in writing about my travels and travails in 2000, i mentioned briefly mentioned `the project` but never got into any details about it. it wasn`t anything top secret but years later it`s still one of my favourite pieces in my portfolio.
first let me give you some background. i started in the advertising business as a typesetter but my interest in design was peaked one summer when i worked at a printery. we have a one color Heidelberg press that required a blood sacrifice before every job. the Heidelberg was an old fashioned letter press, you had to pick your letters and numbers out of a box, put them in a frame, add your leading and your spaces, use the kerning knife to scrape the sides of the letter blocks. then when you thought you were done, you locked the whole thing in place and you put on the press and ran a sheet to check. because of the sharp edges and the heavy blocks of type the likelihood that you`d get cut or squeeze your fingers in something was pretty high, hence the joke about the printer requiring a blood sacrifice. the owner of the printery had actually lost the top two knuckles of his right hand to the press before i even started there.
so with my interest in printing and design peaked, i started work at an advertising agency as a typesetter. this was in the early days of the transition to computer graphic design. we had 13 fonts on a Mac SE and the traditional designers would come in, specify a type and size they needed, i`d type it up and we`d send it out to one of two companies that actually had a laser printer at the time and if we didn`t have the typeface on the computer, we could request one that the output house had. and if they didn`t have it, there was good old Letraset.
i could go on reminiscing about the good old days but they only lasted about a year and a half and that`s a story for another day. the agency i worked for, had the fortune and misfortune of having my name on the building. the fortune being, when i called vendors, they usually responded, the misfortune being people thought i was a close relative of the owner and expected me to coast along. coasting is not my speed. i spent five years at the agency and then they merged and they were filled with art directors and creative directors and more designers than you could shake a stick at, so i requested a lateral promotion to the sys admin job that i`d been doing and they denied me, so i quit and the agency imploded.
i did freelance design for a little while and then i got lured back into another agency and the only job i`d ever been fired from. which in itself is strange because the guy that fired me recommended me for another job and everytime i ask, writes the most glowing references. after i left that job, i swore that i was out of the advertising industy for good and like all such threats, it went the way of the dinosaur. in three months i was back at another agency thinking i was going to be working with a creative director i had a great deal of respect for. his last day was the day i started, which was interesting to say the least. they hired another creative director who i got along with fabulously but i had problems with management so i quit, not just burning that bridge but applying copious amounts of dynamite on my way out. hoping against hope that i wouldn`t get sucked back into advertising again.
fortuitously, at the same i left that job, a friend of mine offered me a place in his studio doing pretty much whatever helped pay my way and about a month after i started that, i got a job being webmaster for the national airline, which is a whole batch of stories on its own.
during my first trip to London, an ex introduced me to a friend of hers who was running a production company. they did promotion for up and coming artists, urban marketing and trend prediction and what turned out to be their last hurrah as a company they organised the Playstation 2 launch in London.
working on this project actually completely disenfranchised me with advertising and marketing in Trinidad, which always was and still is a hard sell. this launch was subtle, everyone on the planet knew what a PS 2 so why make launch a hard sell, instead they went with Mi Corazon, the Summer of Low Rider.
the concept was to bring Lowrider culture from LA to London. and it wasn`t going to be a half measure; cars, bikes, people, all had to be organised, paid for, transported and hosted. and the people who couldn`t make it, had to be photographed and recorded. it was a logistical nightmare and my job in all of this?
i designed the logo, the powerpoint presentation and the website and keep the computers running. i had a blast. i`d never worked on a project of that magnitude and this was the real world. in Trinidad, everyone knew who i was and knew my work, here i was in London, a tiny, insignificant fish in a huge pond and my work could stand the test.
i realised as i was writing this, aside from the logo, i don`t have anything else for this project. the cd that i`d backed up that years work on is scratched and damaged so all the image files that make up the website are inaccessible. i should try harder to recover those materials, because without this project i don`t think i would have had the confidence to make a lot of changes in my life since then.
it`s also kind of weird in this day and age, where you can google anything i can`t seem to find anything about the event.
if you’re a graphic artist or you know one, you would have seen the London 2012 Olympic logo. if you haven’t, now is the time to take a look.
i’ve always been an advocate of function and legibility over form and design for the sake of design. i think my fundamental issue with this logo is that is smacks of two things, over hipness (design for the sake of design) and design by committee.
the over hipness factor is an attempt to ‘communicate and resonate with the youth’ which throws out design fundamentals like legibility and usability in favour of ‘cool.’ the logo lends itself to motion and animation and i suppose in this era of continuous internet and video access it does have some merit but i believe the hallmark of a good logo is to be immediately identifiable and communicate a message, specifically in a static, one colour environment. i’m also a type purist, not that i don’t appreciate modern fonts but again i believe in legible, easily readable fonts, properly kerned and leaded. the logo is is none of these things. it took me three viewings before i realised the shapes in the background formed a pattern and another number of viewings before i discerned 2012 from LO12.
design by committee has become the norm these days and sadly i believe it is destroying creativity. no one person want to go this looks like crap, start from the top. it’s a bunch of people sitting around in meetings with buzz words and market research and focus groups and before the it gets to people that actually matter, a ton of people have made comments and a good idea gets beaten into submission and more often than not mediocre ideas seems to rise to the top. i’ve worked on projects that get decided on by committee and there comes a point as a designer where you just throw up your hands and go whatever. sadly it seems that is always the thing that gets approved in those situations.
so i get into work today after my day off yesterday and the presentation and the work that was perfect less than 48 hours prior, is now riddle with changes.
change is not a big problem for me but fucking random ass changes like
“i don’t like the type face” and “there is too much space”
is the kind of shit that drives me around the bend, have these people no concept of design. what makes it worse there is no constructive critism with suggestions, fucking morons.
like i said earlier, if it wasn’t for the fucking money…
and the money ain’t that good.
moving on…
i found this really cool app for os x (yes, i’m a mac owner) called clutter which finds the cd cover for tracks you’re listening to in itunes, so on a friday night, i’m home making sure all my mp3s are associated to an album. there is something truly fucking depressing about that.
