Black & Chrome

The black and white  – sorry, black and chrome – version of Mad Max: Fury Road is finally coming to the big screen this April (a good excuse to appreciate Changethethought's wonderful heavy-type poster). It may seem like a trivial adjustment, but going black and white can change a film in unexpected ways. For example, Frank Darabont's superior cut of The Mist feels more like a particularly excellent episode of The Outer Limits. And if you watch Saving Private Ryan or Raiders of the Lost Ark with the colour turned right down, it somehow seems more realistic, closer to the imagery of the era that we're most familiar with. Anyway, this is apparently George Miller's preferred version of the film, so it'll be interesting to see how it differs. It looks wonderfully, appropriately oily.

Peter Crawley will tear us apart

Illustrator and jolly nice chap Peter Crawley does some amazing things with a needle and some thread, but this stitched-soundwave interpretation of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart is particularly splendid. Unfortunately, if you want to get your hands on it, it's too late – it's been snapped up by one Mr Peter Hook.

Barbican Centre by Andrew Murray

I found this print of a 1983 Andrew Murray painting on eBay ages ago. It's been sat in a drawer waiting for a decent patch of wall and a frame, but in the meantime I thought I'd share it on here. The caption reads "Barbican Centre, City of London. An interior view looking towards the the Sculpture for Light (by Michael J. Santry) and the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre". It's wonderful – so much life and colour within that familiar vast space, like an illustration from Miroslav Sasek's This Is Brutality (oh if only that was a real thing). I'm not really familiar with Murray's work, but I did find another 1980s Barbican painting by him the other day, which is equally lovely – I wonder if there are more there … ?

Words we don’t say

I found this fascinating list on the Made Shop's lovely tumblr, originally posted by Hugo Lindgren at the New York Times.

Lindgren explains:

In 1997, when I was first hired at New York magazine, Kurt Andersen, now a best-selling novelist and radio-show host, had just been fired as editor. Everybody was grieving about this, though not me, since I wouldn’t have had a job there otherwise. And though it wasn’t until years later that I even met Kurt, he unwittingly left me a gift: tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine. Just yesterday, I rescued it from a bunch of old office stuff that I was throwing out, and I have to say, 14 years later, it’s still a pretty useful list of phony-baloney vocabulary that editors are well-advised to excise from stories.

I think I need one of these. There are many, many words I use far too often in my writing (I type "splendid" at least a dozen times a day), and tired, tabloidy phrases that get repeated over and over. There's a fine line between having a distinctive voice and having a hackneyed one. It's important to constantly exercise one's vocabulary muscle.

Street Furniture Design

Jolly nice to find the cover of Eleanor Herring's Street Furniture Design featured in the Casual Optimist's monthly Book Covers of Note round up. This one went through a lot of iterations – we tried all sorts of combinations of benches and lampposts and phone boxes and bus stops and bins and bollards. Basically everything from David Mellor's Street Scene. In the end though, it was Kenneth Grange's iconic 1958 parking meter that came out tops. 

Inferno

Most of this idea was rescued from a rejected design I worked on earlier this year – one of those simple concepts that has hung around on my desktop, looking for a home. Also at the back of my mind was a magazine article I wrote recently, looking at thematic links between Inferno, Frozen and The Thing. For some reason, there's a lot of Dante in my work at the moment. Probably best not to ponder that one too much.

Kubrick on Disney

Nick Wrigley recently compiled a master list of Stanley Kubrick's favourite films, stitching together remnants of interviews and articles from his career. Some are rather tenuous, plucked from passing mentions or second-hand anecdotal evidence, but there's enough in there from the man himself to get an idea of how his tastes changed throughout his career.  

One thing that stands out is this extract from a 1968 interview with Charlie Kohler of the East Village Eye, in which Kubrick discusses Disney, violence and censorship:

I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but … Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter. I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under twelve should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.

I wonder what he would've made of modern Disney fare. For example, Tangled and Frozen are both big favourites in our house, but there's no avoiding the fact that they deal with parent mortality and the threat of capital punishment. And there's Finding Nemo, which opens with the slaughter of hundreds of babies – we turned that off pretty quickly. I understand these stories require a sense of peril to push them along, but must there be quite so much death?

If you need to fill your head with more Kubrickly goodness, look no further than Coudal's ever-expanding link-dump.  

Mad Max: punk's Sistine Chapel

My ears and eyes are still ringing from watching Mad Max: Fury Road. What an incredible film. It's not perfect – it could've done with a little more quiet to emphasise the loud – but an audacious and unique experience nonetheless. It's good too see a proper stunts film, and not just a bunch of CGI cars flipping about. The Incredible Suit's review is pretty spot on:

Kudos to those films' creator George Miller for returning to his brainchild in the winter of his seventh decade and transforming it from cult curio to psychotic explosion of rocket-fuelled insanity with Mad Max: Fury Road. Max still isn't all that Mad, but his new film is so deliriously bananas that its very title deserves a place in thesauruses everywhere as the go-to synonym for crackers. It's a carnival of carnage (also lorrynage, bikenage, buggynage and tanknage) so eye-poppingly demented that it's hard to believe it's the work of a human being, rather than some furious, acid-tripping demon with a grudge against moving vehicles.

