Don't you just love the iPhone?

All done on the iPhone in my siting room from the comfort of my Ligne Roset Togo sofa. The iPhone is more than a phone, it's a timewarp in which one can produce photographs they didn't know were possible.

Even the Garden sign in the previous post was done with my iPhone pretending to be a Polaroid. Ironic given that the last batch of Polaroid film is about to expire.

Wayfinding and orientation

We were in Ilkley in Yorkshire on Sunday for a genteel stroll and tea in Betty's (I refuse to omit the apostrophe like they do). I'm sure that all Ilkley residents will recognise grass and flower beds as a garden, but the town has been really kind in labeling it as such for visitors from the concrete jungle.

However, I was nearly run over on leaving the garden as they had omitted to label the road.

A warm welcome a long way from home

There I was giving a lecture on national branding during the week I spent as a guest of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida when I felt a hot flush coming on.

Nerves? No.

My friends in Florida had checked out my passport and realised that it was my birthday. Where they got all those candles from I'll never know, but the flames on my surprise cake as it was carried in very nearly caught the attention of Steve McQueen and Paul Newman fresh from Towering Inferno. Florida must have suffered a birthday candle shortage for months after.

Don't try and count the candles, please. I believe the blaze was visible on Google Earth.

But what a lovely surprise. I'll always remember that.

Notting Hill gates

Whoever stole Alan Fletcher's original Victorian gates from outside his Notting Hill house did the design world a favour.

Fletch's replacement gates were made to his own alphabet design and demonstrated that it is possible and necessary to think differently when confronting an obvious brief.

Fletch's take on the Thomas Crown Affair

Watching Pablo Ferro's title sequence for the original The Thomas Crown Affair (see the previous post below) I was reminded of Alan Fletcher's poster for the National Portrait Gallery in London which juxtaposes rectangular fragments of portraits from the gallery's collection to create an irreverent caricature of the Prince of Wales (should there ever be anything other than irreverent for Charlie boy?)

Fletch's poster was again a brilliant piece of creativity amazingly well-seen.

Watch the YouTube clip and spot the similarities, quite coincidentally.

The decider

What made me really decide to become a graphic designer? The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. I was excited about the split screen motion in the titles and throughout the film. So very basic now, I had never seen anything like it as a 17 year old.

Pablo Ferro created the graphic design and optical effects in the 1968 film. Ferro used a variety of techniques: forming a larger image out of smaller sub-images, moving the subframes, changing the tint colors of the subframes, duplicating the same image within multiple subframes, and so on. The edgy, jazzy score by Michel Legrand complemented the rhythmic visual editing.

Why I did not pursue a career in film titles I will never know, but the titles of the film and the presence of Steve McQueen, the coolest man of the 20th century, certainly sent me in the direction of graphic design. Well, a career as Steve McQueen was impossible.

Take a look at the titles on YouTube (with Legrand's Windmills of Your Mind sung by Noel Williamson):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELgjuHTbT3o

It still makes me excited (but I don't get out much - he world has changed from black and white to colour since then and it's a bit too bright for me).

What was my first design influence?

As a small boy I used to accompany my Mother to a minute, private library near home. For a few pennies it was possible to borrow from a limited range of novels, and my Mother was (and still is) an avid reader.

As she browsed the shelves, I recall waiting near the owner's desk upon which was an ashtray bearing the Dunhill logotype. I became fascinated with the elongated ascenders of the d,h and l and its radically modern appearance in amongst the very traditional dust jackets.

I lived then in a world of tobacco smoke, and the library was no different. The owner sat chain smoking as her customers browsed. The Dunhill ashtray was a necessity and its graphic influence may well have set me on my typographic career journey.

Paul Rand - using the language of the poet and business man

I had the great pleasure of meeting Paul Rand at IBM in the 1980s.

It was daunting to meet one of the godfathers of design. Focused, astute and a strong advocate of attention to detail, Paul Rand worked with some of the World's largest corporations - IBM, Westinghouse, Ford and many more. He had a lot to offer in relation to my work and his influence on me will never be forgotten.

Steve Heller described him as “an enemy of mediocrity, a radical modernist”. Just before Rand died in 1996, Steve Jobs, who had been a client at NeXT Computer, said that he was 'the World's greatest living graphic designer'. His inclusion in Apple's Think different advertisements bore this out. Picasso was another different thinker chosen for this series.

Moholy Nagy said of him early in his career: 'Among these young Americans it seems to be that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable […] He is a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, [and] advertising artist who draws his knowledge and creativeness from the resources of this country. He is an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and business man. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems but his fantasy is boundless'

His contribution to the development of corporate identity from its beginnings in simple trademarks to the sophisticated machine that it is today was immense. His input was from a time when design mattered immensely and his brilliant use of what one perceives as simplicity (but which was not) made him one of the major influences in design in the 20th century.

Fletcher/Forbes/Gill

Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Bob Gill

These fellows were responsible, almost without rivals, for the birth of modern graphic design in the UK. Fletcher/Forbes/Gill became Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes, which became Pentagram.

Like the Beatles of design, they broke new ground. They did things differently.

The rest is history. We owe them a lot.