From an interview with Patrick Rodmell, CEO of Watt International, in Monday’s Globe and Mail on what retailers can learn about branding in the recession:

“One of the core challenges, particularly in North America, is overcoming the development of strategies from silos. Market strategies are often done without consideration for the overall retail environment. Advertising can be done in the absence of looking at the actual store. How many times have you been to a store and then seen the TV ad and felt like they could be two different businesses? They have to bring that integrated message together or it gets lost in the noise.

“The winners in retail after this recession will be those who operate from a truly brand-centric point of view. [This means] the core essence of an idea that translates into all the touch points of your customer.”

Further, he identifies that customers are seeking “the right choice” over “every choice available.” Personally, I believe a curated product line is important, and would add — and firmly believe in — attention to detail and an unrelenting committment to quality.

Every time I’m tempted to overcomplicate a project, I listen to Sonny Boy Williamson and he restores my faith in simplicity. You’ll understand.

Beginning Spring 2010, Rick Klotz, owner and designer for Freshjive, is stripping all brand from the firm, their marketing and indeed, soon, their website:

“Throughout the years I’ve become uncomfortable with this business of branding and brand identity. I’m not the type of person that buys something for the brand name. I’ve also never done a very good job at creating a captivating identity to our own brand logo. Also, within the streetwear culture, the promotion of a company’s brand has become downright silly to me.”

Worth noting is that Freshjive is a sub-brand of General Pants Co., which includes 70 retail locations across Austrialia, generating at least $250M in revenue annually. So: is this a ballsy corporate move? Is it punk, as Klotz states, for an iconic company with two decades of history to drop it’s name?

Catch the full interview with Klotz at The Hundreds blog.

Unapologetic, and unabashed, Wally Olins speaks on the branding of nations (Note: .pdf file.):

“And the rebranding of France has proceeded sporadically and often violently ever since. Napoleon’s Empire gave way to the restored Bourbons, who were overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois Monarchy, which was followed by a Second Republic which turned itself into a Second Napoleonic Empire. In an attempt to recreate the glory of his uncle, the first and incomparably greater figure, Napoleon III and the Second Empire went down to humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1870. By the time the Third Republic emerged from the ashes of the Second Empire, French politicians had become the worlds specialists at branding and rebranding the nation.”

And further draws parallel between the brand strategy of nations and businesses:

“Businesses have to create loyalties; loyalties of the workforce, loyalties of suppliers, loyalties of the communities in which they operate, loyalties of investors and loyalties of customers. In creating these loyalties they use very similar techniques to those of nation builders. They create myths, special languages, environments which reinforce loyalties, colours, symbols, and quasi-historical myths. They even have heroes.”

Here in Alberta, there are ongoing concerns with presenting the province to the world in a positive light, sometimes controversial, sometimes regarded as expensive and ultimately unsuccessful. This has resulted in a multi-front war of words divided amongst the Provincial government, advocacy groups, environmental stewards and the news media.

(Suncor Energy upgrader and tailings ponds. Fort McMurray, AB. Photo by Edward Burtynsky.)

For some, Ed Burtynsky’s aerial photos of the tar sands are the only insight into the operations happening in our own back yard. Or, they would be if anyone here had paid attention.

“The value and importance of the oil sands will make that much harder the choices that Albertans and all Canadians suddenly face. Canada has now become a major-league merchant of one of the most desirable – and dirtiest – sources of energy. The money is flowing in, and the profits are rolling out – good news for stockholders, the Canadian dollar and government coffers.

“But there are environmental and social costs to stuffing our pockets while the oil speeds south. And Canadians will have to answer a question already being asked by many Albertans: When does a boom become a burden?” – Erin Anderssen, Shawn McCarthy and Eric Reguly, An empire from a tub of goo, Globe and Mail.

See also: Better Nation Building Through Design, via Design Observer.

Built around an aluminum frame, this Dutch bike features a single-speed, coaster brake, integrated solar powered LED head and tallights and not much else.

“We were inspired by the good old-fashioned Dutch bike”, explains the 28-year old Dutch designer Sjoerd Smit, “we stripped the bike from whims that can only break or cause frustration and added innovation and style”.

The VANMOOF is a thoroughly modern town bike, and looks nothing like the old stadsfiets my Old Opa would have built at our factory, (though that’s not necessarily a bad thing!) It certainly resonates with me: I suspect cycling is in my blood.

VANMOOF promises a new model every six months, and this is a firm I’ll continue to watch.

Update: Portland-based, Specialized-owned, Globe Bicycles looks to have a small, but growing collection of practical and not-so-practical models for sale. More interesting than their offering, however, is the running commentary on factory-built/imported bicycles vs. locally built by a skilled framebuilder in the post comments at the NAU blog. (via Luke Dorny/@luxuryluke.)

A quick image drop for you: here are two type-related desktops I had casually put together, recently.

