Somewhere in the USA

Ohne Anmerkung… aucun commentaire… an oil painting by Ron English (propaganda.com) available in many resolutions here.

Toronto, Canada

Designer/cyclist Simon Farla (about whose FontBike project I posted back in April here) has recently taken over design duties for Mr. Something Something—he’s given me a heads-up re: the band’s innovative new pedal powered, off-the-grid show format—all the power comes from bicycles! The format was launched in conjunction with International Car-Free Day 2008 (a week ago) in Toronto. Check out the band’s new online promo/demo here; read about the Toronto street event (with video link) here.

London, England

Kudos to Catharine Brandy (nee Hildebrand; originally from the rural hamlet of Plum Coulee Manitoba; and a senior design colleague at Circle for over a decade) on the rocking success of the UK’s Beatles stamps—not only have these become the country’s best-selling (non-royalty) postage stamps, they have also won a Gold Cube at this year’s New York Art Directors Club (87th Annual Awards), and have been selected as ‘best of category’ in I.D. magazine’s 54th annual design review. Cath has been a design director with Britain’s Royal Mail for the past half-dozen years—for this issue she worked with the talented designer Michael Johnson of London’s johnson banks.

The six stamps (marking the 50th anniversary of Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting in 1957) portray the ‘Fab Four’ in casual stacks of LPs, each topped with an essential album from the band’s brief history. Read I.D’s description here, and more on the johnson banks Thought for the week blog here.

Poster image by Josh MacPhee of justseeds.org

Following is an alphabetical list of the countries bombed by the United States since the end of the Second World War (the citizens of these countries represent roughly one-third of the people on earth)…

Afghanistan 1998, 2001-present
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Cambodia 1969-70
China 1945-46, 1950-53
Congo 1964
Cuba 1959-1961
El Salvador 1980s
Grenada 1983
Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69
Indonesia 1958
Iran 1987
Iraq 1991-present
Korea 1950-53
Kuwait 1991
Laos 1964-73
Lebanon 1983, 1984
Libya 1986
Nicaragua 1980s
Pakistan 2003, 2006-08
Panama 1989
Peru 1965
Somalia 1993, 2008
Sudan 1998
Vietnam 1961-73
Yemen 2002
Yugoslavia 1999

Louisville, Kentucky

From the “a picture is worth a thousand words” file… flashback to a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photo from the Great Depression. No further comment necessary…

Winnipeg, Canada

Here’s a cool ‘tool’ that my friend and colleague Adrian discovered recently…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (from the Wordle website)

You can either enter text yourself or submit a blog/RSS feed for the Java applet to draw from. Visit http://wordle.net/ to learn more or to make your own “word cloud.”

Image shown: the “word cloud” image above was created using the Wordle applet and text from Circle’s website. You can view the image larger here on Adrian’s flickr site.

Winnipeg, Canada

If you’ve ever sat through one of my lectures (or read my book), you know that I frequently quote Marshall McLuhan (an ex-Winnipeger). Enjoy these quick quips of his…

+  +  +  +  +

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers.
They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.

More here.

Pretty much says it, methinks… (image source unknown).

Winnipeg, Canada

Doing online image research has become so easy… it almost seems wrong. A quick search for “vintage matchbooks” using Compfight (my favorite flickr™ search tool of late) brought up these beauties (among hundreds more, such as here, here, here and here). I love old paper ephemera (such as matchbooks)—methinks the considerable limitations of scale, art creation, and printing techniques in early times simply served to raise the design bar.

Universal truths about war…

“There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
— The Bible, Matthew 26:52

“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: “Mother, what was war?”
— Eve Merriam

“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
— Blaise Pascal

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
— Jeannette Rankin

“Those who prefer victory to peace will have neither.”
— Anonymous

(found on flickr, here)

Nanjing, China

I received a notice from Wang Jing today regarding an invitational exhibition he has co-curated that opens on 21 September at the RCM Museum in Nanjing. Here an excerpt from his text… “The 5.12 massive earthquake in Sichuan killed tens of thousands of people. All Chinese and people in other countries are very concerned about the relief work and reconstruction after the disaster, and meanwhile they have spared no efforts to help those victims in various ways. What can a designer and artists do at this time?

Within one month, we have received more than 200 works by designers from over 30 countries and districts. The works collected include posters, T-shirts, music, movies, equipment, sculptures, animations, and so on. The number and quality of the works are much better than we expected. Most of the works demonstrate the care for humanity, and good expectation of the future. The designers and artists have made their voices heard with their excellent visual works… they advocate a humanitarian spirit and try to encourage people in the affected areas…”

View an online gallery of the works done “in response to the tragedy” here.

