A little interactive exercise. It would help me to know which of these arrows you can see in its entirety without it impinging on the sidebars of the blog. If you can see all of all of the arrows, write ‘width 4′. If you can see width 2, but not width 3, write ‘width 2′. It would also be interesting to know if it messes up the page. If it does it would be useful to know which browser you are using. In the event of many reports of messed-up pages this post will be short-lived.

All clear? Go!

P. S. Thank you. This is to help me work on the design of my site.

P. P. S. This is not a competition and there are no winners and no prizes. In the event of a tie the Judges’ decision is final.

Interesting supplementary fact: I have found that if you say the word ‘width’ repeatedly it (a) becomes nonsensical, and (b) you sound like an idiot.

It seems to be fashionable to be against the Olympic Logo, so I am going to be for it.

One reason is that I was once rude about a logo I had seen, and then discovered that the person I was talking to was the person who designed it. I was mortified and have not yet really recovered (I wore sackcloth for a while, but now just prefer to wear a t-shirt with an abrasive label on the collar). Just in case I meet the designer of the Olympic Logo at Tescos whilst pondering the chilled Indian ready meals I am going to say I quite like it.

I suspect the reason that most people do not like this logo is that we have come to expect logos to be boring and corporate. We are so used to seeing the bland and ‘safe’ logos of multinational companies that we have come to think that that bland and safe equals good. This logo is not boring, which to my mind a good thing. Of course everyone thinks they can do better – lots of people have spent twenty minutes on their computer designing a logo and sent them into the BBC, but the results look like designs done by people who have done them in twenty minutes on their computers.

One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that this is not a static logo, but rather an animated one. In five years time of course everything will be animated – adverts, t-shirts, even the labels on chilled Indian ready meals, so there is no point designing a logo that is not animated. You need to watch the video to see the whole animated sort of aspect.

Of course it has not gone down well with the newspapers, though it should be noted that the same tabloids who have poured scorn upon the design have been very happy to receive a large cheque from Lloyd’s bank to display a full page advert with the logo at its centrepiece.

Other Pro-logoers:

prblogger.com » Blog Archive » I like it
Byrne Baby Byrne » London 2012
gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": 2012 olympic "brand launch"
The Rosemont Loving: Where is the love?

Update:
John’s point about the Olympics taking funding away from worthwhile projects is one that needs to be heard.

In other news, Radio 5 just phoned me and wanted me to be on their show defending the logo. I declined because my thoughts are jumbled and not well thought out. Also they wanted me to defend the £400 000, which I cannot do. Hopefully they found someone else – the piece is on at about 11 o clock.

I find Alan Fletcher’s work inspiring and have done for a number of years since being directed to ‘the Art of Looking Sideways‘.

This sort of exhibition reminds me that I enjoy making notes and doodles in notebooks.

The exhibition ends this weekend, so go now if you have the opportunity and like design-related things. It costs £7, but if you go on the train you can take advantage of the 2 for 1 offers they do on going to London attractions by train. If you can’t get there then Flickr has quite a few images posted by people who have been.

Other people who have been: jonnybaker / Babble Babble Babble

[Click on the image to see it from a closer vantage point]

You can download a large printable version here (right click on link and choose ‘save as’ or something).

I must warn you that it is not very good. To be honest I do not know very much about making bedside tables, but it is what the public wants and if I was to stick to things I know a lot about then I would not write or draw very often. Also I did it in 5 minutes and did not take much care.

Feel free to print out and republish this worksheet. Please resist the temptation to sell it to someone.

Tim has undertaken all manner of other wierd and wonderful projects, details of which can be found on his website. Don’t miss the eccentric arcade machines on Southwold pier.

Thanks to Russell who has also posted a few links to videos and things.

I have back pain. I am going to take a multi-pronged and many-faceted approach by getting a new office chair and also seeing whether I can think of any other ways to improve matters.