The former is an homage (and a thank you) to Able Parris—designer, collagist, and all-around nice guy—for providing design inspiration and enjoyable conversation every day. (Further, digging through Able’s archives while listening to the live rebroadcast of moon landing on Kottke leads to wistful sketchbook doodling!)

The latter represented an opportunity to play with the lovely Burgues Script by Alejandro Paul, one whom I will readily admit to being a fan.




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Two examples of a superb four-colour screenprint in progress by Jason Munn of The Small Stakes design studio. Many of his prints are for sale, in limited runs, in his online shop.

I stumbled across the beautifully whimsical calligraphy of Betsy Dunlap while in the midst of an unrelated Google search and it stopped me in my tracks.

She seems to spend a great deal of time handling wedding invitations and the like, and has been featured on Design*Sponge but I’d love to see more; I would like to think this could be a potentially favourable pairing for the likes of Sudtipos/Alejandro Paul.

Good design is honest. Good design is thorough to the last detail. Good design is as little design as possible.  [Dieter Rams]

There is a brief, but important list of people that I would credit for my love of design, art and architecture. Individuals who’s guidance and mentorship was and is invaluable: my Oma and Opa, painter and photographer, respectively; my father, the engineer and photographer; Pat Dowie, photographer and printmaker; and Jacqui McFarland, interior and graphic designer. The rest, whom I’ve only known in books, photographs, and occasional consumer purchases include John Pawson, Jonathan Ive, and Dieter Rams. These individuals, seen and unseen, have collectively developed my aesthetic worldview, and I carry them with me every day.

All the more exciting then that Rams and Ive, among many others, are included in the list of personalities featured in Gary Hustwit’s latest film, Objectified, which debuted at SXSW, a couple weeks ago. I eagerly anticipate an announcement of a screening here in Calgary.

(ilt.end, from Feel Script by Ale Paul/Sudtipos.)

There is always a bit of a voyeuristic thrill when looking at a thing of beauty such as this. I hold a great deal of respect and admiration for the work of Alejandro Paul and Sudtipos, and am looking forward to the launch of Adios Script, which I hope to be able to write about in depth once I get my hands on it.

Everybody thinks that he knows an A when he sees it, but only the few extraordinary rational minds can distinguish between a good one and a bad one, or can demonstrate precisely what constitutes A-ness. When is an A not an A? Or when is an R not an R? It is clear that for any letter there is some sort of norm. To discover this norm is obviously the first thing to be done.

MyFonts posts an ‘interview’ with long-deceased Eric Gill on legibility, fine lettering, the moral qualities of type and the beauty of marks upon stone.

So we have the designer who designs what he never makes and the worker who minds the machine which makes what he never designs. And we have the salesman who neither designs things nor minds machines but is supposed to know what the public wants. But the public doesn’t know what it wants, and it has no means of finding out. [Gill, via MyFonts Creative Characters]

For now, I fit into the salesman category.

Paperfont for Neo2 magazine. Custom type for every issue by Ipsum Planet.

Folded Paper by Daniella Spinat.

Folded-Font in standard A4 paper by Vienna’s BUSK, via LetterCult.

Fold Font, by James Machin.

The Folded, by Anton Studer for Neo2 magazine.

(FF Mister K specimen, from FontFont on Behance.)

Sadly, information online regarding Julia Sysmäläinen‘s FF Mister K—beyond regurgitating the original press release—appears sparse, save for an excellent post on the Font Feed. The abridged version: Ms. Sysmäläinen, of edenspiekermann, struck by the grace of Franz Kafka’s handwriting has digitized the script for our enjoyment. The family consists of three faces, Regular, Onstage and Crossout, each with extensive ligatures and alternates.

Please take this as further evidence of my growing love affair with OpenType handwriting faces.

Printing as a vocation attracts many young and women, because it offers real opportunities for steady work, good pay and advancement.

Job security, stable earnings. Sounds good. Perhaps you’d like to cross-train on a Linotype machine.

For the record, I think about this line of education every day.

(Robin Hood Gardens. Photo by Flickr user joseph_beuys_hat.)

While Paris ponders it’s future, London is examining it’s past, seeking the destruction of a brutalist modern housing complex, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1960s.

My first view of Robin Hood Gardens was from across a busy roadway. The complex is surrounded by a ring of forbidding concrete walls tilted outward to block out noise. Just beyond this ring, ramps lead to underground parking, forming a kind of moat between the buildings and the street. The facades are in decrepit shape. Even on a rare sunny London day the project’s famous concrete walkways, which the Smithsons called “streets in the air,” look gray and melancholy. The rows of concrete mullions, a play on Mies van der Rohe’s steel I-beams, give the facade the aura of a medieval fortification.

