When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.
The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.
The Talking Heads have released a new music video for an old song. Directed by Mike Mills—who is not only a filmmaker but also a graphic designer—and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video for the band’s first hit, “Psycho Killer” is a wonderful study on the pressures, anxieties, and joys of being a young person in today’s world. It was made to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary.
On Instagram, the band said, “This video makes the song better- We LOVE what this video is NOT - it's not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”
I knew instantly that the brand identity was paying homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of a galloping horse. It’s a logo for an AI video company.
The whole case study from Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell of Pentagram is great.
I’ve been seeing this new ad from Coinbase these past few days and love it. Made by independent agency Isle of Any, this spot has on-point animation, a banging track, and a great concept that plays with the Blue Screen of Death.
I found this one article about it from Little Black Book:
“Crypto is fundamentally updating the financial system," says Toby Treyer-Evans, co-founder of Isle of Any, speaking with LBB. "So, to us it felt like an interesting place to start for the campaign, both as a film idea and as a way to play with the viewer and send a message. When you see it on TV, in the context of other advertising, it’s deliberately arresting… and blue being Coinbase’s brand colour is just one of those lovely coming togethers.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Emigre was a prolific powerhouse. The company started out as a magazine in the mid-1980s, but quickly became a type foundry as the Mac enabled desktop publishing. As a young designer in San Francisco who started out in the ’90s, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans were local heroes (they were based across the Bay in Berkeley). From 1990–1999 they churned out 37 typefaces for a total of 157 fonts. And in that decade, they expanded their influence by getting into music, artists book publishing, and apparel. More than any other design brand, they celebrated art and artists.
Here is a page from a just-released booklet (with a free downloadable PDF) showcasing their fonts from the Nineties.
On 4/4, Marvel released a wonderful teaser poster for their upcoming movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This will be the fourth iteration of the first family of comics on film. There was an unreleased Roger Corman-produced movie from 1994, with a fascinating history.
I was visiting a customer of ours in Denver this week. They're an HVAC contractor and we were camped out in one of their conference rooms where they teach their service technicians. On the walls, among posters of air conditioning diagrams were a couple of safety posters. At first glance they look like they're from the 1950s and ’60s, but upon closer inspection, they're from 2016! The only credit I can find on the internet is the copywriter, John Wrend.
Sadly, the original microsite where Grainger had these posters is gone, but I managed to track down the full set.
