Sensible Software 1986–1999

When I was 14, I wrote a list for my parents: "100 reasons why it'd be a good idea for me to have an Amiga 1200". Although it didn't work immediately, my dogged dedication to the cause eventually wore them down, and before long I was able to chuck out my old grey Amstrad 464 and replace it with something much lovelier. That's the power of lists for you.

The Amiga – a kind of precursor to the modern Mac in terms of human-friendly home computing – was an incredible machine. As well being the platform for useful software such as Wordworth and Deluxe Paint (both of which were mentioned near the top of that list and were essential tools at university), it was home to some classic games. The best of these games came out of a handful of idiosyncratic British developers such as Psygnosis (Lemmings), Bullfrog (Syndicate, Theme Park), Team 17 (Alien Breed, Body Blows, Superfrog, Worms), Bitmap Brothers (Speedball), and Sensible Software (Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder).

Those who grew up with the Amiga have seen computing and gaming change in all sorts of massive, ridiculous ways, so a lot of this only exists in our flaky ephemeral memories now. Still, at least we have jobs and internet connections now, so at least we're able to do things we only dreamed of back then – such as fund a biography of Sensible Software using Kickstarter.

The first project from new games publisher ROM, the book looks pretty damn lovely – credit to designer Darren Wall. If you throw enough money at it, you get a heavyweight vinyl LP of the songs from their games (War from Cannon Fodder is a classic). It'd be a shame to see this period of British creativity and innovation (and the weird geeky humour that came along with it) get swept aside and forgotten, so books like this are important. With any luck, the success of this project (at time of writing, it's just £4,000 away from its funding goal) will lead to similar titles that we can wave at our grandchildren while we explain to them how things used to be better, back in the day.

UPDATE: They've reached their funding goal! Good work, everyone.

The 16 types of dads

Thanks to @WeMakeMags for the scan of this classic Life in Hell strip. I'm still undecided as to which of these types of dad I'll be most suited for. I'll probably aim for Fun, but come across as a delicate blend of Snooze and Goofy.

For those of you unfamiliar with Life in Hell, it's the rather smashing strip with which Matt Groening made his name. Entirely written and drawn by him, there's a lot more of him in it than in The Simpsons or Futurama – he is a master of daftness. It's endearingly doodly, in a good old-fashioned pen-and-paper way. Plus it was used to sell Apples, way back in the 80s.

A good place to start is The Huge Book of Hell, although as he's recently retired the strip for good, it's possible that an online archive of all the strips will appear at some point soon.

Marina City

Just to be a great big cliché, I bought an issue of Monocle to accompany me on a flight recently. Amongst all the unintentionally ridiculous articles (in their "things to improve your life" section, one of the suggestions was "buy your own island"), one piece really grabbed my attention: Life in the round, Hugo Macdonald's profile of Chicago's Marina City.

The 1964 building complex, with its iconic corn cob towers, was designed by Bertrand Goldberg to be a self-contained town – full of residential and commercial units (and a blues club), it's possible to live there and rarely set foot outside. This sort of 20th century architectural/urban planning idealism fascinates me – reading about this reminds me of the thinking behind the Barbican in London. You just can't beat a good concrete citadel.

Macdonald's piece, accompanied by David Robert Elliot's stunning photography, looks at the people who live there and the variety of ways the apartments have been remodelled over the years. Of course, Monocle being Monocle, you can't actually read the article unless you're a subscriber. There is however a book, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision, that looks rather good (and would be right at home next to David Heathcote's Barbican: Penthouse Over the City).

And so the obsession begins: Marina City goes straight to the top of my places-to-live wishlist. Just above that private island.

Woodcut

The other day, that nice Mr Ace Jet 170 blogged about receiving Bryan Nash Gill's Woodcut, a new book of prints made from cross-sections of trees. It's beautiful, all naturey and inky at the same time.

One reason I find them fascinating is that when I look at these prints, I don't see trees. I see islands. Topographical maps of volcanic islands. For the last couple of months – since rewatching Shutter Island actually – I've been mulling over the use of islands on screen. Jurassic Park; Jaws; Lost; Enter the Dragon; pretty much any film set in Manhattan. And more figurative islands, like Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard or LV-426 in the Alien films. Something about the physical containment of a story, an idea. Something about poring over maps as a child and imagining adventures and danger and exploration. And probably something to do with that God's Eye View video.

