Meanwhile #002
Hello – Another week, another digest of reading material from the four corners of the web. As well as this lot, I've recently updated my own site: danielgray.com. There's plenty of distrustful matter on there too. I'm basically going out of my way to stop you getting any work done.
“As the same moment that this design was taking shape, I was growing ever more nostalgic about several of the older editions of Calvino, and as a result of these pangs, an insight came to me: why not pick and choose amongst the previous Calvino editions, photograph them, and present pictures of them upon the new editions? Book covers repurposing other book covers. Which is to say: a catalog of readymades. Of course (and I think we all can agree on this) no publisher in his or her right mind would ever sign off on this concept. Imagine the cover meeting: ‘we are paying the designer for new covers—and here they are—the old covers!’ I doubted whether anyone would warm to the (I thought inspired) eccentricity of the idea. So these never made it past my computer screen. Though the concept did lead to another related idea, which was the construction of a library of imaginary book covers.”
The subliminal power of city fonts:
“The electronics company Philips was to the Dutch city of Eindhoven what Rolls Royce is to Derby, or Mercedes to Stuttgart. It was founded there, and grew to become the biggest employer. But when from the 1980s on Philips began to shift its operations out of Eindhoven, culminating with the move of its head office to Amsterdam in 1997, it left a void. Like a lover scorned, Eindhoven needed to go out and get itself a makeover. Technology and design sectors blossomed, and many of the old factories became homes to creative start-ups.As part of the effort to rebrand itself, it seemed apt that Eindhoven should turn to an aspect of design – namely, typeface.”
The weird science of naming new products:
“Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them. ‘You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order dolphin fish,’ Shore points out. ‘You order mahi-mahi. You don’t order Patagonian toothfish. You order Chilean sea bass. You don’t buy prunes anymore; they’re now called dried plums.”
“James Stockdale, a Navy pilot, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and sent to the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ where he was to stay for seven and a half years. With the help of U.S. Naval Intelligence, his wife Sybil initiated secret communications with Stockdale by enclosing a photograph of her mother in a letter to him. He was confused, but (as he said later) he thought: ‘It’s dumb to throw away something from the States without doing more with it. James Bond would soak it in piss and see if a message came out of it.’ So he did. After it dried, print appeared on the back, establishing the code that he later used to communicate with the Navy, informing them of conditions at the prison.”
“I have a theory — probably incorrect, but that’s never stopped me before — that Steven Spielberg regarded this character as the bad-guy equivalent of Indiana Jones. A ballsy, resourceful hero who just happens to be working for the wrong side. Admittedly, he doesn’t exactly have the matinee idol looks of Harrison Ford (or a whip — at least, not that we see; he is a Nazi so probably has one for bedroom use), but here’s the evidence: as he crawls across the roof of the caboose, Spielberg lingers on a shot in which the officer’s hat gets blown off by the wind. Of course, a frequent motif throughout the whole series is Indy losing his fedora during action scenes, then triumphantly regaining it. The difference between good and evil, I guess, is that bad guys never get their hats back.”
That is all.