store Day, and a bunch of artists will be releasing limited edition records to "celebrate the unique culture of independently owned record stores". Now, is it just me, or does the whole thing seem a little counterproductive? Implying that physical formats are only interesting when they're rare and/or collectable turns stores into eBay showrooms. For example, last year Blur released the Fool's Day EP, and rather than run home with it and treasure it, most people just slung it on eBay, where it was selling for £150.

"Come to our record store and fight over a 7" picturedisc that you'll never play and will end up selling for ten times the original price!" – is this really the message that record stores want to be putting out? They're hammering in the final nails themselves.

Surely a more productive way of boosting the record industry would be to address the fact that there are hardly any affordable record players out there. Aside from a couple of naff looking things in Urban Outfitters, you can't pick up anything to play your records on for under £100 – at least, not without having a bunch of other stereo equipment to attach it to. I would love an all-in-one record player on which top play my old Blondie LPs, but apparently that's simply out of the question. I'm tempted by this Steepletone model, but actually seeing one in the flesh is basically impossible. I was laughed at recently by a staff in a high street store (I won't say who, as they very nicely got in touch and apologised since then) for asking about – in their words – a "gramophone". Charming.

Sort out the players, and the format will sell. Excitedly emphasise the format's scarcity and … goodbye vinyl. It was nice spinning you.

On cinemas and fleapits

Khoi posted this earlier:

"An idea to help increase theater attendance: customers pay a subscription fee for movie passes at theaters of their own choosing, creating a relationship between the moviegoer and the theater. I’m not sure anyone will ever do this, but it’s intriguing, and as a fan of the in-theater movie experience, I hope something like this can reverse the downward trend in attendance."

It struck me as odd that he'd be suggesting this, as it already happens in various ways across the UK (Khoi is a New Yorker). There are simple pay a monthly fee, see what you want schemes, and there are more sophisticated ones. For example, I’m a member of City Screen in York, undoubtedly one of the best cinemas in the country (I take some credit for this myself, as I worked there when it first opened and helped put bits of it together). For a small annual fee, you get a bunch of complimentary tickets, invites to free preview screenings, discounts on all tickets (and food and drink in the bar), and a monthly programme sent to your home. Plus discounts in local shops and restaurants.

And Khoi's right, it creates a definite relationship, a bond, between the cinema-goer and the the cinema. It’s amazing that in a town full of museums and galleries and historical sites, the community treasure this cinema as one of the best things in town. It helps that they bother to put on an amazing array of films and live screenings. They only have three screens, but some weeks they'll show a dozen different films.

It's sad that City Screen is an exception, not the norm. On a recent trip down to my folks in Kent, we planned to go to the pictures, but between the three nearby multiplexes, each with at least ten screens, there was a selection of eight films. Ridiculous. And the other week, Dr B and I ventured to the other cinema in York – Reel – to see Limitless. The auditorium was hazardously dark and tiny, the picture was pixelated, most of the trailers were projected at the wrong aspect ratio, and the sound was buzzy and boomy. We won't be going back there again! Good experience = weekly visits. Bad experience = one visit ever. Surely someone in charge must have figured this out by now?

If cinema attendance is dropping, the fact is that it’s entirely the fault of the cinema chains, not videogames or telly or whatever else is being blamed this week. It's as simple as this: stick a sweet shop on the front of a big screen, and no, people won’t care. Make an effort to create an enjoyable, rewarding experience, and people will love it.

The Gray Suit

At some point in the future, I'm planning to conduct an archaic ceremony to transform Dr B into Dr G. For this, I'm going to need a suit. Actually, for a lot of things I could do with a suit. So I'm going to get a suit. Thing is, I know nothing about suits.

So, as is the standard way of solving problems these days, I've cobbled together a quick tumblr to scrapbook various ideas. Hopefully through some kind of style-Darwinism, the ideal whistle will present itself, or at the very least I'll have something to wave at a tailor.

At the moment, the site – The Gray Suit – looks like a Jason Schwartzman/John Slattery fansite, which kind of gives you an idea of what I'm after. I've already had a couple of tips from fine twitter folk, and they've immediately become my favourite websites: @etienneshrdlu suggested Nerd Boyfriend (featuring such handsome models as Dieter Rams and 1970s Michael Douglas) and @philipkennedy sent me to the splendid Clothes on Film. Any other suggestions for sites or images that may help in my epic quest would be most appreciated.