So yes, there's a kernel of an idea for something in there, I'm just not sure what. I'll continue mulling it over while staring at these prints.

God's Eye View

I've had this saved in my Vimeo favourites for ages, and I keep going back to it. Editor Brian Carroll has ploughed through the history of cinema and created this incredible montage of nothing but "god's eye view" shots. It's hard to put my finger on what's so magical about this, but together, the shots seem to be representing different parts of a shared world. It kind of looks like a trailer for an incredible video game, like the original Grand Theft Auto but with incredible graphics and cinematography. Could an entire film be shot like this? Or would it get tiresome after a few minutes? I'd love to see someone try.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/31487012?wmode=opaque&api=1">

Twelve Things On My Mind Before The Dark Knight Rises

1. Nought-five

Well crikey, this has been a long time coming. To put it into context, I posted my review of Batman Begins on here several months before excitedly writing about getting my own MySpace page. Remember MySpace? Batman Begins existed in a world that still had Top of the Pops and Smash Hits. I was still in my twenties, that's how long ago it was.

2. Trailers

2012 will be remembered as the year when trailers went too far. The besuited morons responsible for turning trailers into tiny abridged versions of the films they're meant to be promoting just lost all sight of why people go to the cinema in the first place. The Avengers and Prometheus trailers gave far too much away – particularly ridiculous given how much of an easy sell both of those films are – so I've made the rather rash decision to simply not watch trailers any more. I was a bit too late with The Dark Knight Rises unfortunately, but have successfully avoided the campaign for a good couple of months now. I'm not alone in this either: twitter seems to be awash with people proudly abstaining from trailers at the moment. It's not the easiest thing to do (particularly with Dredd trailers starting to appear), but it's totally worth it so that I can walk into the cinema without knowing exactly what's going to happen in the last five minutes of a film.

3. Unstoppable spoils

Of course, no matter how many trailers you dive out of the way of, with a film of this size you simply can't avoid some spoils. A couple of days ago I received a tweet, innocently asking me what I thought of [ACTOR] being cast as [CHARACTER]. I had no idea this character was going to be in it, but now that I do, the plot just kind of writes itself in my head. Damn. Blast.

4. Plot holes

Batman has been in safe hands throughout this trilogy – Nolan knows what he's doing. I still have concerns though. Many superhero franchises fall apart in the third film for some reason or other (the worst example being X-Men 3: Let's Just Write This Around Cast Members' Availability And Get It Over With), and Batman isn't immune to that. Plus, as good as it was, The Dark Knight still fell foul of some good old-fashioned plot-holery. This is particularly evident during one non-sensical sequence where Batman jumps out of the window of his penthouse, catches Rachel, lands safely on a car several hundred feet below, and then doesn't bother to return to his apartment where the Joker and his goons are still terrorising party guests while looking for Harvey Dent. WHO IS IN A CUPBOARD.

5. Loose ends

I'm sure by the end of the film, there'll be lots of niggling little threads left dangling, but there's one I just can't let go of. In Batman Begin, they make a point of highlighting how brittle the Batmask is … and then never mention it again. It felt like they were foreshadowing something that has yet to happen. In The Dark Knight, the suit was updated, so presumably that design flaw was ironed out. It's a little thing, but it still bugs me.

6. Chicago

Apparently the new film wasn't shot in Chicago like the previous two. It defined the mise-en-scène of the story, so it seems a shame to get rid of it now. (I have qualifications in this sort of thing, so I'm legally obliged to say mise-en-scène every now and then. Now where did I put my beret?)

7. Catwoman

Here's something else to make you feel old: Batman Returns is now twenty years old. TWENTY YEARS. Even so, Michelle Pfeiffer still casts a long shadow as the definitive Catwoman. It's hard to imagine how Anne Hathaway can make this role her own, particularly as she's been lumbered with that same costume Hollywood has been lazily zipping actresses into for twenty years (see also: GI Joe, The Avengers, the other Avengers, Underworld, etc.).

