Miscellaneous: Canned Fish Design

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some images of canned fish containers, noting a much more modern design trend recently than in the past. Here are four more I recently came across.

Miscellaneous: Canned fish revolution?

I've noticed that there is something of a design revolution going on in the world of canned fish. A strange thing to notice, perhaps, but I have noticed it. In my experience, canned fish (outside of the world of canned tuna), whether it be sardines, anchovies, mackerel, or something more exotic, has usually been marketed in cans designed to suggest European tradition; can designs have typically been ornate and old-fashioned. 

Recently, however, the industry appears to have decided that a more modern look is in order – and it's not just one company, but several. Here are some examples from Oliver's, one of our local supermarkets (which, by the way, far outshines Whole Foods now in the quality and variety of its offerings, particularly in the produce department).

Music I'm Listening To: New (Old) Classical LPs

Having recently upgraded my sound system, I'm having SO much fun combing the used record and thrift stores for interesting LPs. It's a great time to be a classical music fan and interested in LPs. You can find some astounding things for a dollar or two. Here are some recent acquisitions--median price $2.

I love the size and impact of the LP cover--so much more room than a CD booklet for showcasing the talents of graphic designers. I know the trend in high-end audio now is FLAC and other digital formats, but from a visual perspective, that's no fun at all. I enjoy the cover art almost as much as the music.

Books I'm Reading: Never Use Futura

If there's a typeface nerd in your circle of friends and family members, here's a great Christmas present idea. Douglas Thomas's Never Use Futura (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) is a look at one of the most enduring modern typefaces. Futura and its variants are so common today we hardly see them any more, but they're everywhere, as a pictorial section of the book entitled "Futura in the Wild" clearly shows. Louis Vuitton, The Limited, Nike, Valero, Volkswagen, Swissair, Absolut Vodka, Vogue, Apple, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the US Post Office, among many others have relied on its crisp, geometric forms for branding, but it's a much older typeface than I realized, having been first created around 1925. It rapidly caught on, becoming the go-to font for projecting a modern feel, both in Europe and the US. In its home country of Germany, it was, in particular, part of an internationalist trend in reaction to the peculiarly Germanic fraktur typefaces. The book looks at Futura from numerous angles—at its position in the history of typography, at its structure, at its political applications, and at its extensive use in advertising. It's always been a favorite of mine, despite my ignorance about its past. I use it myself in all the advertising for The Art Wall at Shige Sushi and in advertising material for my own art work. Its appeal is simple: when used in all caps, it creates neat, compact lines of text that are easy to incorporate into graphic design. Recommended--both the font and the book.

Books I'm Reading: Picture This: How Pictures Work

Children's writer and illustrator Molly Bang's Picture This: How Pictures Work has come to my attention in the form of a recently released 25th anniversary edition. A new, hard-cover anniversary edition suggests the book has long been well known and loved, yet I'd never seen it before--never even heard of it--despite a habit of reading about art and perception. It was originally published in 1991 by Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company as Picture This: Perception and Composition, but I read the revised and expanded (slightly re-titled) 25th Anniversary edition of 2016 from Chronicle Books shown here.

It's a shame it's escaped my attention all this time because this simple, easy-to-grasp book is a remarkable distillation of much of what artists know about composition presented in a way that virtually anyone will understand. So, I wish I had read it long ago. My instinct now will be to recommend Picture This every time someone looks at a piece of my art and wonders what's going on, every time I'm in the presence of someone who expresses frustration with understanding art, especially abstract art. Although it can be read in a single sitting (the expanded edition is about 132 pages, mostly pictures), it's nothing short of revelatory. This book is quietly brilliant.

Picture This is likely to be extremely useful in teaching or presenting basic concepts of perception and composition to laymen. It provides a handy framework for talking about art, particularly with people who think they don't understand art--and again, abstract art in particular because the discussion is presented using simple paper cutouts, themselves abstracted distillations of the things they represent; Bang looks at how shape, color, size, and placement on a page affect our feelings.

