brainstorms

Thursday January 19, 2006

kodak logo design

i am puzzled by this logo. i can see what the designers want: refresh the typeface, remove the iconic but aged reminders of a film past but keep its banner colors. the result is ... um, interesting. here are some thoughts and analysis in terms of lines and shapes, color, balance, space. [this is not very rigorous, but i hope properly observed. i would be interested to know what other designers think]

a disoriented typeface: follow your eyes: K, o, d [hard transition] a [it spins, swirls, throws you back over to d again ... snap out of it] k. very strange, no natural flow here. i am not convinced those bookend Ks belong to this typeface; it must be that d and a are custom. i do not think that initial uppercase K can really balance a's swirl. [round and tail-less "a" and "d" are not common in typeface design with this serious [bitstream] vera-style K. i have consulted quite a number of books on type, and have not been able to spot an analogue.]

frame lines: their thickness do not match the typeface thickness; the space between the lines and the type seems arbitrary. these are not the lightbeams of the original logo; they do not add strength to type, but merely frame it from a distance. their paralellism is further weakened by the formal upper-lower type and the spinning a. they almost set up an optical illusion and appear to bend towards the closing k.

color flip: earlier kodak typeface had the background color now in the frame lines, and the screen/frame had the current typeface color. this switch is bold, if unimaginative [kodak does not really need to carry its historic color baggage] and perhaps a reflection of some new organizational perspective.

size: it is clear logo will reduce and reproduce reasonably well. in smaller sizes, the power of a is diminished; it is just Kodak name. memorable in its moments, even when there is no image left behind.

at the end, i remain puzzled by this weak logo. it would be interesting to know what the designers thought, and how this reflects the new image of kodak.

related reading: david e. carter, logos redesigned: how 200 companies successfully changed their image, june 2005.

[not being able to get away: looking at that tight a again i realize that in kodak, it is a good reminder of a roll of film...]

[addendum: frame lines were removed from the logo in a later release. were the lines a part of an earlier or an alternate design? they are good clues for the designer's vision. removing them solves one design issue, but also removes some color and a potentially useful idea. all that remains in focus is some stuttering typography.]

Thursday November 03, 2005

tufte's six information design principles

note to self: from shermer's sci am article The Feynman-Tufte Principle:

• documenting the sources and characteristics of the data
• insistently enforcing appropriate comparisons
• demonstrating mechanisms of cause and effect
• expressing those mechanisms quantitatively
• recognizing the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems
• inspecting and evaluating alternative explanations

in brief, information displays should be documentary, comparative, causal and explanatory, quantified, multivariate, exploratory, skeptical.

[tbd: a screed about the sorry state of the open-source information display tools [eg. gnuplot, ploticus, xmgrace et al] i found a reasonably good review of some tools here]

Monday August 29, 2005

stross: why input devices suck

charlie's insightful overview of ways of shoveling data into computers, and why they all suck.

Friday August 26, 2005

road to zen of design

zen of design has a charming slogan:

Challenge everything. Especially silly catch phrases.

there is the obvious self-reference, but i think the qualification stops the self-reference. some people would not consider challenge everything [for some fruitful range of everything] a silly catch phrase, especially in design. here is an exercise to put this in perspective: consider challenging these conventional wisdom bits extracted from paul graham's taste for makers or how you can make great things [i omitted the mind-numbingly boring bits like good design is redesign and so on]:

good design is simple

good design is timeless

good design is suggestive

good design is hard

good design looks easy

good design uses symmetry

good design resembles nature

good design is often strange

good design happens in chunks

[i will present my thoughts on these bits in another blog essay sometime soon.]

related reading: don gentner and jakob nielsen, the anti-mac interface, cacm aug 1996. [one of my favorite papers about challenging design assumptions]

Wednesday August 03, 2005

new rome logo

i just received an email about winning the rome logo contest. [insert loud rejoicing] my design #1 [inspired by saul bass paper cutout designs] has been chosen to represent the rome project from a shortlist of three designs. more details are in patrick's blog.

i am very pleased and honored.

[i will post a detailed note on this particular design shortly.]

Thursday June 16, 2005

rome logo contest, plan b [sigh]

rome logo contest had an unfortunate case of vote tempering. they have moved to their plan b: community email voting with project founders choosing their logo from amongst the top five logo entries. contest details, news update, voting details are all here.

all submissions for the ROME logo competition are here.

[sigh. fixed the broken link to wiki.java.net]

Monday June 06, 2005

logo designs for rome: last entry.

earlier i had written about the first three designs. this one was the 11th hour entry. it is very tempting to design something with arrows [there are several of those] and interpret the old proverb, but here i decided i would use braided links instead to symbolize the elements of ROME the project, not ROME the city. alas ratings so far indicate i have not captured what most people think would go well with this project. [most popular logo seems to be something with a sun inside the O and an olive branch dangling from R, with a shadow]

public voting/rating site is here.

Friday June 03, 2005

logos for languages: cplusplus

c++ and i go back a long way. we had licensed and used the early ctrans version at york university around 89 or 90; i liked that early version, but came to dislike the ARM and the inevitable b-movie monster standards that followed. over the years, i designed a number of c++ logos that reflect my [less than complimentary] view of the language; these days that view [when i look at it at all] is best summarized by this logo.

[to be sure, c++ was not the only programming language targetted by my comic logos; i will post others as i render them. perl is/was a particularly rich target, as it is so easy to poke fun at its postmodern pseudo-lingual nuttiness...]

related reading: stroustrup, the design and evolution of C++, 1994. a must have book for programming language designers. it is not often one finds such a through review of design decisions.