Winnipeg, Canada

I had a pleasant outdoor lunch at the Forks with old friend Gary Ludwig yesterday (Creative Director at Interbrand in Toronto, back in the ‘Peg for the weekend bar mitzvah of a friend’s son) and the inimitable(?) Dieter Rams came up in conversation. A discussion ensued regarding the intrinsic qualites imbued in Rams’ remarkable products designed for Braun in the 1960s and ’70s (I still use my ergonomically-perfect 30+ year-old Braun ET66 calculator daily—not even a change of batteries in three decades!), and Gary mentioned an article he had seen on Gizmodo recently that reveals the uncanny design similarity between Apple’s products today and Braun products from when we were kids.

When Gary returned to Toronto last night he sent me the link—here are Dieter Rams’ ‘10 principles for good design’ as often cited by Jonathan Ive (the “genius” designer behind Apple’s successful products):

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Read the whole article here. (Thanks, Gary).

Images: Some direct design comparisons between the Braun products by Rams and the Apple products by Ives. The interface of the new iPhone looks remarkably like my old Braun calculator (which I wouldn’t part with even if you offered me an iPhone in exchange). “Homage? Evolution? Rip-off? Decide for yourself…”

Winnipeg Beach, Canada

During the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed collaborating with ceramist Evelin Richter (my girlfriend) in the creation of a series of pieces that combine stoneware vessels (thrown by Ev) with beach findings (bits of coral, pebbles, etc.). A selection of these works—which we’ve called “Zenish” (approaching “zen,” but perhaps more accurately “wabi-sabi”)—is now on exhibit at the Fishfly Gallery in Winnipeg Beach. I’ve always been an intensely visual person, and so am very happy to be experiencing tactility (better late than never, methinks) through the haptic art-form of ceramics.

As Ev puts it, “These pieces were an exercise in contemplation—combining natural findings with man-made form… the tactile end-results were surprisingly rewarding to mind and spirit…” You can see more of Ev’s works on her new website (designed at Circle and which launched this past weekend) here.

Images: Zenish; generous thrown stoneware basins (200mm to 250mm Ø) fused with merged beach findings; some low-fired to Cone 04 with burnished steel glaze, others wood-fired to Cone 12+ (unglazed, but flame-kissed with warm blushes and ash).

Winnipeg, Canada

I’ll be giving a 30-minute keynote presentation (on Thursday, 25 September) as part of the National Digital Media Day celebrations in Manitoba. My topic is “Do the right thing. Do the thing right,” and will allegedly “contain practical advice, and ‘pithy insights’ from around the world” along with “age-old principles applied to current media scenarios.” I’ll use Circle’s “Maxim Dictum” (a sort of in-house manifesto to work and live by) as an outline. The mixer evening starts at 19:00 and my talk is at 20:00, followed by a “stirring of the proverbial new media pot” with sounds from DJ Lil’Phil who will “mix an eclectic melange of house, disco, techno, electro, down tempo, trip/hip hop, 80s, lounge, and acid jazz” until the wee hours. (It sounds like mine is the sage and sober bit that evening… :-)

The host venue is  the Pastry Castle Café on the corner of Arthur and McDermot in Winnipeg’s Exhange District. Cost is $5 and includes two drink tickets and enough cheese to make a Swiss schoolboy blush. Registration in advance only, here.

Milano, Italy

For many years, my good friend Giancarlo Iliprandi (also a former president of Icograda) has been making annual trips deep into the Sahara Desert, a remarkable region that he has developed an intimate relationship with. Upon his return, he often publishes his delightful journal sketches in limited printed editions (many of which I am proud to have in my library collection). Today I received this notice from Giancarlo… which I pass on to widely scattered Friends of Icograda and anyone in the Milano area. Visit the Galleria Nuages website here. Congratulations, Giancarlo!

Accra, Ghana

“Trade in creative economy products is booming because of increasing world demand for goods and services that link cultural heritage, the arts, media, creative services and design to modern business, culture and technology. There is room for everyone, but the challenges are to help increase the creative capacities of most developing countries and lower external and internal constraints.”

Creative Economy Report 2008: The challenge of assessing the creative economy towards informed policy-making is a comprehensive United Nations report launched recently as a joint effort with four other international agencies: the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Special Unit for South-South Cooperation; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); and the International Trade Centre (ITC). Read more about the report here, download an overview here (376KB PDF), or download the full report (2668KB PDF) here.

(Thanks to Brenda Sanderson at Icograda for the ‘heads-up’).

Boston, Massachusetts

The “Design Journeys” project celebrates the stories and work of diverse designers and educators through online galleries and biographical essays, a special collection in the AIGA Design Archives and a traveling exhibition in 2009. The first seven featured designers’ entries have been published… see how the histories and work of these designers can inspire the next generation of young people from all backgrounds to consider design as a viable and rewarding career… view the Journeys here.