At the same time, I suspect many artists will find the book concisely articulates much of what they instinctively know already about these subjects but may be unable to express in words. For artists, the book is likely to feel like an affirmation of instinct. The author touches on the subject explicitly at the end of the book (I suspect this is an addition to the anniversary edition) in a short chapter called "Finally, in Defense of Instinct." The chapter comprises a single illustration (from the author's book Dawn, an adaptation of the Japanese folktale known as "The Crane Wife"), and a single page of text. She says "I made this image long before I wrote Picture This and before I understood its principles." You can almost hear her inwardly saying "Yes! See! I knew what I was doing all along!" And, as an artist, it's hard not to share her feeling.

But she's thinking about instinct in another, more fundamental sense. Throughout the book, Bang looks at pictorial elements pared down to essentials and draws attention to the basic human instincts these elements play on to evoke feeling through the agency of the artist. For example, she makes it abundantly clear how our intimate, unavoidable relationship with gravity informs the way we interpret nearly all pictorial forms. Almost the entirety of the book is illustrated with diagrams made using only black, white, red, or lavender paper cutouts--just the essentials (see the book cover above). The first example not such an explanatory diagram appears only on page 117, at the very end of the book. Presenting her illustration from Dawn mentioned above, author Bang invites the reader to contemplate the image using the ideas presented in Picture This without herself deconstructing the image. By page 117, however, there's no need for her to reiterate. With the concepts leading up to this illustration in mind, it's easy to see how it works. Her ideas are clear, elemental, and obvious once presented; they leave a deep impression. The last time I encountered such a clear, convincing, extended argument about any topic was reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Highly recommended. This book should be in the collection of every artist, every school, every man or woman who's ever struggled with interpreting (or making) imagery of any kind.  

Books I'm Reading: Pan Am: History, Design & Identity

I bought Pan Am: History, Design & Identity (Callisto, 2016) on impulse because it appeared to present the entire history of Pan Am's branding in photographs of the company's aircraft, destinations, hotels, and personnel at work as well as in reproductions of posters and other ephemera the company used—hundreds of posters, luggage labels, brochures, and other promotional material. But the book turned out to be much more. I hadn't really expected a lot of text, but, in addition to a remarkable collection of images, author M. C. Hühne presents a succinct yet thorough history of Pan Am's origins, it's development into probably the most influential airline in the world, and then its slow decline and failure. Along the way, we get an insightful portrait of Pan Am's visionary leader, Juan Trippe, and a look at some of the people he worked with, including Charles Lindbergh. The illustrations are beautifully printed on heavy, coated paper, which makes the book feel like a brick, but it's a brick that's very pleasurable to peruse. Owning it is an indulgence, but it's the kind of book that will reward repeated visits—in the end, a worthwhile investment.

Art I'm Looking At: High Style at the Legion of Honor

Featured now at San Francisco's Legion of Honor is High Style: The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection--a rather poorly named show, it turns out. I'm tempted to call the subtitle deceptive. It gives the impression that a large swath of the Brooklyn Museum's costume holdings awaits the visitor. In reality, the selection is modest and everything being shown is from the first eight decades of the 20th Century--hardly the sweeping display of the collection suggested.

The show is poorly lighted. While I understand the need to keep light as low as possible to prevent damage to fabrics, the first room was so dark it was difficult to read the labels. Other rooms were only slightly better. Coming in from outdoors, my eyes were poorly adjusted to the dimness. With that in mind, I went back at the end of the show for another look at the earliest pieces, but the lighting still seemed inadequate. Also, a number of pieces were displayed on raised platforms divided into quadrants by semi-transparent plastic panels that created distorted reflections of some figures overlapping with veiled views of others through the plastic partitions (above). While visually interesting, the distortions distracted from the costumes.

The show is worth seeing--if you're seriously interested in the history of 20th century haute couture, including shoes (there is an entire room full of shoes, with some especially extravagant examples by Steven Arpad, including the rust calfskin pair shown here, from 1939, printed with circular Japanese designs in green, blue, and lavender and embellished with peach and aqua metallic kidskin). The fabrics and materials used in fine clothing are always a pleasure to look at and the sculptural or even architectural approach to clothing design taken by some of the designers, particularly Charles James, is instructive to see here.

