Otl Aicher (May 13, 1922 – September 1, 1991) was one of the leading German graphic designers of the 20th century, and the designer of the identity of the 1972 Munich Olympics. I wrote an article about him in 2010:

Quote: “Good art inspires; Good design motivates.”

Raymond Loewy

The father of industrial design, responsible for such product design behemoths as the slenderized Coca-Cola bottle, the streamlined Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike cigarette package, as well as some of the most famous Identities, Exxon, Greyhound, Shell, and the U.S. Postal Service. Life Magazine selected Loewy as one of the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

Quote: “between two products equal in price, function, andquality, the better looking will outsell the other.”

Neville Brody

The reason I went to LCP, and the guy who introduced me to Bauhaus Inspired Typography. Known for his work on The Face and Arena magazines of the 80′s, as well as album covers for Depeche Mode and Cabaret Voltaire. Recently collaborated with the BBC to re-design the BBC online Global Visual Language

Quote: “An electrician isn’t an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job.”

Ralph McQuarrie

There would, arguably have been no Star Wars without Ralph McQuarrie. When George Lucas was trying to sell Star Wars to the studios he realised that he needed some conceptual paintings to help green light the picture. He called on a commercial artist and designer whose career included stints at Boeing and Kaiser Graphic Arts and creating animations of Apollo space flights for CBS. Ralph McQuarrie came up with the look of Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, the Stormtroopers and many other characters, then going on to helping design such classics as Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T, Back to the Future, Cocoon, Total Recall and the original TV series “Battlestar Galactica.

Ralph McQuarrie died in March 2012

Quote: “George had described Vader as having flowing black robes. In the script, Vader had to jump from one ship to another and, in order to survive the vacuum of space, I felt he needed some sort of breathing mask. George said, ‘OK,’ suggested adding a samurai helmet, and Darth Vader was born. Simple as that.”

Shigeru Miyamoto

The Father of modern videogames, and creator of Mario and Donkey Kong

Quote: “A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever.”

Tom Eckersley

English poster artist and design tutor, creator of most of my favourite posters. Tom Eckersley spent much of his childhood drawing. He was greatly inspired by the work of A. M. Cassandre and Edward Mcknight Kauffer. At college he met Eric Lombers, who shared his passion for progressive poster art. From 1934 they collaborated on a number of poster design for key patrons London Transport, Shell and the BBC. During the Second World War Eckersley produced propaganda posters for public service agencies including the Ministry of Information and the General Post Office. After the war, the bold simplicity and timeless quality of his designs led to prolonged international success. His teaching inspired new generations of progressive designers for over 30 years.

Quote:’that stimulating time when certain artists, supported by enlightened clients, saw opportunities to use their art and their vision to solve communication problems. They began to realise the many exciting visual possibilities that could be derived from the major art movements taking place in Europe between the wars’.

Dieter Rams

German über product designer and major influence on Apple design. Starting out in Architecture and moving on to product design for Braun. He came up with ten principles for good design

Quote: “My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.”

The post Design Heroes appeared first on Maveco.

A new mobile app from Twitter launched on the 24th January called Vine. Vine allows you to create small 6 second looped video clips, and share them through your Twitter feed, or on the feed on the app. An Instagram for video if you will.

The entirely homogenous UI is simple and really intuitive. User experience is basic, you simply touch the camera viewer on the screen to start recording. You can start and stop as many times as you like up until 6 seconds is recorded. That clip is then tagged and uploaded. Simple right?

Then something happened. Porn arrived on the Vine. Easily #hashtaggable clips of naughty bits were simple to find, and the tech press went crazy. Vine’s terms of service don’t forbid you to upload adult content, but Apple’s clearly do. They pulled 500px off the app store when a boob or two starting showing up in the feed.

Also Facebook pulled their ‘find your Facebook friends’ API for Vine as it has a policy against app that ‘bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook’, which translates as ‘crap! we should have done something like this’

Time will tell if Vine is the future of social video, Porn ultimately decided the outcome of digital media format wars of old, so it is fitting that it has a say in the future of Social Networking.

Anyway, here is a little clip I made called ‘sugar’

Sugar vine.co/v/bJ27OhlTrXh

— Maveco (@supermaveco) January 30, 2013

Vine is currently only on iPhone and iPod Touch.

The post Vine appeared first on Maveco.

Wanted to wish everyone, clients old and new, suppliers and friends, a wonderful Christmas and happy holidays. Next year is going to be a great one.