The Silent Evolution and the desaturation of Spielberg

Check out these figures from the underwater sculpture installation "The Silent Evolution" by British artist Jason de Caires Taylor, on the sea floor between Cancun and Isla Mujeres (images borrowed from The Atlantic's gallery of artificial reefs, but lots more images are here). They're pretty otherworldly anyway, but once you take the blue-green colour out of the pictures, robbing them of their watery context, you get something really quite eery.

Talking of artistic desaturation, Steven Soderbergh recently shared a list of all the movies, books, TV shows, plays, and short stories he watched and read over the past year. It's a pretty incredible account of art consumption (slightly let down by the fact he refers to Seven as Se7en …), but one particular thing that sticks out is that he watched Raiders of the Lost Ark three times in one week – each time in black and white.

I WANT TO DO THIS NOW.

I'm a big fan of the director's cut of The Mist, which is basically the same as the (underrated) original but it's in black and white. It's hard to say why exactly, but it just works so much better. I can imagine Raiders also works pretty well because of its old movie-serial roots, but also because the way Spielberg uses light would translate perfectly to a monochrome palette. Blinding white light and deep, unfathomable darkness – he's all about the contrasts. I watched Minority Report recently – although the first thing you notice is how very blue the whole thing is, he counterpoints the shiny, bright future with some impenetrable shadows lurking on the other side of everything. The man knows how to tell a story with light.

So, I'm now planning a day of black and white Spielbergery (Dr B, if you're reading this, you're in for one heck of a weekend). Raiders, definitely. Jurassic Park would probably work pretty well too, with all the lightning and rain and big ol' dinosaur eyes (and for some reason it seems appropriate that Bob Peck's stony face deserves to be immortalised in black and white). Aaaand … maybe Saving Private Ryan.

Not Schindler's List though. That'd be silly.

Vitsoe

William Morris said “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful". Have a look around you home. How much of it is truly useful (and not chances-are-it'll-be-useful-one-day useful, but properly useful)? Or beautiful? How much of it is just stuff, loaded with misplaced nostalgia and good intentions, hanging on simply by virtue of the original price tag? Get rid. Simplify. And how best to structure this sudden rationalisation of your life?

Simple. You need Vitsoe's 606 Universal Shelving System. Look at it there in all it's minimal, modular splendour. Just imagine your desert island possessions nestled stylishly on those Dieter Rams-designed metal shelves.

Useful. Beautiful. A grid for living.

This originally appeared in Gym Class Magazine #7.

This week, I have mostly been:

• Duped by a Croatian guy called Igor, who was pretending to be Port magazine. As you do.
• Entertaining myself (and quite a few other people it would seem) by creating an iPhone wallpaper based on the magical jumper worn by Sarah Lund in Forbrydelsen. It had better feature in the second series [shakes fist in the general direction of Copenhagen].
• Coming to the conclusion that LCD Soundsystem is the sound of someone inventing a time machine, travelling back to 1977 and punching David Bowie in the nuts. In turn, David Bowie is the sound of someone inventing a time machine, travelling forward to 2077 and punching God in the nuts. This is how the Universe works and this is how it will be destroyed.
• Enjoying the fact it's sunny but still a bit chilly, so I can wear my long coat and shades and look all John Cusackish.
• Trying to work out how to convince Dr B that she wants to spend Sunday afternoon watching Lawrence of Arabia. Apparently "it's a masterpiece" just doesn't cut it anymore. I still think she owes me for the ordeal that was You and Me and Everyone We Know.
• Rediscovering Co.Design and trying to read every single thing they've ever posted. I now want this Scrabble set, the incredible ohmygodthefutureisnow Condition ONE app and a tiny Brooklyn apartment made of ping-pong balls.
• Discovering that I should never, ever attempt to make mac and cheese. It wasn't pretty.
• Marvelling at two very different but very amazing films shot on railway station platforms: David Lean's Brief Encounter and Henry Cowling's SixToes video. I'd love to see the former remade in the style of the latter.
• Talking weddings :)

Inside the Eames Office

The web is full of photographs of utopian, minimal design studios bathed in glorious white light. They always look very appealing at first glance, but their empty inactivity is a bit eery. The surfaces are always bare (save for the occasional gigantiMac display), the shelves are sparse and carefully ornamented with the correct monographs, and the only time you'll see humans messying up the place with their clumsy limbs and ill-considered fleshy colour schemes is if they're out of focus, blurred, in the background, or all three.

