Current Configuration

Design Observer, a consistently strong design blog/journal/website, has a great piece on Wilhelm Deffke by Stephen Heller. To claim my awareness of Deffke was anything more than vague would be stretch, but most people do have an awareness of his work. After all, we are all living in a world influenced by the work of Deffke and his contemporaries in Germany.

Deffke’s most enduring work, for me, is the Zwilling J. A. Henckels AG mark on the left. If you imagine it etched into the blade of a knife, you may remember it, as that’s Zwilling’s best-known product.

Unfortunately, his work at simplifying and modernizing many older symbols, such as the Hakenkreuz, has tangled his name up with the Nazis. They took his geometric simplification of the Hakenkreuz, done decades before their existence, flipped it, and now most of the world recognizes it as the National Socialist’s swastika. Just to be clear, Deffke was not an ideological Nazi and did not design it for their use. (I suggest you read the article for the details and judge for yourself.) In fact, they took it without asking, which is kind of their thing, historically speaking.

Regardless, the article is a fascinating look at the ideological origins of the modern logo. It’s a good reminder of the power of ancient icons and marks, a legacy which our modern marks attempt to tap into. To look at dreck like the new Xerox bubble is to see how thin the soup can get, the further you stretch the stock. To look back to the beginnings is to catch the scent of a fuller meal in the kitchen of a true chef. Examining Deffke’s work on these symbols reminds us that some forms have roots deep into our primal consciousness, and that there are lessons we can learn away from the computer, with our eyes on our origins.

As reported by Engadget, it appears that the Sony e-reader and Amazon’s Kindle are both essentially the same product.

The Kindle, if the FCC photo is to be believed, is ugly as hell. It looks like something out of NASA in the 1980s.

The Sony reader is a bit better, but as you can see in this photo by Rick Wilking from Reuters, it still comes off as a super-sized Palm Pilot. Has no one been paying attention to Apple’s success?

(more…)

Over at Design Observer, founding contributor and designer of some note, Jessica Helfand has written a succinct piece on some of the factors at play when a designer chooses type.

“About a year ago, I participated in a student portfolio review involving nearly a dozen American schools, many (most?) exhibiting the classic projects that characterize all undergraduate design programs – the color studies, the poster problems, the typographic exercises – all of which teach the student about that most essential design conceit: letterforms, and how to use them.

And here, I quickly discovered that something had gone horribly wrong. One after another, bright-faced young hopefuls displayed the products of their long hours in the studio. Book after book spilled forth with content ranging from how to cook a frittata to how to understand Freud. There were personal books, commercial books, literary and poetic books, serious and silly books, childrens books, how-to books, and everything in between.

And there they were – virtually all of them – typeset in Futura.”

I recommend it for designers and non-designers alike. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read it. As someone who went to school for design, I sympathize with her perspective and agree with her sentiments.

For those unfamiliar, this is Futura.