{typography} – Page 55 – { feuilleton }

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Love by Hassan Massoudy.

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
The British Museum
18 May–3 September 2006
Room 35
Admission free

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East is an exhibition based largely on the collections of the British Museum complemented by a number of loans. It demonstrates the imaginative ways in which artists across the Middle East and North Africa are using the power of the written word in their art today.

The exhibition includes wonderful examples of calligraphy transforming writing into art, books of poetry, and works which reflect current issues facing the modern Middle East.

Opening times
Daily 10.00–17.30
Open late Thursday & Friday until 20.30

Jonathan Barnbrook interviewed

One of my favourite contemporary designers, Jonathan Barnbrook,
discusses design responsibility over at PingMag.

The Butterfly Alphabet

Naturalist, lecturer and photographer Kjell Sandved photographs the natural occurence of letter and number shapes on butterfly wings. You can order posters of these beautiful patterns from his site.

The Museum of Bad Album Covers

The world is over-stuffed with bad design, from food packaging to tv graphics and awful websites, but it’s fun to be reminded now and then just how bad things can get when all aesthetic considerations are thrown to the winds. The Museum of Bad Album Covers features some of the choicest examples from the music world, such as the sleeve above for Marty Feldman-eyed Heino, a classic of Easy Listening kitsch (Cooper Black is a favourite typeface for this kind of thing). Heino’s records don’t look that terrible compared to other German albums of the 70s which often managed to combine outrageous bad taste with abysmal graphics and illustration. God only knows what sounds Foster Edwards and his band of bewigged elephants produced. Next time someone tells you that you can get any album on CD, ask them about Foster and his jumbos.

The Museum site threatens to bring us a complementary Museum of Bad Single Covers soon. If you’re still not sated in the meantime, Dana Countryman’s Virtual Museum of Unusual Cover Art has further examples of graphic strangeness from the vanished vinyl wastelands.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

The Apple logo

The original company logo from 1976 depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the fateful apple glowing above his head and looks about as far removed from a computer company logo as it’s possible to get. The picture frame contained Wordsworth’s description of Newton, “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”

Rob Janoff designed the more familiar Apple at about the same time. The typeface used was Motter Tektura.

According to the logo designer…the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, in line with Apple’s mission statement of making high-technology accessible to anyone.

As with many old typefaces, there doesn’t seem to be a font of Motter Textura available today apart from this Cyrillic clone.

The original apple was streamlined and given coloured bars at
Steve Jobs’ behest in order to “humanise the company”.

Ironically, it was Jobs who also decided to remove the colour bars in 1998. The current logo is now a typical piece of flexible contemporary branding, easily reproduced in any colour, at any size or shape.