So it makes a nice change to see these old pics of the Eames Office (pinched from Co. Design and House Industries), full of stuff, with people doing stuff, using stuff. All lit by a multitude of Anglepoise lamps. Of course, if you do want to see it all empty-like, you can do so whilst feeling like a giant.

Forbrydelsen

Sometimes, just sometimes, a week of work has been so eye-gougingly frustrating, that the only way to cheer yourself up at the end of it is to create a wallpaper based on the knitwear of your favourite Danish detective.

Sometimes.

Feel free to use it yourself: just press and hold to save the selected image above. Navigate to [Settings] and [Wallpaper]. Select to [Choose From Camera Roll] and select the Grid-App you wish to use, when prompted DO NOT scale and hit [Set]. Bosh. Done.

RSS blindness

I subscribe to a LOT of RSS feeds. Far too many. The problem with this is that I read all the posts in Reeder (on Mac and iPhone) and I end up missing the carefully considered context of each blog's actual design. Given that the bulk of my subscriptions are to design blogs, this seems a little counter-productive, doesn't it?

Sometimes I'll step out of Reeder and onto a site I read all the time, only to notice that it's had a radical makeover (for example, a recent visit to Creative Journal was a surprising treat). I've spent hours hacking away at the code to redesign my own site, so it strikes me as an odd paradox that new readers get to see this, but those who have chosen to subscribe to the RSS feed (gawd bless you), are missing out on it completely. All those little widgets on the right that aid the reader in navigating the site and discovering other posts and other blogs and things: completely absent.

Loyalty is rewarded with an inferior reading experience. Style is traded for convenience. Function for brevity. RSS is certainly one of the best things to happen to the web, but at times it does seem to be working against it.

Why I love Subtraction.com

Well there's this for a start:

Mr President

… and this:

Khoi Vinh's illustration for Stack America

… but also because it's just a damn well-written blog that covers just the right breadth of subjects. Khoi Vinh is a designer, but he doesn't just write about design. He covers other areas that interest him, approaching them from a designer's perspective – he'll write about iPads and magazines and the usual designer diversions, but he'll also write insightful posts about Batman and Charlie Sheen. His individual take on the world is fascinating, informed and intelligent. Essentially it's not a design blog, but a blog written by a designer.

In a world currently flooded with single-minded ultra-focessed tumblr blogs (do we really need any more sites like "Fuck Yeah Tilt Shift Photographs Of People Sitting On Bins Outside Woolworths Reading Proust" or "My Daily Portrait of Rod Steiger"?), it's that consistency of authorship, not topic, that has kept me (and many others) subscribed to his RSS for several years. Whenever I hit a blogular brick wall, Subtraction.com is the site that always gets me inspired again.

33

I'm exhausted. Physically and mentally exhausted. Like, oh-dear-lord-i-may-sleep-under-my-desk exhausted. I've just returned to work after the most splendid birthday weekend of adventures, all organised by the magnificent Dr B. A few highlights:

• Watching Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, at City Screen, beamed in live from the National Theatre using a complex system of mirrors or something. A damn good show, and further proof that Benedict Cumberbatch really is quite a gifted actor. A little annoyed that the people who arrange these things still insist on ruining the atmosphere by putting a making-of featurette before the show (although it's an improvement on the Metropolitan Opera's habit of interviewing the cast during the intervals, as if it's a sporting event or something).
• Breakfast in bed – what better way to start your birthday than with bacon and eggs amongst a pile of lovely presents?
• A rather nice lunch with my folks at the Blueprint Café, followed by a wander around the Design Museum and a quick spin with my dad.
• Sipping on an Old Fashioned at Detroit in Covent Garden, followed by the rather dangerous drunken discovery that Fopp is open late. I somehow resisted buying everything and settled on the tradition Foppery of a CD (Saint Etienne's Finisterre), a DVD (Speed – Dr B has never seen it!) and a book (Joe Haldeman's The Forever War) for a tenner.
• TEDx. So many fascinating speakers, so many ideas, so much temptation to use the cliche "a rollercoaster of emotions". I feel like my view of the world has been broadened significantly, I have a renewed hunger for learning stuff. Plus I've now breathed the same air as Jude Law, so I feel 10% more handsome (and Dr B is forgiven for yelping when he appeared, because she also yelped at Vivienne Westwood). Hopefully the Observer will organise another TED event next year – it'll definitely be added to our annual cultural events diary alongside Latitude Festival and Summer Screen at Somerset House. After a long day of having our brains tickled, we had a swift drink with Daniel and Cecilia at the stunning St Pancras Renaissance hotel. How stunning? Well, a night in the royal suite will set you back £10,000. That stunning.
• A jolly housewarming party in Greenwich (mostly involving people from York, rather bizarrely), under the watchful eye of the big big moon. You can't beat frozen pizza, home-made rosé, Chemical Brothers and the company of great friends.
• A hungover Sunday of shopping and sitting and watching stuff. I picked up my annual supply of Uniqlo jeans, picked up Forbidden Planet's last copy of Haunted Knight (thanks to Loz for the recommendation) and finally got my mitts on issue one of Port magazine at Magma. It smells as lovely as I'd hoped, and the actual content is pretty good too.

