File under “Ammo”: a Saul Bass anecdote with which to buttress brand-experience design:

“When my NatWest business cheque book finally did arrive with its tweaked logo and grown-up colours I was reminded of a Saul Bass story which might interest those responsible for the bank’s new look.

When the design legend was invited to refresh the livery and visual identity for a chain of gas stations he drove into one of them to check out the customer experience. The forecourts were filthy, the attendants sloppy and the service virtually non-existent. When he called the client to find out what plans they had to address these issues, he was told not to worry because all that was expected from him was a bright new look and feel. He walked away from the job.”

» FT.com: Creative Business: Don’t bank on the brand

What are your absolute favourite pieces of web-native typography? Not flash, graphics text or anything other than CSS.

My current favourite is the Tufte-esque restraint of http://tesugen.com/irrational, closely followed by Venusburg and Interconnected.

Suggestions below please!

Haaaa-lle-lujah!
Halle-lu-jah, Halle-lu-jah,
Ha-lle-e-elujah.

» Usability News: The Impact of Paging vs. Scrolling on Reading Online Text Passages
[via Oskar van Rijswijk]

Title freely adapted from Mies’ : “God is in the details”; the goal of holonic selfconsistency of the architect’s parti though all scales, all points of the experience. See also Adam’s invocation of Aalto today:

“Always consider a thing in terms of its next larger context”

I love this post at Rogue Librarian, about using good typography as the starting point to a greater design journey.

“Start with the typography, and use it to define your style, simplify your color scheme, and clean up the visual lines in your site.”

» Roguelibrarian.com: “Looking good with less”

Noticed this at k10k.net:

“Nowadays I seem to get more pleasure from reading on the web than looking at the web – I don’t know whether that’s symptomatic for the design scene as a whole (which seems to be in a rather disjointed state), but it does give me an opportunity to shine the light on some of my current favo[u]rite “wordy” spots.”

Least said, soonest mended. I think it was Spiekermann who said: “You cannot not communicate”. Strikes me – whether it’s written or graphically communicated: you cannot not read the Web. The “design scene” knows that surely? You’re losing out if you’re just looking or making things to be looked at, not ‘read’, not engaged with.

Having said that, maybe looking vs reading is just a symptom we’re heading nicely into the snowcrashed century.

UPDATE: December, 2003

This post got linked to from BoingBoing, due to the mention in a comment that the PDF document is now available on the Kazaa p2p network. Two things to clear-up:

1. I haven’t verified whether the document is on Kazaa at all, or in it’s original format.
2. It wasn’t made clear immediately who authored the document. Again, I have to stress it wasn’t me. I just happened to work with the designers who did, and offered them a place to distribute the work. If you are linking or mentioning the document do not give me the credit but place it where it is due:
   Incomplete list:
   • Gideon Bullock
   • Caroline Smith
   • Julie Dodd
   • Paul Hammond
   • Steve Hunt
     • Steve has a great post here about the ‘adaptive design’ thinking behind the project.
   • Steve Rogers

Anyway, please do give the credit to them and not me.

Well done to the team who worked on the new design for the bbc.co.uk homepage.

Go there… click on News or Sport then click back to the homepage. Try doing that a few times… Notice the background colour of box which you clicked the link from gets a few shades different?

It’s all coded so that whatever you click most gets reinforced over time, making it easier to find what you always want. A gentle, reactive form of personalisation that doesn’t take away any choices. Nice.

A lot of that code was by a clever young man called Paul Hammond. Paul’s a client-side coder, who worked in a massively-integrated way with Gideon, Julie and Caroline (the design team who you can see hilariously styled as a Matrix-style hit squad to the left) to realise this new design. Along with Annabelle who worked on the content/editorial, Andrew who is the picture editor and Steve who was the IA for the project (nifty new sensible categories box! yay!) it was a truly multidiscplinary user-experience design team which made it happen.

Great stuff and just a taste what’s to come.

» http://www.bbc.co.uk

Dave(s) Gibbons and McKean, two pre-eminent UK artists hold forth on comics.com at the ICA in London. I just got my tickets.

“Dave Gibbons, artist creator of the seminal graphic novel Watchmen heads an illustrated conversation about this turning from old techniques. Does the computer bring with it a loss of soul, or actually a greater expansion of the medium? He will be joined by Dave McKean, acclaimed for his covers for the Sandman series, who uses painting, sculpture and the computer. Matt Smith is the editor of the UK?s Number 1 comic, 2000 AD; comic book artist Tom Gauld draws a weekly strip Move to the City in Time Out. Tonight?s Chair, Paul Gravett, has been graphic novel consultant for Penguin books, director of the Cartoon Arts Trust and co-publisher of Escape magazine.”

» Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)- – The Mousetm vs The Mouse

Tom, Celyn and Mark are mad and must be stopped. Go and look at their sketchbooks and see why.

Celyn also did our illustrations for carfreelondon.

» FizzyEye