ingers were tripping over the old keyboard, ducking in and out of the endless swamp of internet information, when I came across a great little blogesque site by illustration/typographer Jessica Hische. Who on an almost daily basis, posts a hand-crafted alaphabetic letter for the world to see and use. She details a little bit of code for peeps to paste into their own blogs. Which is rather sweet.

Hands That Do Dishes

Marking 50 years of Fairy Liquid (50 years! is that all?) the people at Fairy have relaunched the nostalgic white bottle from when it was mild, green, made your Mum's hands as soft as her face and Blue Peter used them to make everything possible.

New Look Observer

I personally bemoaned the loss of the Observer, around for 200 years and then shelved,but it is back, hurrah!and better than ever. Dropping the multiple supplements that earmarks a Sunday paper, it is less cumbersome, and the layout is marvellous. The people at Press Gazette should be patting themselves on the back.

Innovation. The wish of every designer worth their salt, but alas, most will just produce design that fits or follows a trend. Nothing wrong with that, most of the time that is what the client/customer wants, it just means that these designers are not the ones setting the trends from which other designs will be inspired.

As an example...

...this is more blatant than most!

Not breaking news I'll grant you, but I still think it's worthy of a blog spot. Boris and the bods of London have hired design agency Saffron to rebrand London at a cost of £500,000. They want a brand that is as successful commercially as the I 'love' NY logo created by Milton Glaser. However I'd argue that London already has a strong 'brand identity'; the colour is red, and the evolving, but still familiar London Transport roundel, adapted to its most successful form by Edward Johnston, the unofficial logo. Of course 'London' cannot officially adopt this symbol for their own. So I see the logic behind wanting a specifically London logo, I'm just skeptical about spending £500,000 on an identity that has to work with the heavy existing personality of London. At worse it’ll be a heavy price tag for an Olympic banner that will blanket London in 2012, only to be then confided to the history books. I hope it’ll understanding the evolving, but traditional nature of the city and create something that grows on Londoners so they believe in it, because if they don’t it’ll never succeed.

Reading, okay skimming, through the newest addition of graphik magazine (new cover, which is all very 'wall art')I saw an article on Rob Ryan (rather talent personage with a scalpel and paper)who has create an installation at the YSP, that's Yorkshire Sculpture Park to you and me. If you are in Wakefield (where the park is, then I think it would be worth a little look-see. http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=693

I think it's gone now, but at the end of 2009, whilst they went about ripping down the buildings around Tottenham Court Road (one being a rather smashing chip shop), they revealed an old sign for Veglio & co's cafe.

The world is peppered with 'ghost signs'from a time when painting on a prominently displayed wall was the way to solicit business. Now washed out and faded these old advertisements, still tenaciously clinging to the brick they were painted on, are a nod towards the skill of the sign writers who created them. Generally working on a freelance basis,the sign writers mixed their own paints to exacting colours, executing the designs onto walls from scaled drawings whilst making sure the lettering was level - even if the wall wasn't. Not easy.

This site is a marvellous little portal of visual stimuli uploaded by people of the world, who have seen it, been inspired and want to share it.

http://weheartit.com/

 

For a quite a while now I've been a little obsessed with comedy moustaches, and it seems that I am not alone. Moustaches are inspiring design in loads of product areas; appearing on t-shirts, prints, mugs, dogs... the list is long and varied.