So, thank you Dr B, thank you London. Time to catch up on this weekend's Forbrydelsen and get some sleep methinks. Lots and lots of sleep.

Me, today

Braun PS 2, by Magnus

Mike Mignola's Dracula

Did you know that Mike Mignola adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book and the Coppola film) into a comic? I didn't either, until Dr B dug out her copy to threw onto the big eBay pile currently taking up half of our office (or studio, depending on who's in there).

I've recently been catching up on Mignola's massive and lovely Hellboy Library Editions, and he's quickly becoming one of my favourite comic artists around (matched only by Adi Granov and Charles Burns). He has a really distinct style, and has an amazing mastery of light and shade. As fun as they are, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy films don't do him justice – they just don't capture the sheer inkiness of the those vast expanses of black that Mignola does so well.

Actually, having watched them both a a couple of weeks ago, I find those films incredibly frustrating. They're hard not to love, but are so patchy and superficial – cheap thrills and easy laughs at the expense of the dark, gothic characters that have so much more potential. Plus in the second film, del Toro seems determined to frame Ron Perlman in such a way that he looks far too small. When you're trying to make your red latex-covered 60 year-old star look like an imposing 7' tall beast, don't make him spend half the film sat down!

(That gripe aside, the films are surprisingly excellent for career guidance. Dr B and I have both decided we're going to work for the York branch of the BPRD.)

But I digress. As lovely as Mignola's Dracula is, we've got a big ol' wedding to pay for, so we're flogging it on eBay along with a few other morsels – including some Lester Bangs, PJ Harvey, Adele, the excellent Canteen cookbook, a Sony Vaio, the first issue of X-Men: First Class. If that shameless hard sell hasn't got you a-clicking, check out the official Art of Mike Mignola site for some freegothic treats.

Psychodesign

In my dream last night (I know, not the most promising start to a post), I went into a comic shop on a backstreet of the Big Imaginary City of My Mind, and bought some incredible WWII ephemera. It was basically a bunch of four-page newspapers, each contatining a day's worth of statistics and facts about the war. The centre-spread was a map showing all the latest troop movements and conflicts. Although in my my dream the design was credited to Disney, they didn't look Disneyish. They were mostly black on white, with touches of red. Imagine Nick Felton setting up a blind date for magCulture and TeuxDeux – that's what they looked like.

The thing in my dream looks a bit like the Edinburgh Civic Survey (1949), as shot by Joe at Applied Works

Now, I realise that this is basically my mind processing a weekend viewing of Inception, a discussion on Friday about the latest map-happy issue of Eye (specifically the lovely Dutch atlases of 010), and the fact I recently read about Disney's creative input into the war. But I'm also rather proud of the fact that I designed something elegant and useful without even being awake. It also taps into things I've been thinking whilst watching the terrifying footage from Japan – getting information to the people using non-electronic forms is still vital. As much as we love having everything accessible from our pocket gadgets, batteries die, transmitters fail. Sometimes a good old fashioned pamphlet-airdrop is the solution.

Another shot of the Edinburgh Civic Survey

One day we'll hopefully be able to tap into the creative power of our subconscious, processing problems and stimuli in unexpected ways, and it'll completely change how we go about designing things, learning things, doing things. This blows my mind a little bit.

I also dreamt the new Spider-Man movie. It was so-so.