Tuesday May 31, 2005

logo designs for rome

today i sent in three of my designs for the ROME project logo contest. all rendered in illustrator amidst two carboncore crashes. [i guess i should be cheered that i am not using tiger; i can actually get some work done instead of banging my head to the nearest wall for all the new and old stuff that are not working properly. sigh, what a flop] i have a number of other designs (on paper) that i simply could not find the time to render in illustrator. some would not have been acceptable anyway: i realized a couple of weeks ago ROME project wanted an all UPPERCASE logo whereas i had been working on all lowercase (surprise, surprise) designs. oh well, good practice anyway, and as david vestal put it, practice sharpens our perception and improves our performance.

some notes:

first one is what i call the paper-cutout logo, one of my favorites, inspired by paul rand and saul bass designs. it is hard to get the cutouts just right: one has to balance the letter cuts, cutout shapes, their placement and their colors. i can see doing dozens of variations until i am satisfied with all four elements. a note on the font: it is linotype herculanum, by adrian frutiger. it is based on the roman handwritings of the first century AD.

second logo is a custom typeface assembled to resemble a futuristic road sign that says something like go here and plug in. this is the logo that would look great on a golf shirt :) [initially, i wanted to assemble these letters as an homage to sun logo, but i could not make it work.]

third logo came out of a serendipitous encounter. i had designs with a connected, semi-cursive ROME when i came across a java applet that generates and solves mazes. [i do not recall how i ended up in a maze] its solution was a path that looked very (very) roughly like an r, m and an e. [sort of like seeing faces in clouds] a path through a maze seemed appropriate for a ROME logo... [most maze generators programmed in the usual way do not generate path crossings as you see with letter O here. these are called braid or multiply-connected mazes]

all submissions for the ROME logo competition are here.

june addendum: public voting site is here. [unfortunately 4images interface is clumsy and sluggish so requires some patience, but please vote.]

related reading: steven heller et al. paul rand, phaidon press, 2000.

Wednesday January 12, 2005

neat bit of sandisk design...

here is a neat bit of engineering: a flip-over design for an SD card with a usb connector...

(2005-01-12 20:22:56.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday December 28, 2004

lupton's free advice

selections from ellen lupton's wonderful thinking with type appendix free advice [comments in brackets mine]

think more, design less: many desperate acts of design ae perpetrated in the absence of a strong concept. a good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work. [software designers often start with a good idea, but manage to tear it apart and bury it in the process.]

say more, write less: just as designers should avoid filling up space with arbitrary visual effects, writers should remember that no one loves their words as much as they do. [good advice for most bloggers]

make the shoe fit, not the foot: Rather than force content into rigid containers, create systems that are flexible and responsive to the material they are intended to accomodate. [most software designers confuse flexibility with features]

build the discourse: Design is social. It lives in society, it creates society, and it needs a society of its own - a community of designers commited to advancing and debating our shared hopes and desires. Read, write, and talk about design whenever you can. [amen]

(2004-12-28 20:00:08.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday November 05, 2004

designing a logo for sim1...

a friend of mine who does wonderful chain jewellery, needed a logo. name of her business is lorica designs, latin for armour. here is one of the designs i recently created for her; this one is using a special typeface to represent chain links.

i am quite pleased with this preliminary design, and i know my friend (sim1) likes it as well. it works for my eye, even though the composition can be improved some more. how can we tell if it is a good design? is it simple? timeless? slightly funny? suggestive? looks easy? uses symmetry? etc etc... [i have yet to construct a complete graham conventional wisdom checklist (paul graham, taste for makers) for this. ah well...]

i have been working on a number of logos, some more challenging than others; a notable entry amongst them is a new hacker logo, my alternative to that amateurish ESR hack that is supposed to represent the hacker community. [my logo is just a design exercise, not an ego trip.]

lorica logo design copyright 2004, ozan s. yigit. all rights reserved. cannot be reproduced in any form without permission.

(2004-11-05 06:57:00.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Sunday October 31, 2004

notes on "notes on the synthesis of form"

trying to get to the core of alexander's notes while waiting for my son's martial arts class.

this is the earlier, foundational work of alexander on the analysis of design problems and resulting diagrams, what later came to be known as patterns. but this is a flawed work: even though it is an attempt to formalize the design process, using logical structures to represent design problems (probably an influence of logical atomism at the time) it seems strangely incoherent in places, quasi-formal, as if he found it tiring along the way and gave it up. [at this point, i am not so sure if he really had a good handle on the mathematics and logic to do his idea justice] looks like appendix 2 mathematical treatment of decomposition needs a close reading to see if it is correct and complete, and more importantly, works. [he mentions that these were programmed for a 7090]

here is an important quote, from the opening of goodness of fit

the following argument is based on the assumption that physical clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is some programmatic clarity in the designer's mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to find some sort of pattern in them. I shall try to outline a general way of stating design problems which draws attention to these functional origins, and makes their pattern reasonably easy to see.

this is how it all started...

Christopher Alexander. Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1964.

(2004-10-31 16:54:28.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 29, 2004

piet hein on good design

as i work on an essay countering some of paul graham's Conventional Wisdom observations on design, i come across a well known piet hein poem. in my reading, "good design" replaces "wisdom" and resonates.

The road to good design? --- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
    Err
    and err
    and err again
    but less
    and less
    and less.

(2004-09-29 18:58:00.0) Permalink