For a bit of post-film reading/thinking (don't try either of these while watching the film), check out Ballardian's excellent and thorough post on the links between Mad Max and JG Ballard. Turns out he was a big fan of Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior), describing it as "punk's Sistine Chapel". This is what he told Rolling Stone back in 1987:

I loved The Road Warrior – I thought it was a masterpiece. For ninety or so minutes I really knew what it was like to be an eight-cylinder engine under the hood of whatever car that was; the visceral impact of that film was extraordinary. And seen simply from a science-fiction point of view, it created a unique landscape with tremendous visual authority.

I think it's fair to assume JGB would have rather liked Fury Road. If you haven't seen it yet, do. And make sure you see it on the biggest, loudest, two-dimensionest screen you can find. 

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Mark Porter interview

You've set up your own consultancy, Mark Porter Associates. How are you finding it, not being part of an in-house team anymore?

It's very liberating. The Guardian was a wonderful place to work for a long time, and I got to do some some fantastic projects. But I was also a head of department for a large organisation, and a lot of my time was inevitably taken up with being a manager. My main motivation for leaving was to get away from that and spend more time on the fun stuff, which is more or less what's happened. I miss the stimulus of some of the people I used to work with but it was definitely time to make the break.

You've worked all over Europe – how do find designing and writing for different languages and cultures? Do they each have their own particular challenges?

Mass media are increasingly international, and it's inevitable that there is also an international language of editorial design now. But I really value the eccentricities of different cultures and I think its important to at least try to preserve them. I didn't go to art college, I studied languages at university, and that process of understanding how a language shapes a culture is part of the fascination of the work for me. So I do try hard to get a feeling for the written and visual culture of a place when I'm working on a project. I speak some languages (French, Spanish, some Italian), and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians usually speak great English, so the communication part is not usually a problem. I suppose that trying to design like a French person or an Italian is a weird kind of cultural transvestism, and you have to be careful to avoid pastiche. But I believe it's worth making the effort.

Do you prefer to work on redesigns of existing titles, helping to evolve an existing graphic language, or from scratch, with a completely blank canvas?

Both can be exciting. With existing titles there's usually more to lose, so clients can get nervous. In the early meetings they are usually very ambitious and enthusiastic for change, and then when the first dummy hits their desk and they realise that its for real, they can often panic, which is bad for creativity and innovation. But where's there's a strong vision of how a title can develop, then a redesign can be just as rewarding as a new launch.

What magazines and papers do you regularly read?

I work hard and have young kids, so like the rest of the world my time for reading is increasingly limited. The only thing I'm religious about is the New Yorker, which never disappoints. If I'm getting on a plane I'll often buy Wired or Monocle, which usually do. I'm a lifelong Private Eye reader, and of course I still see The Guardian. And I enjoy the writing in the New York Times and The Economist. But as an editorial designer, a lot of my magazine and newspaper consumption is visual skimming.

Despite the much-reported death of print, there seems to be an explosion of independent magazines at the moment. Do you think this trend will last?

I hope so. As mainstream magazines have become so terminally dull (with a few notable exceptions), we need independent magazines to keep the creativity and energy in print. Independent magazines can often be self-indulgent and take themselves far too seriously, but there's a freedom in the editing and design which is very welcome. I expect the future of print to be in smaller-circulations product with higher production values, produced with passion, so I'm sure this sector has a future.

Many of these independent titles using services such as Newspaper Club. Even the likes of McSweeneys and Radiohead have been toying with newsprint recently. Do you think there's a viable resurgance for it as a medium, or is this just a phase of appropriating an old format for kitsch value?

I think its pretty much the latter. And just because it has become relatively cheap and practical now (there are an awful lot of newspaper presses around the world working under capacity these days). Of course there's a lo-tek charm to newsprint which makes it feel right for some projects, and oversized pages are always irresistible to designers (less so to readers). But I don't think it's a sign of any appetite for newsprint in the public at large.

You were quite critical about the Independent's colourful and "macho tabloid" 2008 redesign, and the hastily turned-around 2010 rethink by Cases Asociats. How do you see it faring now?

Well they now have a rich sugar daddy to pay the bills which is what every newspaper needs these days, so I wish them luck. I never meant to be critical of the design of the 2008 relaunch, I just though it was amusing to see how the personality of Roger Alton (then editor, who I worked with at The Guardian) came through in the pages. The more recent redesign just seemed a bit half-baked and not very well thought through to me, but I don't think that was the fault of the designers. Any publication design project needs good and clear editorial thinking and I didn't feel any there. There's still a lot of talent at the Indy, but its not where I look for design inspiration.

