What I know about this piece of art, from Wired magazine, is what’s written on the caption: Illustration by Giuseppe Randazzo [Novastructura]. System-coded using processing and rendered with 3Delight.
It is the feature section divider page for the July 2012 issue. The type is rather obscure but it spells the numerals 07 12.
While taking the short elevator trip to my office recently, I spotted a coworker wearing what appeared to be a bracelet made of typewriter keys. I asked and she replied, “It’s a bracelet made of typewriter keys.” “How lovely,” I commented. “May I take a photograph please?”
The lady duly obliged me with a few minutes of her time, and the photo appears below.
In the course of conversation she told me her daughter was curious about the bracelet and when told the circular disks were typewriter keys, the daughter—now a college freshman I believe—asked, “What’s a typewriter, mom?”
Later that day I was interviewed by a young woman who is briefly assigned to our office to learn about marketing. She asked me what I did and I explained as succinctly as I could what a graphic designer does. During the chat I described typesetting, that process of mechanically placing type on paper, and that obtaining type printed on a piece of paper from a typesetter—something that now takes seconds—might take as long as 24 hours. She was incredulous at this news, and as a way of describing what typesetting was, I pointed to a photograph of hot metal, also shown below, that I have on my wall. She had no idea what it was or what it did.
That said, I am officially a dinosaur!
Typewriter keys become a bracelet.
Letters cast in metal.
Bloomberg Business Week May 14, 2012
The simplicity of this opening spread and the way it conveys the dual subjects of the article: oil and Brazil, is striking.
The article explains how an oil spill in November 2011, from a Chevron well named Frade, 230 miles east of Rio de Janiero, led the Brazilian government to charge several Chevron employees with alleged “crimes against the environment.” The 17 employees have had their passports confiscated and face 20 to 30 years in prison, and Chevron are defending a $22 billion law suit.
The spill at Frade was relatively small—just 2,400 barrels, according to Chevron—was cleaned up in just 4 days and resulted in no contaminated fisheries, no dead turtles and no beachline oil slick. In comparison, the Deepwater Horizon explosion resulted in 11 deaths and gushed over 4.9 million barrels into the the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.
What’s at issue, however, is much larger than an oil spill. The real issue is the revenues from Brazil’s vast potential of recently discover oil, estimated at 50–100 billion barrels. And how do they get it out of the ground while keeping as much of the profits as possible. To contrast these numbers Kuwait’s proven oil reserves are 101 billion barrels.
We are likely to hear more about this.
The subject of this blog—your mess, our loss—is taken from a slogan painted on the door of Chevron’s Rio office by Brazilian Greenpeace activists.
According to an article in Business Week, Big Oil has become the biggest investor in the race to create green fuels. The industry claims to have invested $71 billion into zero- and low-emissions and renewable energy technologies. The U.S. government has spent $43 billion on similar efforts during the same period according to the trade group American Petroleum Institute (API).
Environmentalists counter that this is probably just window dressing. Indeed API report that just $9 billion of the $71 billion is for renewable energy while the rest has gone towards greening the fossil-fuel business.
These spreads from Wired that combine and contrast two letterforms intrigued me. After reading the article all became clear. It’s about how firms such as Google, test websites on users frequently without us even knowing. The point is to gather data that proves the effectiveness of website design. That instinct is often wrong, and that testing yields tangible and measurable results.
For example, during Barack Obama’s 2007 campaign, three versions of a splash page were tested with variations in the wording on a particular button to see which one yielded the most clicks: Learn More, Sign Up Now, Join Us Now. The collected data revealed that Learn More yielded 18.6% more clicks than Sign Up Now, which translated into tens of millions of additional donations.
The packaging of Dr. Bronner was featured in an article in Inc. magazine. The opening spread, featuring a type rich packaging label greatly enlarged, poses all kinds of challenges for the magazine designer. Not least being how do you make the headline and deck stand out.
Well if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I suppose.
I think this worked out rather well.
Designs for a series of books by the same author using only type. The name of the designer is below each example.
^ Lapedra Tolson
^ Ehrand Sewell
^ Keia Butts
^ Glenn White
^ Tracy Ringel
^ Elizabeth Logan
^ Lindsay Van Allen
^ Meredith Dausch
Somewhat off the regular beat, but I found this image fascinating.
According to the article from Green Source magazine, 27 million cars are recovered for recycling annually around the world. Much of the material is recycled, but the material that is not—called auto shredder residue—amounts to about 5 million tons a year, and this, according to EPA, finds its way to landfills.
The image above is an aerial photograph of an auto salvage location in Ayer Massacusetts. Annually over 10 million automobiles are recycled in the USA alone, making cars the number one recycled product in this fair land.
While researching the typeface Modern No.20, I came across these 2 posters by Stephanie Whitney, that are very nicely designed, particularly the first one.