Attempting to defend George Lucas

Maggie Kruger at Forgotten Flix is incredibly critical of George Lucas in this post, specifically the Star Wars prequel trilogy. I kind of, almost, jumped to his defence in the comments, and I thought I'd repeat/expand on my musings here, as they touch on various thoughts I've been meaning to post about for a while:

The Phantom Menace is pretty poor, and once you reach the end of that trilogy, is quite obviously redundant. But amongst all the inane politics, Oskar Schindler talking into a ladyshave and yelps of "l'il Annie!", there are some good bits. You have to admit the podracing scene is pretty amazing (and will look great n 3D). Plus watching it now is entertaining simply for spotting the surreal casting of minor roles (Celia Imrie! Dominic West! The voices of Greg Proops, Lindsay Duncan and Peter Serafinowicz! Sofia and Roman Coppola! Keira Knightley! A completely undermined Terence Stamp!).

Attack of the Clones is fascinating as a an example of film-making in the web age, a transparent fan-pleasing response to the critical mauling that Phantom Menace received. All the important plot progression is being saved for Episode III, so Lucas actually has a stab at making a fun, pulpy sci-fi adventure.

The problem is, he tries to hard too please – it's an exercise in eliciting as many fangasms from the audience as possible, to mask the fact that not a lot actually happens or makes sense. It's as if he just went out onto the street and asked for ideas: "What do you want to see? Less Jar Jar? Fair enough. Boba Fett? Okay. Yoda fighting? Black Hawk Down with Stormtroopers? R2D2 flying? Yup, we can do all that. What's that? You want Jimmy Smits in it?"

But 90% of the basic story they were trying to tell with the trilogy is basically in Revenge of the Sith, which is far and away the best of the bunch. There are some amazing sequences. There's definitely enough material to edit the three together into a big epic tragedy that'd stand up against any of the Lord of the Rings films … except for one thing: Hayden Christensen. The biggest crime the prequels commit is revealing that Darth Vader is essentially Dawson Leary.

Sorry George – that's the best I could do.

From geek to cultural mainstream

Last night I attended a talk by Revolution Software founder (and official industry/local legend) Charles Cecil, entitled From geek to cultural mainstream. He discussed the evolution of adventure games from their humble text-based origins, through the glory days of Monkey Island and Revolution's own Broken Sword, to the resurrection of the genre on various handheld devices that let you literally point and click. There was also a lot of of focus on the actually storytelling art involved in writing a game, and how the App store model of selling is infinitely superior to the slow developer/publisher/distributor/retailer one.

The talk was predictably fascinating, as you'd expect from someone who's been at the front line of the gaming industry pretty much since its inception, and Cecil has a knack for entertaining Ron Howard anecdotes. But I particularly enjoyed it because it got me all nostalgiary — and not just about the games (although that does happen sometimes).

You see, way back in 1998 I managed to get myself a few months of intern work as a researcher and artworker at Revolution Software whilst they were developing In Cold Blood (not, it should be pointed out, based on the work of Truman Capote). I compiled film clips of set design and cinematography as inspiration for the designers – plenty of The Third Man and Batman Returns I seem to recall – and created lots of incidental graphic elements featured in the game.

Looking back now, I realise this was pretty much the accidental beginning of my career. I was studying film and television at York St Johns at the time, and had great plans for carving out a niche as the British Cameron Crowe. I loved anything that involved creativity, but design as a profession wasn't really on my mind. I'd never used Photoshop before, but knew my way around Deluxe Paint on the Amiga, so understood the basics.

I mostly had to create textures for the 3D models and sets, so I got to traipse around York with a digital camera (a nineties digital camera – clunky) and take pictures of rusty boats and mouldy walls. I also had the fiddly but incredibly fun task of creating industrial floor markings and some background animations (which involved watching the opening of Alien … a LOT). Fortunately there are still some screenshots of the game online, so here are a couple of examples of my very first professional designs:

See those yellow dashed lines on the floor? I did those. Oh yeah.

I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure that the computer console at the bottom features a couple of my astonishingly generic green-screen sci-fi animations.

Yeah, could be. Impressive, eh?

The skills I picked up at Revolution – and, more importantly, learning that this sort of thing was actually rather fun – put me on an unexpected path to designerdom. The Oscar was, and continues to be, put on hold. Careers start in odd, unexpected places, don't they?

Thanks Charles :)

We are science fiction

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE_USPTmYXM&w=552&h=344]

On my computer, I've just watched a video of a spaceship containing a robot hurtling towards its rendezvous with a spacestation, all shot with a mobile phone from within an airplane. There are people alive today who will remember a time when none of these things existed.

Isn't that just a tiny bit amazing?