What do you make of the i experiment?

Its intriguing. I don't understand the commercial logic (we researched something similar when I was at The Guardian and there didn't seem to be a strong case for it then).  But anything that gets people reading newspapers is a good thing. And the design felt quite fresh for UK newspapers, although if you know the work that Cases Associats do all over the world its pretty familiar.

Are there any titles that you only read on screen these days?

No. I don't enjoy reading on the laptop or the desktop machine, I will usually print out anything over a few hundred words from the web. I probably read the New Yorker on the iPad about 50% of the time, but that's more about the convenience of downloading it in the departure lounge than a preference. The iPad is not a bad reading experience, but it's nowhere near as good as print.

What do you make of curated-issue apps like The Daily and Wired? Others (such as The Guardian app) seem to take a different approach, with it simply being a different, more platform-suitable method of presenting the web content – do you think one way is better than the other, and that one will come to dominate, or can the two co-exist?

The Wired model is really just about a publisher who has a big investment in printed magazines attempting to leverage that investment on a different platform. They will keep on doing it, and if tablets do become universal, it may become a viable medium for magazine publishers. But most iPad magazines of this school are not very satisfying because they have so clearly been transported from another medium and you sense that as you read them. The Guardian iPhone app works because there's an affinity between the web and mobile (both are about being fast and up-to-the-minute), but I don't see this approach making a big impact on the iPad. The daily is a much more interesting idea, as is Project, because they are conceived as tablet-only products. The problem is that they're not very good. I think that the best experiences will come from apps which are native to the device and are conceived edited and designed to that end. So far they haven't been many successful ones, but we're still learning, and I'm optimistic about the future. 

As creative director of the Guardian, you oversaw the 2005 Berliner redesign and the development of guardian.co.uk. How closely do you keep an eye on what they're doing now?

I still work with them on projects as a contractor. But I try not to look too hard at the overall design of the paper and the site now. When you leave somewhere that's been a big part of your life, you have to accept that it will not continue to look as you would have chosen. It's someone else's turn to do it now.

You collaborated with Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz on the beautiful Guardian Egyptian typeface for the redesign. Now that it's publicly available (from www.commercialtype.com), how does it feel to see one of your babies out there in the wild for anyone to mess with?

It's still a bit odd because I do feel proprietorial about it. But we developed it for a specific context, and it's great fun to see it being used in ways I hadn't expected. The worst thing is seeing it used badly or boringly. And I've just stopped using it in my keynote presentations, so maybe I'm getting over it.

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Have you seen it in any peculiar places?

So far I've only seen it in the obvious places, newspapers and magazines. For some reason it seems to be big in Scandinavia. But actually, the typeface I developed with Paul and Christan for the redesign of Público in Lisbon has been a much bigger seller for them and I see that everywhere, it's even in the Evening Standard now.

Looking a bit further back, you were behind some iconic covers in the 90s for Guardian Weekend. One that springs to mind is the Spice Girls' shoes cover, where you've got five instantly recognisable faces, ideal cover-fodder … and Nigel Shafran takes a photograph of their feet! Can you tell us a little about how that come about?

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. 

The combination of the interesting cropping and the full-width masthead gives it the look of an early-sixties Town cover. Are there certain titles or designers whose work you always look back to for inspiration?

Its no secret that I'm in love with the 60s and 70s. There was such incredible energy in magazines in those days, that was where the hippest photographers and designers and smartest editors wanted to be. I still love the work of Tom Wolsey at Town, Willy Fleckhaus at Twen and Dave King at the Sunday Times. It really doesn't get any better.

You said in the past that you consider yourself as more of a journalist than a designer. Has that changed?

Not really. There are plenty of people out there who are better graphic designers than I am. But I have an instinct for what readers want (and sometimes don't know they want but need) which enables me tell stories and create editorial identities and environments. Of course I love it if designers like what I do, and it's great to win design awards. But that really is the last 1% for me.

Any exciting plans for Mark Porter Associates that you can share with us?

Nothing specific. We had a busy year last year, which was a great way to start out. But when you're busy there's a danger of spreading yourself too thin, and quality can suffer. In the future I'd like to do less projects, and leave space for things which might be more creatively satisfying even if they don't pay the studio bills. And I must get round to sorting out the website!

And now the important question. You received a D&AD Black Pencil for the Guardian redesign – where do you keep it?

At the moment it's gathering dust on a shelf in the studio between some piles of paperwork and boxes of teabags. But I'm still proud of it.

Tear Gun

After an altercation with a tutor, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Yi-Fei Chen designed a gun that captures, freezes and fires her own tears – recently on display as part of Dutch Design Week. I'm not sure about the practicalities of this in an actual warzone, but I sure do like the brassy steampunk-minimalism design of the thing. 

Ballard

Far more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene, above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man — the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star … All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate starring role.

JG Ballard, Vogue, 1977

Henry Miller's eleven commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring".

3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can't create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.