8. Justice League

The success of The Avengers' shared universe franchise has not gone unnoticed, and there are already plans to make a Justice League movie. Wherever they go with Batman after Nolan's films wraps up, putting him alongside a bunch of intergalactic superheroes just seems silly. And this is where I shamelessly quote myself from a few months ago:

Nolan has created a world in which a costumed vigilante fights organised crime using fear and wealth. Not an entirely realistic world, but one that has the right amount of internal logic for it to make sense and seem real. Sticking Supes in there would make it a world in which a costumed vigilante exists side-by-side with a flying cape-wearing super-powered alien. That's like making a sequel to Seven in which Detective Somerset finds a portal to Narnia. It just isn't going to work.

Then again, what do I know, as that basically describes the relationship between Iron Man and Thor.

9. 3D

The Dark Knight Rises is not in 3D. Do you know how many people are disappointed by this fact? None. None whatsoever. I'm glad Nolan stuck to his guns on this one – gimmicky headache tax should be left to the like of Paul WS Anderson and his knee-sliding, axe-throwing wife.

10. Timelines

If there's one constant with Christopher Nolan's films, it's that he likes playing with time. The back-to-front Memento, the Russian-doll timeline of Inception, the never-ending day of Insomnia – everything he makes involves some kind of timey-wimey trickery. The shuffled chronology of Batman Begins and The Prestige are particularly impressive when you think how confusing they could've been if dealt with by a lesser film-maker. It'll be interesting to see what he what tricks he plays in The Dark Knight Rises.

11. Our biggest export

Right now, Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are all played by Brits. You're welcome, America.

12. Nolan

So what's next for Nolan? Inception was the first film he'd made since Following that wasn't an adaptation of something else – I'd love to see him come up with more entirely original works. Or something a bit smaller perhaps. Or maybe I'll hate him by the end of Sunday, who knows.

Fingers crossed.

Tools

Back in 1995, when Bill Gates rather accurately predicted the form and function of the iPhone (or, as he snappily called it, the "Wallet PC"), he described it as the new Swiss Army Knife. The iPhone has certainly has lived up to that comparison, housing all sorts of handy tools, even if it's not that useful for cleaning out hooves or slowly and painfully opening tins of beans.

The one thing my favourite tools (or, as you kids call them, "apps") all have in common is that they do one thing and one thing only – they allow me to choose how to use them together in my own way. Nobody wants to open up a Swiss Army Knife just to find more Swiss Army Knives (well okay, now I see that written down it does sound like it'd be quite fun … for a couple of minutes anyway).

The single-purpose tools I use for working, blogging and surviving day-to-day life change over time. They come and go, they get replaced, they get absorbed by operating systems. So I thought I'd make a snapshot of what mobile and desktop tools I'm using right now:

Amazon Associates

Just one little unobtrusive way to make a few pennies from time spent blogging (particularly on one of my tumblrs, Print Is Dead). And by pennies, I mean Amazon vouchers – mostly spent on expanding my Complete Peanuts collection. Amazon's interface for this is surprisingly clunky, mobile-unfriendly, and incapable of differentiating customers from different countries. And it's quite fun seeing what else people are buying too, as Darren Rowse found out.

Buffer

Pretty simple idea, but one that divides opinion: Buffer lets you spread your tweets out throughout the day, using a time pattern of your choosing. I agree that it seems completely contrary to twitter's live conversation ethos, but it does have its uses. For example: when I'm going through my RSS feeds, there are usually several articles that I want to share, but dumping them all onto twitter at once seems a bit uncouth. Why not spread then out? It's also quite handy for starting conversations with those you'd otherwise miss out on, i.e. in other time zones. I see it as an automated way to increase human interaction, but I understand the arguments against it.

Creative Suite

Good old Creative Suite. Couldn't live without you. I am a couple of versions behind though: sometimes I feel like I might as well be using Deluxe Paint IV.

Dropbox

Good lord Dropbox is useful. And incredibly reliable. One of those things that just works so well, I kind of forget it's there, or what life was like before it.

