Meanwhile #004
Vacuum cleaners, chicken bones, vague promises, centripetal privilege and academia nuts.
“The idea of faking your own location through attaching your GPS anklet to a Roomba and letting it wander around the house all day is perversely brilliant, like something from a 21st-century Alfred Hitchcock film. Of course, it wouldn't take very long to deduce from the algorithmically perfect straight lines and zig-zag edge geometry of your Roomba's movements that it is not, in fact, a real person walking around in there—or perhaps it would just look like you've taken up some bizarre new form of home exercise. But a much more believable algorithm for faking the movements of a real, living resident could be part of some dark-market firmware update—new algorithms for the becoming-criminal of everyday machines.”
magCulture interviews Gym Class Magazine's Steven Gregor.
“I look at so many magazines each week. Too many to count. But I never have any of them on my desk when I’m designing. Copying another magazine is like a pigeon eating discarded chicken bones … ew. If you’re looking to start a magazine, fantastic! You don’t even have to be rebellious! But, don’t pick up a copy of Kinfolk or Cereal looking for inspiration. Both these titles are very good at what they do, and the market’s not big enough for another hyper-minimal, generalist clone. You’ll receive a lot of attention on Twitter and Instagram, but this show of love will not necessarily translate to sales.”
Do you have to read a book in order to design its cover? The consensus among various top designers (including David Pearson, below) is a resounding maybe.
“Ideally you would read the book – key themes and ideas present themselves so readily that way – but it’s important to remember that the book isn’t always written by the time a designer is summoned. Often, we receive only the vague promise of a book, with design work regularly taking place before a title is even settled on (one of the disadvantages of the cover having to be produced so far in advance of the publishing date). In this instance, it is up to the designer to speak to the book’s editor or, better still, the author to build a sense of the book’s tone and temperature.”
As happens every now and then, we are turning the city inside-out (from Jonathan Meades' Museums Without Walls).
“What we are actually witnessing is an abandonment of the North American model and an espousal of the French model. The embourgeoisement of the inner city combined with a dereliction in the matter of building social housing to replace that which was so carelessly sold off is effecting an economically enforced demographic shift. Social polarities are not going to disappear. The sites of income-defined ghettos are merely being exchanged. They’re swapping with each other. A new hierarchy of place is being created. The haves move inwards. The have-nots move, or are forced, outwards. There is a significant population who cannot afford the affordable. Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal. It can be summed up like this – in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road.”
Designing for academics is not without its challenges …
“If I were of the academic persuasion, I'd simply stick to the business card template set by the esteemed Wile E Coyote: Genius. Have Brain, Will Travel. This is essentially what all academics want their business cards to say. Instead, what it'll actually say is: their name (followed by a ludicrous string of qualifications, memberships and random letters); their office number; mobile number; home number; switchboard extension number; fax number; home fax number; research assistant's home fax number; and pager number. Just in case you really need to contact them in an emergency and/or the 1980s.”
That is all.