Pickling

Walter Murch, Port #9:

When I was studying at the Sorbonne, I discovered Truffaut and Godard. Being in Paris aged twenty was like being pickled in cinematic vinegar: at the end of it, I thought, 'So now I'm a pickle, let's see where it goes.'

Port #9

I've been a big fan of Port since it appeared on the shelves a couple of years ago (thanks to magCulture for bringing it to my attention in the first place), and although the first few issues were incredible in terms of content and design, I was a bit worried that it couldn't possibly keep up that level of quality. Or, worse still, that it'd fall back on the usual men's magazine tropes to boost sales (Cars! Boobs! Cars with boobs!).

But here we are, nine issues in, and it's still bloody gorgeous. The latest, guest edited by Daniel Day-Lewis (hyphenated Daniels are all the rage right now), is the film issue. And it's pretty much my dream magazine. Eschewing the usual news and reviews – content more suited to the web – Port #9 embraces the slow reading strengths of the format with articles on all aspects of film, past and present. Particular credit goes to the photography – elegantly illustrating conversations with the likes of PT Anderson, Thelma Schoonmaker and Walter Murch. Add to this articles on cameras, costume and production design, the whole thing feels like a magazine for grown ups without ever feeling dry or pretentious.

I'd be quite happy if every issue of Port was a film issue, but I'm sure they've got something even better up their sleeves for #10.

NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual

Recently discovered in a locker beneath some old gym clothes (a bit random, that), this first edition New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual is quite, quite superb. Designed by Massimo Vignelli at Unimark International (of lab coat aficionado fame) in 1970, it's barely aged a day – testament to just how influential the great man still is.

Every detail deserves closer scrutiny, so it's well worth visiting the Standards Manual site for shots of the whole thing. Or, for a more concentrated graphic burst, lovely chap Matt Coyne has put together this video flick-through. Get it on the biggest display you can find, prise you're eyes open with matchsticks and stick it on loop for a few hours.

Music

So here it is, yet another version of iTunes. Another update, another shuffling around of bells and whistles. As with the last ten versions, there's a lot to love and a lot to hate about iTunes 11. It's still suffering from a decade of feature creep – books, movies, apps – but there now seems to be plenty more focus on the music. You know, the tunes.

One feature that caught my eye is the new design of the album view. Using some high tech algorithm/sorcery, it presents the track listing on a backdrop based on the palette of the album artwork. Sometimes even the text is coloured appropriately. It's not the most exciting leap forward in human endeavour, but this small step towards giving one batch of files a different character to the next has had a rather splendid effect: it's got me listening to albums – whole albums – again.

For the last few years, my music consumption has been a lazily digital, scattershot affair. Shuffling, Geniusing, Spotifying, Last FMing, Rdioing (now there's a word worth remembering for you next Scrabble tournament) – it's been a messy stream of individual tracks. This is great, but iTunes reminded me that there's something special about a structured, deliberate collection of songs by a single artist. A good old fashioned beginning-middle-end snapshot of an artist at a particular time, requiring a bit of a time commitment. iTunes returned me to a lifetime of slow listening.

My first exposure to albumetry was a bit misleading: my parents' eight-track player, which was basically a hole in the dashboard of a Citroen CX into which a cartridge was shoved, and out of which Smokie's Living Next Door to Alice bellowed. On loop. All the way from Gravesend to Durdle Door. It's not for everyone.

But then one day I was granted access to that temple of sound, the heart of the home: the record player. Oh my. Incredible collections of songs, expertly crafted into two sides of fuzzy, crackly (and, as any muso will earnestly tell you, warm) sound. There was something so engaging about having to get up halfway through an album to walk across the room and flip the disc over. And the whole time you could cling onto, read, sniff, ponder that seductive sleeve.

(However, under no circumstances must you ever, EVER attempt to cut out the cut-out goodies in Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve though. You know, the ones that are clearly designed to be cut out.)