Facebook

I'm including this as a tool I use … begrudgingly. It completely fails the one tool/one function test. It tries to do everything, and manages to do them all horribly. And somehow, they've made it so that the iPhone app makes the Facebook experience even worse. Unfortunately, I have a bunch of friends/family on there who I don't want to lose touch with. It's basically the modern day equivalent of Word: everyone hates it, but everyone uses it, so you have to stick with it.

Feedburner

This is how I manage my blog's RSS feed. I think. It might be useful, I'm not entirely sure. It's so weirdly clunky and poorly explained, it's not entirely clear what it does or how it does it. Really Simple Syndication? Really Fiddly, Opaque and Mystifying Syndication more like.

Gimme Bar

Ah, Gimme Bar, how I love you so. Image bookmarking sites have come and gone – anyone still using Ffffound? – but this one has just stuck with me. It's like a big cupboard full of little boxes of clippings, perfect for research and inspiration for any project. It's mostly for personal use, but my Red and Yellow collections seem to be rather popular.

iA Writer

A big white space you type into. Lovely. Particularly nice full screen. And its cloudiness – enabling me to switch from Mac to iPhone to Mac without trouble – shouldn't be sniffed at. That people still use Word to write things baffles me: iA Writer is like having a nice pen and crisp white sheet of paper to write on; Word is like having an irate octopus and a tree.

Kenwood Coffee Maker

I consider this the most essential of all desktop apps. All of these other tools would be utterly useless without this.

MailChimp

I've only just started using this, so it'll be interesting to see how long it remains in my arsenal (wait, where did that Swiss Army Knife metaphor go?). I use the postal primate for managing my email newsletter (sign up now, or forever wonder what you could've had), and so far it all works rather nicely.

Path

Path is great. It's a social network in which you update your status and chat to friends and … that's it. Perhaps it's just the people I follow on there (mostly creative dads in Northern Ireland for some reason) but it's basically everything I want Facebook to be. It's about people, not data. That it's also beautifully designed is just a bonus. If I could pick up all my Facebook friends and just plonk them into Path, I'd do it in an instant. As I've said before somewhere: Path is like a comfy fire-side booth in the pub with your mates; Facebook is like being screamed at in a supermarket.

Reeder

For managing and reading RSS subscriptions. Until very recently, I was subscribed to nearly a hundred feeds, but it just got too much and I had a massive cull. Now I try to keep it to no more than ten (that's not to say I don't read other blogs and things, it's just I usually jump to them from twitter). So which ten? These ten:

Yes, yes I know.

Safari

My browser of choice. Works fine and dandy for me, except on eBay for some reason. Safari hates eBay. It's then, and only then, that I have to dig out Chrome. The only gripe I have – and this is soon to be fixed I believe – is that the address bar isn't also a search bar. One thing I particularly like is a handy little feature called Reading List that lets me save pages to read later. Simple as that. I know there are more fancy methods of saving articles out there, but this does everything I need it to, thank you very much.

Sparrow

I've never got on with Apple's Mail desktop app. Messages just look so very wide. Sparrow isn't perfect, but it looks right (then again, I used to use Entourage, so my opinions may be a bit warped). Actually, Reeder, Twitter and Sparrow are all rather splendidly designed, and look good together – more than can be said for Apple's current batch of leathery, crusty apps.

Squarespace

The thing I make this here blog with. Not the most popular of blogging platforms, but pretty reliable. I keep thinking I'll switch to Wordpress, but something always holds me back.

TeuxDeux

The thought of one day waking up to find my precious TeuxDeux lists gone fills me with terror. Where am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to be doing? How should I feed myself, dress myself? Heed my warning, mankind: if the TeuxDeux server went down for just a couple of hours, what you've got on your hands is basically the worst bits of The Road.

Tumblr

As well as this blog, I also have too many tumblrs: there's the random pile of black and white stuff that is Hammer and Code; there's a collection of nice book covers at Print Is Dead; and there's a bunch of spaceships drawn by grown men who should know better at Star Draws. Oh, and there's Labcoating, which I'm not entirely sure what to do with. Please note: none of these sites are curated – a word that has pretty much lost all meaning.

Twitter

You know, twitter.