Inside, tenants of Robin Hood Gardens ride claustrophobic elevators to reach their apartments. When the elevators break down, they climb a dank, airless stairwell. A barrier that runs up the center of the staircase makes it impossible to see what’s around the corner, so you worry that you are about to get mugged each time you reach a landing. The experience only reinforces the isolation of the mostly poor immigrants who live here.   [Nicolai Ouroussoff/New York Times]

Complaints of escalating crime and neglect have placed this particular development on watch as living conditions degrade. An easy solution is to blame the building—to uproot the community and replace and renew. These solutions overlook the root cause in favour of the quick-fix, leaving in place the existing problems overlaid on a newer, shinier infrastructure—or the systematic displacement of the existing community via the process of gentrification.

Jane Jacobs describes the urban renewal of Manhattan in the 1950s:

Well what was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad and people were so mindless about it and so dishonest about what was being done. That’s what ticked me off, because I was working for an architectural magazine and I saw all this first hand and I saw how the most awful things were being excused. [...]

They could justify it because urban renewal was a greater good, so they would bare false witness for this greater good. Why was this a greater good? Everybody knew it because slums are bad. But this isn’t a slum. Oh well. You know, the whole thing. They didn’t care how things worked anymore. That was part of it. That was part of what was making me so angry. Also they didn’t seem to care what part truth and untruths had in these things. That’s part of how things work. And do you care about it.   [Jane Jacobs, interviewed by Jim Kunstler, Metropolis Magazine 03/2001]

The systematic erasure of Modernism in favour of the style du jour, the process of which fosters the creation of a new community of diaspora, is far from the most correct solution to the problems of Robin Hood Gardens. I beg you remember the countless examples worldwide where modernism thrives, and draw your own conclusions.

(Simon Fraser University. Photo by Flickr user devlyn.)

BMW is working with South African artist Robin Rhode to promote the BMW brand, the Z4 Roadster, and ostensibly Rhode’s own work with another installation of their long-running partnership with the arts via it’s BMW Art Cars program.

Rhode has previously come to light when Nike SB took heavy ‘inspiration’ from his pieces as the basis of a series of advertisments featuring Paul Rodriguez.

His work with BMW on the surface appears to be a long stretch from his foundation as a performance artist, in many cases being site-specific. In ‘Leak’ (2000), Rhode refenced Duchamp’s readymade ‘Fountain’ (1917) by urinating on a hand-drawn urinal inscribed on the wall of Cape Town’s South African National Gallery. Further:

Rhode’s visual and conceptual alphabet is built around issues of desire, loss, and dislocation in a capitalist world while also acknowledging the specific indignities of growing up “colored” in formerly apartheid South Africa. For instance, Park Bench (2000) was a life-size drawing of said object on the wall of the Parliament building in Cape Town, in an area that used to be off-limits to all but white South Africans. Dressed in dark, hooded clothing associated with trouble-making youths, Rhode then proceeded to loiter around his bench and was eventually arrested for defaming state property.  [-Walker Art]

It would seem to me BMW wants desperately to identify with Rhode’s rebellious streak. I see that more to be a representation of the BMW of old, rather than the newer, softer BMW, but being a BMW vintage fan (and owner), I suspect I’m a bit biased.

Regarding the design of characters, I believe it is especially essential to do so by hand, where one can observe the calligraphic character. [...Working digitally] limits of the very vision of the designer. In any case I believe that the design of characters is a complex issue and should be [evolutionary, so as] not to over-design. In designing courses I choose a specific topic, but very wide and with just a moderate amount of restrictions and parameters to be met, because violating the rules is easier than creating alone, and the most original follow the opposite path. [–Translation via Google, with some cleanup. Original.]

I’ve spent the evening searching and turned up very little English-language information on this face, much less examples in use. Commissioned by the Università Iuav di Venezia, and designed by Luciano Perondi in 2004 for use in Venice’s wayfinding systems, it’s not readily apparent to me if this face was ever actively used for wayfaring in the public realm. That said, I’m awfully enamoured with Miniotype‘s character at large sizes, and surprisingly delicate grace when set small.

We think of signs–the task is to bring a person from one place to another but can be [visually] very strong, even evocative. Perhaps we need to reassure the user of a danger, or simply make them feel comfortable in an elegant place. [These are] messages that are not attributable solely to writing, but also to a form of rhetoric of another type; a second level of reading. [–As before.]

I may be late to the party, but I’m willing to suggest Luciano Perondi, and his typefaces, just gained a new fan.

Torbjørn Brundtland, the other half, goes on to confound the simplicity of Berge’s description, “Making this new album was like mining in the mountains. When you think of a mine you think of one that is already many kilometres deep, and people work inside it. But sometimes one has to start a new mine, so you start digging the crust of the earth. And we had to find a good spot to start digging. [Prefix]

While I’m not at all sure what that means, I can say “Happy Up Here”—the impressive CG video for the first single on Röyksopp’s third album, Junior—is directed by Reuben Sutherland, a design school dropout who has previously worked with The Doves, T-Mobile, and others.