And then came tapes. Like records but smaller and faffier and more likely to go wrong. But they were magical because, as well as having the ability to transform into birds of prey (I'm remembering that correctly, right?), tapes offered you the opportunity to make your own albums. Compiling songs was one thing, but the whole package was in your hands. Deep down, we all know that the all time greatest music designers aren't your Peter Savilles or your Peter Blakes: they're you, aged thirteen, making an inlay for your latest mix tape out of bits of Silk Cut adverts and Letraset.

Then CDs. Like futuristic, smaller records in crappier packaging … but so much more convenient. Easier to ship, to store, to play. And they took over the world. Other formats came and went (bless the plucky Minidisc – it tried so hard, so very, very hard), but until recently, the CD has ruled. Now, the format itself is just packaging, a means of delivering digital files to your computer, where the music hides behind a shiny little JPG. Buy CD, rip CD, eBay CD. The physical artwork barely gets a look in.

With all this digitisation and miniaturisation, design for music has changed. It's now so much smaller, and requires a different approach. Tim Fowler, creative director at the legendary Rough Trade Shops, has witnessed this trend over the years:

There has been a definite shift in the way sleeves are designed, it seems that gone are the days of complex images and heavily photoshopped cover artwork and the trend is far more subtle and stripped back. Take the XX cover which is quite frankly the simplest and bravest cover there's been for a while.

From a dozen inches to a couple of hundred pixels in such a short time. I grew up with albums, and a simple aesthetic flourish in iTunes has made them part of my life again. It's just a shame that although the all-important artwork (assuming it's even found the correct artwork) may be the source of a nicely-calculated background colour, it comes at the expense of it being right royally buggered about with.

The Next Day campaign by Barnbrook

For example, the love-it-or-hate-it artwork for Bowie's new album The Next Day, once dulled and shrunk and feathered by iTunes, is barely artwork at all. The outside edge, controversially reusing the sleeve to 1977's “Heroes", is lost to a grey smudge. Ironically, the digital minimalism of Jonathan Barnbrook's design would look fantastic and subversive in print, but as it is, it's been reduced to a nothingy grey square.

With a new-found love for the long-player, maybe I’ll go back to where it all started (ignoring the eight-track anomaly … please don't make me go back there, next to Alice, I beg of you), my vinyl destination: records. Fowler makes a point that they're still packaged as alluringly as that untouchable Sgt Pepper's:

With the mass use of digital downloads the design of an LP sleeve and what is inside is even more important: free MP3 versions of the album, limited editions prints, extra reading material. All of this keep the industry alive.

Digital and physical: sounds like the ideal solution to me. All I have to do now is get myself something to play the records on for when I fancy a slower experience than iTunes can offer. But it'd have to be something pretty. Something aluminium. Now if only Apple made an iTurntable …

Dots

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.

Don DeLillo, Underworld

New Utøya

Following the horrific events of 22 July 2011, the Norwegian island of Utøya could've been left abandoned, forever a memorial to the senseless events of that day, the site reclaimed by nature. Instead, the Labor Youth Party have grasped the opportunity to rebuild and re-establish a political camp there, finding optimism and hope in the face of terror.

Architectural studio Fantastic Norway are behind the designs, and so far it looks pretty damn good. In their own words:

Our ambition has been to reflect and reinforce values such as commitment, solidarity, diversity and democracy, both through form and function. In short we have done this by establishing a small village with small streets, bellfry and a town square on the very top of the island. The village consists of many small units that together ad up to a bigger community: A symbol of unity and diversity.

Definitely a project to keep an eye on (especially if it involves more architectural models – I do love me a good architectural model).

London Docklands in the 1980s

It's easy to forget that, until relatively recently, London Docklands was little more than an industrial wasteland. This massive set of pictures on Flickr shows the area at the end of the 1980s, just before the developers came in and turned it into the towers and apartments jungle that it is today. I recall taking a trip on the new Docklands Light Railway when I was a kiddie – probably a couple of years after these pictures were taken – and it was like a theme park ride through a gargantuan building site. The London we see now couldn't be any more different.