Images: three works by Chaz Maviyane-Davies (from top): Poster on the plight of Palestinian people, Self/Iraq Cultural Centre, 1980; Poster to commemorate the 100th year of the death of Toulouse Lautrec, Salon des Cent, France, 2001; Poster on AIDS awareness, Centre of Design of Rosario, Argentina, 2007.

Ste. Anne, Manitoba

With flights of geese honking overhead and overnight temperatures dipping into the single digits, it seems summer is rapidly drawing to a close here in Eastern Manitoba. This weekend was a (long-overdue) time of outdoor catch-up at my place in the woods… mowing the meadow (first time this year), cutting firewood, re-potting dozens of houseplants (thanks, Ev!) and harvesting what remained of several varieties of crab apples (deer have a remarkable reach when standing up on their rear legs—the ‘low-hanging fruit’ was all but gone).

Next up, apple jelly… mmmm.

Stege, Denmark

Morten Flyverbom’s “Green Beetle” at Louisiana… inspiring! (found on the content-rich Environmental Graffiti, with many more clever examples of ‘reverse graffiti’).

Winnipeg, Canada

Yesterday evening I attended the delightful book-launch and reading by (my second cousin) Miriam Toews from her latest novel, The Flying Troutmans, at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location. Miriam delighted those in hometown attendance here in her inimitably self-deprecating manner… and I very much look forward to reading this latest work of hers. (Miriam is the author of three previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding, and A Complicated Kindness [winner of the 2004 Governor’s General Award for fiction], and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life).

McNally’s will also be the venue for (my first cousin) Sam W. Reimer’s book-launch and reading next month (8 pm on Monday, 6 October). If you’re in the Winnipeg area I look forward to crossing paths with you then as “the bard holds forth” with “a veritable Vaudeville of verse.”

Auckland, New Zealand

The September/October 2008 (#363 Interactive Annual) issue of Communication Arts magazine contains a feature article entitled “Living on the Edge: Visual Communication Design in New Zealand” written by Circle’s principal, Robert L. Peters. The in-depth piece investigates New Zealand’s unique attributes, history, culture, and current realities in relation to visual communication—the feature is accompanied by a selection of contemporary works by Kiwi designers drawn in large part from recent winners of DINZ awards shows (Designers Institute of New Zealand).

Peters visited New Zealand in late 2007, touring design offices in Auckland and Wellington (in conjunction with DINZ lectures in both cities) and acting as an external moderator for students graduating from the Wanganui School of Design. He has been contributing foreign feature articles to Communication Arts magazine since 1994, including pieces on design and design events in Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Denmark, and Cuba. Copies of CA issue #363 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

“To foreigners, New Zealand is an exotically bucolic, clean green land of extraordinary natural beauty—a pristine playground-destination for thrill-seekers, and a place apart from the rest of the world—a view effectively reinforced by the tourism slogan “100% Pure New Zealand.”

To the country’s quietly self-reliant inhabitants, New Zealand oVers a peaceful, friendly, egalitarian and multi-cultural haven for individualists who find themselves surrounded by a moat known as the Pacific Ocean. Blessed with a temperate climate, the island nation enjoys a relaxed lifestyle imbued with a love of the outdoors and the waters surrounding it, and an enviable quality of life.

Less known abroad (under the radar, some might quip) is the wellspring of talent, innovation and design prowess emerging from the NZ creative community—it’s at the forefront of this wave that the candidly fresh and vibrant vernacular of New Zealand’s visual communication design finds itself…”

Read more of the article (with full creative credits for works shown) or download the entire CA New Zealand design feature here (1.2 MB).

Note: this feature article from the Communication Arts magazine September/October 2008 Interactive Annual appears with permission by Communication Arts ©2008 Coyne & Blanchard, Inc. All rights reserved.

Winnipeg, Canada

Sooo… I just received an e-mail from my sister-in-law Vanessa informing me that her hubby (and my half-brother) John Paul Peters has entered a submission to the nation-wide search by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for a new Hockey Night in Canada anthem (after their usage rights ran out on the decades-old theme music that has virtually become an institution for hockey fans in this hockey-mad nation). Though I’m not a big hockey fan (ever since growing up in Germany I’ve had a basic mistrust of groups of men dressed in matching uniforms and carrying sticks) I must admit that JP’s entry does pack some punch (and as his kin, I assume it’s laced with not-a-little irony). Check out how his composition: “Devastates the other team with this rowdy bleacher rock, slams the competition into the boards… and out-skates, outplays, and outscores!” Roster: Stompin’ bleachers, slapping sticks, wall ‘o’ guitar, and screaming fans… enjoy it here (too bad, link disabled).