So there we go. That's my Swiss Army Knife – for now anyway. It'll be interesting to look back in year's time and see what's been replaced or has become irrelevant (fingers crossed, Facebook). What are your essential tools? What am I missing?

Quick, it's the designphone!

Finding new work as a freelancer is a haphazard affair. No matter how intently I stare at it, that phone never lights up when I want it to. It's a lot more complicated and messy than that. Maybe one day I'll figure out the best method for reeling in work, but so far it seems that there as as many methods as there are clients. 

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Bumps

Early on in our courtship, during a typically sophisticated booze-and-movies night at her apartment, Dr B managed to spill a large glass of red wine across a previously pristine magnolia wall. With the ever-present fear of an unreturned rent deposit looming, we manically attempted to clean up the spattered mess – like something from Dexter – with the nearest thing to hand: vermouth. It turns out that vermouth is rather good at removing red wine … and paint. We scrubbed and scrubbed until we saw the brickwork. We were clueless and laughing our heads off. The first of many little adventures.

Jump ahead to 2012 – this year is turning out to be the biggest adventure of all. One minute, there I am without a care in the world aside from deciding when to redesign my website again or which variation of Scotch Egg Surprise to prepare for lunch and then – BLAMMO! – the next thing I know I've got myself a concussed pregnant wife.

Yup, I'm married to a beautiful concussed lady-doctor and there's a little Benneworth-Gray on the way. It's all a bit exciting and nerve-racking and a little bit more exciting. Suffice to say, we've been a tad busy.

The wedding was incredible, joyous, perfect. Basically all the adjectives from the good bits of the dictionary (and we have pics by ace photographer Emma Case to prove it). Of course, Dr B looked stunning from beginning to end – impressive given that she was on some pretty hefty painkillers all day.

You see, the day before the wedding, the lady wife managed to pass out in the refund queue of Marks & Spencer and bonked her head, giving herself quite the concussion. Spending several hours in A&E wasn't at the top of our big wedding planing list, but thanks to help from friends and family, we still managed to get everything done.

Dr B's noggin is still on the mend – the main problem at the moment is dizziness and the mystery of anosmia. Basically, she can't smell anything. Anything at all. Smell is one of those things that doctors don't seem to know too much about, so it's impossible to know if it'll come back tomorrow, in a couple of months or ever. We're trying to train the nose and the brain to recognise smells again – this mostly involves me sticking a particularly inky-smelling bit of print (thank you GF Smith and Herb Lester) under Dr B's face and describing the smell of the colours. I fear I may just be implanting a case of designer synesthesia.

The concussion has also meant we've had to postpone the honeymoon for a bit. Fingers crossed we'll be able to get to New York before Bean arrives and dictates our travel plans for evermore.

Oh yeah, Bean …

In March, we found out that we're expecting a baby. An actual human baby. We had a bit of a scare at the beginning – and by "a bit", I mean the worst day of my life, the absolute polar opposite of our wedding day, but significantly longer – so went for a very early scan. Everything turned out fine, but all we saw on the screen was a tiny pulsating baked bean shape. Without any exciting pictures to take away with us, I dealt with the situation in a typically designery way: I asked an illustrator to do one for us. I don't know how many "hello, you don't me but I want you to draw the inside of my wife's bits" requests Simone Lia gets, but I'll wager that was the best one she'd received that week.

Bean is a LOT bigger now, but we're still only halfway there. I suddenly find myself trying to catalogue all the impartable wisdom cluttering up my head, checking out every pram I see in town (no, lady, I'm not staring intently at your baby, I'm just trying to see what make your travel system is), and despairing at the state of children's TV (seriously, have you ever seen the nightmare that is Baby Jake?). There's just so much to figure out.

And this is where Path comes into its own. For some reason, this fledgling social network is the perfect arena for dads. Most of the people I chat with on there are writers or designers with, or expecting, kids. For months now, seeing their little stories of pride and bemusement has filled me with hope. I always feared that I wouldn't be a good dad because I didn't really know how to be one – I now realise it's something you learn as you go along, and that every single day throws something messy and stupid and glorious your way. Pathmen, you've been a real inspiration and have helped me through this more than you know.