Even though browsing large sets in Flickr is rather painful (75px thumbnails? in 2012? Really?), it's worth having a look just to find gems like these: the Design Museum's surprisingly successful modernist revamp of an old banana warehouse sits gleaming in the middle of nowhere (I do wonder how much business they got in those early years); the remains of Beckton Gas Works shortly after a starring role in Full Metal Jacket, where it represented the Vietnamese city of Huế; and the now-incongruous image of Tower Bridge set against a skyline of … nothing.

London: you're brilliant. Don't stop changing.

Neil Armstrong 1930–2012

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

— Extract from the speech written by William Safire in 1969, to be used in the event of moon disaster (via Letters of Note).

Camoupedia

Within minutes of picking up Roy R. Behren’s Camoupedia, I was regurgitating fascinating bits of camouflage-related trivia at anyone who would listen, like some kind of third-rate Stephen Fry. Did you know that in 1918, Walt Disney drove an ambulance for the Red Cross, covered not with a standard camouflage design but with early Disney cartoons? Or that snipers in WWII would hide inside fake horse carcasses? How about the fact that there is a specific technique for painting sweet potatoes to render them virtually invisible?

Before I got into it, I was half expecting a Jane’s Reference-like book, full to the brim with painstakingly catalogued military markings (something that the superglue-fingered Airfixkid in me would have treasured), but its scope is far broader than that. Encompassing everything from Picasso to the evolution of mice, this is an essential reference for anyone interested in the subject matter and its broader context.

For example:

By far the most famous eyewitness account of modern camouflage is reported in Gertrude Stein’s autobiography, which she impishly mistitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. During the first winter of the Great War, as she and Pablo Picasso were walking at night on the Boulevard Raspail, ‘All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spellbound. ‘C’est onus qui avons fait ca,’ he said, ‘it is we who have created that.'

A lot of the entries are biographical entries of key camoufleurs (the artists and officers responsible for the techniques, and favourite new word), which in themselves are quite dry. However, the tapestry of these characters comes to life when you come across an entry about how their work has been adopted by the fashion world or incorporated into a audacious method for hiding entire munitions factories. Behrens clearly knows his stuff, and is generous with his references to other resources. As well as the encyclopedic structure, there’s a comprehensive bibliography, index and timeline (going all the way back to Darwin’s theory of natural selection).

Of course, as fascinating as the text is, when you pick up a book about camouflage, you want pictures. Big pictures. Big colour pictures. This is where Camoupedia’s format lets the subject-matter down a little. Where the reproduced pictures are simple line-work, such as the numerous drawings submitted for bizarre patent applications, the black-and-white print works fine. However, when you’re looking at a picture of a brightly-coloured aircraft or an animal blending in to its background, the lack of colour robs it of any impact. Ironically, the camouflage on display is so good, at times you can’t actually see it. I’m sure the author would have loved to have had a full-colour coffee table tome, so it's not so much a criticism of his work, but of the budgetary constraints of a book that is unlikely to shift huge numbers (and whose source material was probably black and white).

That said, there's certainly no shortage of pictures. A lot of attention is paid to dazzle-painted camouflage – the technique of using brightly coloured, high contrast disruptive shapes on a ship’s hull, not as a means to hide it, but to force enemy U-boats into miscalculating its distance, speed and trajectory. Despite the lack of colour, the numerous photographs and technical drawings on display here contradict the common image of steel-grey WWII warships, instead revealing them to be garish and visually arresting, a style that rightfully garnered comparisons to the cubist movement. For me, looking at these designs led to a far-too-long stint on Google to look for bigger and better pictures, now armed with knowledge of the history behind them.

The breadth of the information within demonstrates how design can sit comfortably at the intersection of topics as diverse as nature, science, art and warfare. That such an encyclopedia still has a place in the modern I’ll-just-look-it-up-on-Wikipedia world is testament to the authority of Behrens’ research and his contagious love for the subject. 

Camoupedia’s real strength is as a starting point from which to explore one of the numerous intriguing avenues it sends you down. The first of which should be Behren's own blog, a fine companion to the book. 

Written for The Designer’s Review of Books