The 1953 "Clover Leaf" Ball Gown by James is perhaps the centerpiece of the show, presented complete with preparatory drawings and a media display explaining the materials used, including computer graphics showing the details of its construction. Also given special attention is his 1955 "Tree" Ball Gown in pink silk taffeta, the dress used in the main advertising materials for the show (top of page). I was attracted just as much to a group of rather somber outfits from the 1940s designed by Vera Maxwell, Bonnie Cashin, and others, however, perhaps because they seem more like clothes you might have seen a woman wearing on the street in the period. In the end, I was disappointed, having come with the expectation of seeing an overview of the famed Brooklyn Museum collection. The High Style show runs through July 19, 2015.

After seeing High Style, I walked around the permanent collection a little, noticing a few pieces I'd been unaware of--particularly a small 1889 depiction of an unfinished Eiffel Tower by Seurat, a beautiful little 1879 portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work I've noted before for the clarity of atmosphere he achieves, and a tiny 1650 painting of pea pods and various insects by Flemish painter Jan Van Kessel II.

Miscellaneous: Signs of the Times (literally)

In Sebastopol, California I recently saw this sign in front of a small shopping center. I had to look at it carefully to decipher it. In fact, I had to stop and get out of my car to get a good look at it and to understand what it was trying to tell me (I've isolated it from its background here, but this is a photo of the actual sign at roadside).

I mention it mainly because it's new (I've never seen this type of sign before) and because it uses a symbol (top, center) that underscores how important computers and wireless technology have become.

But is this a good sign? The knife and fork are easy to see--and easy to interpret: Food available here. The coffee cup, indicating a coffee shop, I assume, makes sense too. The icon at the top is relatively familiar now to anyone who uses the Internet--wi-fi available here--but the dot and waves would have mystified many people not too many years ago. The glass started me wondering. I've decided it's specifically a beer glass (because it's squat and appears to have a head) but that it's probably intended to indicate alcoholic beverages generally, without suggesting hard liquor (which presumably would have called for a cocktail glass icon).

The bass clef seems an odd choice. It suggests music, naturally, but are we to understand this as indicating a place to buy recorded music, a place to listen to music, a place to make music? And why a bass clef? Is the music here typically of a low pitch? I suspect the G-clef is much more familiar to most people. I remain uncertain about the intention here, and I wonder if this sign is a Sebastopol thing? It appears to be a bona fide road sign, as opposed to a privately commissioned advertisement for the shopping center or its tenants. Has anyone seen one of these anywhere else? Let me know in the comments below.

The sign above seems very modern, the locomotive sign pictured at left, in contrast, is a vestige. This sign may on rare occasions alert drivers to a possible encounter with an actual steam locomotive, but mostly signs like this one persist at rail crossings that for many years have seen nothing but diesel engines (or no engines at all). The steam locomotive sign is a kind of fossil, a leftover that reminds us of obsolete technology. Nevertheless, we interpret the image as a warning about possible train traffic, even if it's a more modern kind of train traffic we're likely to encounter.

Miscellaneous: The New $100 Bill--Design Disaster

I was deeply disappointed by the new design of the $100 bill when images of it first began appearing on the Internet, but I thought I'd keep an open mind before judging it. I figured the real article might show better than the representations of it I was seeing on my computer screen, but now that I've handled the new $100 bill, I still think it's a design disaster. What were they thinking?

This new design is a veritable definition of the term "half-baked." Rather than start from scratch and design a new bill incorporating cutting-edge anti-counterfeiting technologies in an elegant way, the people in charge have simply allowed half of the old bill to be overlaid with some of these technologies. The mismatch is glaring. It's embarrassing.

The left side of the front of the bill looks mostly like the old design. The right side of the front looks new, but even the right side suggests a badly thought-out collage. The contrast between the two sides of the front face is hard to reconcile, and the purplish hologram stripe that separates them looks like a strip of tape sticking together two halves that don't go together. The reverse is just as bad. A large, yellow "100" has been slapped onto the old design in an awkwardly large hole that's been carved more or less out of the existing layout. The whole thing looks amateurish--or worse. No attempt has been made to make the range of common denominations ($1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100) complement one another. Each ought to be part of a coordinated suite of bills with some kind of design harmony. Instead, the new $100 bill makes it look as if no one cared one way or the other what our currency looks like. I give the new $100 bill a big thumbs down.

Wines I'm Making: New Rosé Label

Just finished designing the label for the 2009 Sangiovese rosé and having it printed. Looks good on the bottles. Ready for drinking. Two cases made.