wikiday, wikiway

The Future is Stupid

Obama ‘Gotham’ is the Desingers’ President

Last issue of form publishes an article by Erik Spiekermann that looks at the US presidential campaigns with an eye of graphic designer (and ES, renown German designers, founder and for many years a director of legendary MetaDesign studio, does have such an eye).

Few excerpts:

“Type doesn’t provide the melody” [I guess, he meant 'meaning' here], but the sound of a text. A song strummed on a banjo will sound different from the same song performed by a full philharmonic orchestra. Listeners will know. And designers have, of course, always been aware of that fact.

“Barack Obama himself also has to abide by some of these unwritten laws. His logo shows a blue semi circle, rising like the sun over three curvy red stripes that flow towards the upper right – into the future?

“OBAMA’08 is set in roman capitals. But his motto ‘Change’ makes a much more definite typographic statement.

“Above varying sublines it is set in Gotham, the typeface that want to be generic. Its designers were inspired by vernacular type found on the New York’s public buildings. Batman lives in Gotham City, the mystical New York. Gotham looks simple and geometric, but not as cold or constructed as DIN [similar font, used, for example, on the road signs along the German highways]. It has authority but tolerate dissent.

“The candidate on the other side, John McCain, makes a Freudian choice, typographically speaking. Optima, of all the things, the typeface that doesn’t know whether it is a serif or sans.

“This wimpish alphabet is supposed to represent the war hero and hardliner in matters of security. His logo also features a golden star that looks like it belongs to a uniform, but he cannot kid us, experts: if this election campaign is about brands, there can only be one real candidate: Barack “Gotham” Obama will be the designer’s president.”

(un)reality

Argh, this blog got abandoned again; lot of things happened ‘outside’ a blogosphere, taking time but more importantly a drive to keep with Playing Futures. But give-up-ers we are not, so let’s keep moving.

Completely accidentally, we bumped yesterday into a very interesting exhibition (called Fossa Eugeniana, about a unfinished channel that was to connect Maas and Rhein somewhere near Dutch city of Venlo. It is quite a curios project itself, and will write my NEXT post about it.

But the picture above is itself interesting; it is taken at this small exhibition, and shows a panoramic view of the traces of the above channel (as they are seen today, I assume). The panorama is mounted on a bended boards, and create a good immersive feeling.

But what I liked in particularly were the dry leaves they placed near the picture; the real ones somehow gradually transition into the one on the picture, creating a funny, but nevertheless powerful believability of the whole setting.

I thought two possible suggestions to the designers of this prop; there was a music there in the hall, an expected piece of baroque. But what if they would blend this with the sounds of wind, and rustling leaves? And – what if they would also add a smell, of fallen and decaying leaves, of a distant smoke, and of Fall in general?

When back home, I – ‘of course’ – bumped into something very similar in nature, though quite different technically: the giant murals by John Cerney. He has a website, and one can also easily find hundreds of pictures of his beautiful Gulliverian figures on the web. There is also a nice video of him talking about the work he does. Just one image to illustrate what he does, and how it looks like IRL:

The image is from his famous series Farm, and taken by someone uzvards.

It’s interesting that he keeps calling them murals; mural literal mean wall-painting, and the ones by Cerney are of course wall-less; or rather they force the world to become the ‘wall’ they are painted on.