At the moment I sit on a wooden chair all day as it hurts my back less than the more conventional office chair that we have. The office chair now lives in the second bedroom. A lot of things live in the second bedroom.

I have done some looking in the Viking and Staples catalogues and have decided that an ‘operators chair’ is what I need. There is something called a ‘typists chair’ which does not look advanced enough. Then there is something called an ‘executive chair’ which sounds very important and executive and looks very comfortable but actually cannot be adjusted in many of the directions one might want to adjust things.

The problem comes when one wants to buy one. I went to Staples and tried sitting in a few of the chairs but they all seemed either too basic or too expensive and there were no sales people there to advise on the ins and outs of the ups and downs etc. I am also confused by some of the jargon. Some chairs offer ‘lumbar support’ as a feature. Is an unsupported lumbar my problem? Probably, but I don’t know. There are some that can be adjusted in any direction, but do I really need the seat to be able to go forwards and backwards as well as up and down? I don’t know. The other problem with Staples is that they do not advise on which chairs are suitable for ‘intensive use’, which is something the Viking catalogue does do. But the problem with Viking is that you cannot try before you buy which I think is probably important.

If anyone can advise I would be grateful. I do not mind spending some money on a good chair, but I do not want to waste money on features that are not essential to the wellbeing of my lumbar. What do you sit on all day anyway? Feel free to send make and model numbers, photographs, tales of chairs of yesteryear… Anything really.

This morning I received this letter and also a very similar one asking for information about flat pack calendars.

When I was young I remember writing off to various people asking for information or samples. There was a ‘beer mat’ collecting craze when I was at primary school and we all used to write to the different breweries asking for samples and they used to reply with a brown envelope containing a selection of beer mats. Some people managed to get bar towels sent to them as well, but my letters were obviously not interesting enough to warrant such generosity. The real winners were classmates whose parents could bring back beermats from far-flung exotic locations which of course the rest of us could never match. I don’t think we really knew what beer was in those days, let alone a beer mat, but it was a fun craze for the few months it lasted. Such a hobby probably wouldn’t be allowed these days of course.

Anyway, I have now reached the stage in life where I am the sort of respectable businessman to whom children write when they want to gain new wisdom (the fact that it is only because I have a good Google ranking for the term ‘flat pack calendars‘ is neither here nor there). I feel an obligation to write back with useful information which will reward their intrepid letter writing. Therefore I feel the need to draft some fully working blueprints for a 3D flat pack calendar – I might as well kill both the ’3D’ and ‘flat pack’ birds with one stone after all. If anyone has any ideas of how to make such a thing then I would be pleased to hear them. Remember that this is a year 10 project not a primary school one, so it will need advanced features, moving mechanisms etc.

I’d ask readers not to send me letters written with their left hand pretending to be children asking how to make a fully functioning tv/dvd player using discarded food packaging and the leftover bits and pieces you get when you have constructed an item of Ikea furniture. I would not find that funny at all.

Joe (who runs the Freedom Clothing Project who did some of the Greenbelt t-shirts this year among other things) isn’t impressed:

Next time you walk down the high street wearing your ethical ‘I spend £35 on a t-shirt’ t-shirt, munching your ethical Fruit ‘n’ Nut, and wafting unsuspecting passers-by with the smell of your Community Traded Strawberry Cheesecake face cream, ask yourself who benefited from the radicalness being surgically removed from your radical product.

The text in full:

O Coffee
O Tea
O Espresso
O Caffe Latte
O Macchiatto
O Cappuccino
O Hot Chocolate

Quite beautiful. Moving almost.

Admired by Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass, Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986) was one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionising graphic design and encouraging the creativity of thousands of people – all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun in California.

So says the Guardian on a slide show page about an Exhibition of Sister Corina’s work currently showing in London. The official site has more examples of her work, and there is a new book of her work published by Four Corners Books – more about the book, ‘Come Alive! The Spirited Art Of Sister
Corita’ can be found on their site. Thanks to Richard Embray of Four Corners Books for the image used in this post.