So here we are. Five years after abandoning that boozy crime-scene of a wall, we're both still clueless and laughing our heads off. Adventures. Many, many adventures. I'm terrified and I couldn't be happier.

Vulture Books

A little personal project plucked from the film/design Venn diagram in my head: Vulture books. It's one part tribute to my favourite design birds and one part utter geekery. It started with me watching a film and thinking "what if that book they just mentioned was an actual paperback that I had on my shelves?", and it spun out of control from there.

Initially, I thought these non-fiction titles would work perfectly as Pelican books (my blue heaven of book design), but then I thought they deserved their own imprint. This involved a lot of ornithological research and a lot of staring at the Death Records logo. Eventually, I managed to draw a chirpy little vulture. He looks a bit malevolent, but still has a cheeky glint in his eye.

Full geek points if can identify the origins of each book.

Spice Girls on The Face, 1997

As promised, another great Spice Girls cover from 1997. Compare this to the Guardian Weekend one – two incredibly different approaches, but both great executions. One is grimy and faceless, the other is glossy and smiley, but they both play on the same instant iconic nature of the subject matter. In summary: the Spice Girls were an art director's dream.

Picture from the Flickr group The Face (1980–2004).

Spice Girls on The Guardian Weekend, 1997

One of my all time favourite magazine covers. Photographer Nigel Shafran, faced with five of the most famous people on the planet, ideal cover fodder, went for something a bit different from the countless other magazines they were appearing on at the time. I recently interviewed former Guardian Weekend art director Mark Porter for Gym Class Magazine – he gave me a bit of backstory behind the creation of a classic:

In those days, Guardian Weekend used to pride itself on avoiding the usual PR-driven celebrity interviews. We tried to reflect that visually by trying to go behind the surface and photograph celebrities with limited makeup and styling. But in some cases that was impossible. We only had access to the Spice Girls in their public persona, fully made-up and styled, but we wanted to do it in a Guardianesque way. So we assigned the late Kathy Acker (who sadly died later that year) to do the interview, and tried to select a kind of anti-celebrity photographer (Nigel). Then we briefed him to look for strange angles. My recollection is that I actually asked him to try doing some body parts (hand, feet etc), although that may be selective memory. But we certainly encouraged him to avoid anything that looked like the images of the Spice Girls we were seeing in all the other magazines and newspapers, and he did an amazing job. But he also did a great shot for the inside which did show their faces.

It's just great. Half the cover is just floor. Not even interesting floor.  It says a lot about how strong the Spice Girls were as a brand at that time that they're still instantly recognisable by nothing but footwear. I have a very, very different cover of them on The Face from a few months earlier that I'll post up here soon, just to show you two different approaches to the same subject.

Image ruthlessly culled from Jeremy Leslie's excellent Issues: New Magazine Design.

UPDATE 07 02 18

It's just been announced that the Spice Girls have been offered a shedload of cash to reform for various activities, including a new greatest hits. Potential artwork perhaps… 

Well I'd buy it.

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A small thought about infinity

Somewhere in the digits of pi is a complete script of Raiders of the Lost Ark in which the Nazis all look like Prince, and upon discovering the Well of Souls, Indiana Jones performs an acoustic version of Stripper Vicar by Mansun, the entire thing translated into binary.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Friday links

Sutherland

Okay, so this record doesn't actually exist. But it should.

As soon as I saw this image of Donald Sutherland on Junk Funk, it was just begging to be a record sleeve … so I obliged. I just added some words, because that's all it needs – the picture says everything. You can just imagine what it'd sound like (somewhere between Wilco's Being There and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water) and where the obligatory Carole King guest spot would appear (halfway through the second side, definitely). It's a fully formed album without an album. It's one of those photographs.

More4

I can't stop doodling the new More4 logo – surely a good measure of an effective design! It's really quite lovely, especially when seen in motion. I even like the contentious floating E. Hats off to brandeteers ManvsMachine.

Gym Class Magazine / Mark Porter

It's been brought to my attention that there are still some members of the human race who haven't picked up the latest issue of the fantastic Gym Class Magazine. This really is a sorry state of affairs. These poor individuals are missing a beautiful magazine all about the beauty of magazines …

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