£25 for a logo?!
Like many other products and services, it’s never going to be too hard to find a cheaper option. But, as the painfully obvious saying goes, you get what you pay for. Buy a cheap car, it’ll break down more often. Buy a cheap meal, it won’t taste very nice. Buy a cheap haircut… you get the idea.
But is there a place in the industry for logo design being sold in this way? Unfortunately, we think the answer is yes. People or companies who aren’t particularly interested in the way they present themselves can’t be blamed for spending as little money as possible on a service they don’t see value in.
Inspiration vs. Imitation
Fantastic piece on unintentional copying by the super-awesome @jessicahische.
Books I’d buy because of the covers alone — especially Aphorisms’.
Book covers by Peter Mendelsund (via Jason Santa Maria)
Source: jacketmechanical.blogspot.com
Branding for I Do Films by Two Paperdolls: love the vintage, romantic styling (via design work life)
Source: twopaperdolls.com
Paul Shaw on The Kerning Game
The first time I tried KernType I didn’t realize what the “rules” were until I had failed at several of the test words. But even after that my scores were often pathetic. I think I only got four of the ten test words right. However, when I looked at the solutions that MacKay proposed I didn’t feel so bad. I disagreed, sometimes violently, with them. My failed scores began to look like a badge of honor. To see if that really was the case I played the game a second time, paying more attention and trying to achieve perfect scores for each test word. But I failed. This time I only got three right.
KernType is a wonderful idea for teaching typography students and others about good letterspacing, but in practice it needs much work. It is not just that some of its solutions are faulty or are open to debate. There are no explanations for its solutions, no discussion about the problems that each word and its letter combinations pose, and no overall notion of what constitutes good spacing. Adding these would make KernType a useful product instead of just a bar game for type geeks.
Apple's aesthetic dichotomy
When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone - perhaps his greatest product presentation - he joked that the iPhone was an iPod with a rotary dialing system on the front. It was deliberately absurd, and the audience duely delivered the anticipated laugh. (I’m reliably informed that an early prototype of the phone actually did feature such an interface.)
But no one laughs when Apple delivers a calendar application for the iPad that tries its hardest to look like a real-word desktop calendar pad, complete with fake leather and “torn” pages.
Still fewer have a chuckle when they see the new Address Book app on Mac OS X Lion, or the even more recent Find My Friends iPhone app.
These apps, and many more besides, all stem from a completely different, and I would say opposite aesthetic sensibility than the plain devices they run on.
Individuals do not seek satisfaction from products, from their actual selection, purchase and use. Rather satisfaction stems from anticipation, from imaginative pleasure-seeking. People’s basic motivation for consumption is not therefore simply materialistic. It is rather that they seek to experience ‘in reality’ the pleasurable dramas they have already experienced in their imagination. However, since ‘reality’ can never provide the perfected pleasures encountered in daydreams, each purchase leads to disillusionment and to longing for ever-new products. There is a dialectic of novelty and insatiability at the heart of contemporary consumerism.
Source: ieatshampoo
The Tweaker — the real genius of Steve Jobs.
Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