The post Merry Christmas 2012 appeared first on Maveco.

LOCOG, The organisers of the 2012 Olympic games were quite proud of the fact that the London Olympics would be the first Twitter Games. The hugely popular micro-blogging site would be the focus of social commentary and communication, throughout the games, and hashtags were #everywhere.

Twitter was the favourite social media site for conversations about the opening ceremony.

Then something went wrong. The negative aspects of digital communication were amplified to the world.

1) Network
The BBC Mens road race coverage was shit. We blamed the BBC. The BBC blamed the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). OBS blamed Twitter. I blame the Network, it simply can’t cope with the amount of people using mobile data.

2) Trolls
Trolls have been around since Usenet. Everyone who has ever been on a forum knows not to feed the troll. However bad that persons online behaviour is, it is their right to communicate their opinion. You just ignore it. Or if you are Tom Daly, you can retweet it. The police now seem to take a Dorset teenagers tweets as a credible threat. People who genuinely seek to kill others, don’t tell them that in advance, using Twitter. The police seem to not want to arrest actual criminals, but I digress.

3) Celebrity Athletes
Tom Daly retweeted the trolls evil diatribe (140 characters or less) and thereby guaranteed himself a ton of publicity and support, despite not winning us a medal. Hold on, he came out of this rather well. Celebrities play Twitter like a PR game. There is also the proliferation of useless but fascinating information. Usain Bolt tweeted about his craving for chicken. American hurdler Lolo Jones revealed she’s a virgin. Maybe TeamGB should get off the iPhone and concentrate on winning. I hardly think the Chinese athletes are allowed to use Twitter. Such a tool of procrastination can’t be conducive to elite athletes winning golds. The rest of the athletes are actively encouraged to “take part in social media and to post, blog and tweet their experiences

Here is the PDF issued by the IOC

4) Sponsors
The Olympic Athletes got hit with Rule 40 – Rule 40 means athletes in London can’t mention non-Olympic sponsors. Of course, this is never going to work, as Dr Dre proved by getting his Beats Headphones all up in everyone’s grills. Tennis player Laura Robson tweeted about receiving her headphones, although the post now appears to have been removed from her Twitter account, as did football goalkeeper Jack Butland, who tweeted: “Love my GB Beats by Dre.” (Guardian). Then news that LOCOG was going after Oddbins told us that they really were that petty.

Nike launched a lovely campaign called ‘Find Your Greatness’. If only Oddbins had the cash.

5) Twitter Needs Revenue
Twitter cut a deal with NBCUniversal on a special “insiders” stream of Olympics-related tweets. This was for no money, but obviously Twitter would gain advertising revenue. This was fine until the British journalist Guy Adams posted negative tweets about NBC.

“America’s left coast forced to watch Olympic ceremony on SIX HOUR time delay. Disgusting money-grabbing by @NBColympics”

and:

“I have 1000 channels on my TV. Not one will be showing the Olympics opening ceremony live. Because NBC are utter, utter bastards.”

Twitter employees alerted NBC staff and then suspended his account

Jeff Jarvis wrote a brilliant post about the debacle. You can read it here

The 2012 games have shown us, within one week, that Twitter is no different than any other communication channel, it needs to be monetized, it needs partners, it needs to censor and it can be used to makes the games better and indeed worse.

My all time favourite tweet it still the tweet which proves the power of Twitter as the defacto real-time info source.

Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.

— Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 2, 2011

Twitter user @ReallyVirtual unwittingly reported the capture and execution of the worlds most wanted terrorist.

Half man half fish Ryan Lochte still has a long way to go:

Always reach for the moon cuz if u slip up u will still be a star!! #Jeah

— Ryan Lochte (@ryanlochte) July 31, 2012

God bless Twitter.

The post Twitter and the Olympics appeared first on Maveco.

Before Instagram, Hipstamatic et al, there was a lovely thing called Lomography. In particular – a camera called the Lomo LC-A

I took these shots in 2001 – analogue, and without a flash.

The post Lomography appeared first on Maveco.

Proving the might of the niche mobile/social networks, Facebook just took out a credible threat.

Instagram did what no other company did well, put simply – they took a trend in photo grading/tilt shift/nostalgia, started by the Lomography craze, and built a decent tight social app around it. With this, they led the rise of the pure mobile/social app – everything you need, and not a sausage more. Facebook is all things to all people. That is not ‘mobile’. Foursquare showed everybody how the ‘location’ tentpole feature of mobile was critical. Instagram did the same with photo sharing.

Path does the same with pure user experience.

The Guardian were asking for commentary for this article – I tweeted them this:

@GuardianUS this is the rise of pure mobile, niche social networks. Otherwise FB could have added retro effects and tilt shift to their pics

— Mat Venn (@matvenn) April 9, 2012

They included it in their comments.

Whether or not the brilliant photo sharing mobile app with become Facebook Photo, is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime, here is a way to export/back up/get the hell out

The post Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion appeared first on Maveco.

A lot has been written about responsive web design lately, my current position is this:

I think part of this is designing in a modular fashion, with mobile first in mind. It is a strategy we adopted at Betfair to great success, and enabled us to design modules, order those modules (semantically, logistically and analytically) and then think of the experience as a collation of those modules. Also when it came to mobile sites we had a strategy in our pockets from the get-go. There was also more correlation with native apps too

The question is whether you deliver a layout for a particular device, orientation or platform, or let the user decide. One could argue that most mobile browsers can let the user touch and zoom. I quite like the full http://www.bbc.com site on my iPhone4, but would appreciate the opportunity to switch to a more narrow layout. These decisions are hard to force on people.

Also to take into account the proliferation of people browsing on the go – sometimes on 3G data plans. Content is then much more expensive and thus, a strategy for accurate or efficient content needs to be implemented.

One could argue that designing and building big sites and then scaling down is much more hassle than starting small, smart and agile, then scaling up. From a strategy point of view is a good conversation to be had from the project inception.

This is a nice slide deck from the presentation: Meta Layout: A Closer Look at Media Queries – at Mobilism2011

Is a masterclass in Media Queries. Like most bright new things, there are pros and cons.

Further reading:

CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold

Media Queries – showcase of Responsive Web Design

The post Responsive web design – my (broad) thoughts appeared first on Maveco.

Whenever I design anything that has the slightest bit to do with sports or sporting event categories, symbols or diagrams, I always go through the stunning and groundbreaking graphic materials for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Aicher was the lead designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics. He created, using a strict orthogonal and diagonal square grid, a new set of pictograms that paved the way for the ubiquitous stick figures currently used in public signs (Otl Aicher on Wikipedia). He also created the first official Olympic Mascot, a striped dachshund named Waldi.

Waldi Mascot Keyring.

Hockey Identity Badge.

Yachting poster.

Results Book.

Ceramic Vases.

Athlete Badge.

Unfortunately the 1972 Olympics will always be associated with the tragic terrorist attacks on Israeli athletes, but hopefully the designs of Otl Aicher and his team will be remembered for centuries to come.

Further links:

Online resource for the Munich Olympics, including original items for sale

Otl Aicher – 1972 Munich Olympics

Linotype – Article on Otl Aicher

The post The Genius of Otl Aicher appeared first on Maveco.

User interface design work on a social network for Sage. Project was a real pleasure to work on, a ton of screens, icon design, problem solving, colour theory, lots of shiny buttons etc.

Click here for the biggy one.

The post Work – Sage Open social network design appeared first on Maveco.

Common Elements
If you are using an element, such as a panel, more than once in a layout, you can save it as a symbol in a library, and use it as many times as you like. Need to change the panel, you only have to change it once, and the change is appended throughout all instances of the design. Just like Flash.

Rapid Prototyping
You can assign actions and linkages between all pages and symbols in Fireworks, at whatever level (sketch, wireframe) and create a working prototype of just about any object in a website, link the whole thing together and export as a dynamic PDF, HTML/CSS or a multiple of other options including Adobe® AIR™, Adobe have a great tutorial video on this

Fireworks export panel has a ton of export options including exporting as HTML/CSS for a quick site prototype.
Compression
Fireworks can export stuff tighter and smaller in file size. Web Designer Wall have a great article on Fireworks vs Photoshop Compression

9-slice scaling
9-slice scaling lets you scale vector and bitmap objects without distorting their geometry, retaining the look of key elements like text or rounded corners. The following images are from the Adobe site, as part of this article

9-slice scaling guides positioned so that corners aren’t distorted when the button is resized.

After applying 9-slice guides to a symbol, you can nest it in the protected regions of other 9-sliced symbols, creating complex objects that scale perfectly.

The post Photoshop vs. Fireworks – a practical guide appeared first on Maveco.