iDESIGN

Cats, deer, monkeys, bats, birds… a variety of species can be found on many of the world’s most recognizable logos. Save Your Logo is a global initiative aimed at these brands as a way to give back to their beloved creatures.

Backed by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the World Bank, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the French-based Save Your Logo was founded to support the biodiversity of the plants and animals represented on logos across the world. The initiative also focuses on education and community engagement in efforts to help preserve a healthy planet.

Clothing company Lacoste, whose iconic crocodile logo has adorned tennis shirts for over 80 years, is one of the first companies to embrace the initiative. The brand will actively support projects selected by the program to “safeguard or protect endangered crocodile, alligator, caiman or gavial species, whose loss would jeopardize the biological balance of their natural habitats.”

Advertising campaign announcing Lacoste’s Save Your Logo initiative.

In 1927 when René Lacoste chose the crocodile as his emblem, he hadn’t imagined that 80 years later millions of people would bear this logo. He hadn’t imagined either that the crocodile would be threatened to disappear one day. Today, within the Save Your Logo initiative, Lacoste commits itself to…the preservation of Earth biodiversity.

French insurance company MAAF and ski resort Val d’Isère have recently signed on to protect the dolphin and eagle, respectively.

Hopefully we’ll be seeing many more companies join the program.

Over the weekend a group of artists took to the streets of Manhattan, in a battle of art and advertising.

According to the Public Ad Campaign group, there are over 500 ‘illegal’ street-level billboards around New York City, covered with unauthorized wheat-pasted advertising. Participating in an a second round of ‘New York Street Advertising Take Over’ (NYSAT2), the group attempted to reclaim the public space on Sunday, white-washing and creating art over more than 100 of the billboards.

However, the white-washed ads were quickly recovered by workers for NPA Wildposting (a firm who pasted the advertisements to begin with)—with ownership going back and forth throughout the day in what the New York Times calls “a bizarre cat-and-mouse game,” which eventually led to five arrests.

“Despite intense NPA harassment and a major police crackdown… it seems that every artist had the chance to at least get their work up for a few hours. Unfortunately, NPA made a tremendous effort to reclaim all of their space so I think it is safe to say that nothing has lasted into this morning,” said Gaia (one of the group’s participants) on Monday.

It is unclear whether the billboards are, in fact, illegal as the group claims, but here is some of what was seen (for a brief period of time) around the city:

For more see Animal and Unurth.

After Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities this week, millions of horribly designed websites are gone. It’s the end of an era, but it’s an eyesore we could stand to lose.

I remember creating one of my first websites on GeoCities in the mid-90’s. Making myself a home on the “SunsetStrip,” the website likely remained untouched for more than a decade—like an embarrassing time capsule filled with animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, and (of course) Comic Sans.

Once the third most popular destination on the web, GeoCities was shut down on Monday due to lack of interest as users move to social networks. For the nostalgic, we can rely on the Wayback Machine, and a new initiative called Reocities which is mirroring a substantial portion of what was left (in case you want a second chance to join Simsponaholics Anonymous, read Dan’s Guitar Stuff, or find out about this new thing called Google—all found randomly via Reocities).

So does this mean we’ll stop seeing Comic Sans on the web? Unfortunately, it looks like MySpace has taken over that domain for now. But with the growing popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter which focus on content over flair, it looks like a step in the right direction.

It’s almost Halloween and no trick-or-treat bag is complete without a twisty, colorful roll of (depending where you call home) Smarties, Fizzers, or Rockets.

Admittedly not one of my most favorites, the chalky pastel-colored candy could usually be found near the bottom of my treat bag. Weeks after Halloween they would remain next to the yellow lollipops, little boxes of raisins, and—the worst offender—the rock-hard, black-and-orange wrapped molasses candies (an oddity of growing up in Canada).

Whatever name you know them by, they are essentially the same rolled-up tablets which originated as Fizzers. The candy was first created in the 1930’s by British confectioners Swizzels Matlow (made famous for their Love Hearts) and are still sold in the United Kingdom and Australia under that name.

L-R: Smarties (Photo: J. Smith, Wikipedia), Fizzers (Photo: Retro Tuck Shop), Rockets (Photo: Danielle Scott, Flickr)

The fizzy candy first arrived in the North America in 1949 when the brother of a Swizzles Matlow partner came to the United States and started the Ce De Candy company. Smarties, as they became known in the U.S., are also manufactured and sold in Canada by the same company. But not as Smarties…

Where Smarties are not Smarties

To the rest of the world Smarties means chocolate (and depending who you ask, a more favorable Halloween treat). Similar to plain M&M’s, Nestlé Smarties were first sold in England as “Chocolate Beans” in the 1880’s before adopting the “Smarties” name in 1937. The equally colorful candy is popular in the UK, Germany, Australia, South Africa and Canada—where it’s common to eat the red ones last.

Above: Canadian Smarties packaging (Photo: pollyalida, Flickr); Below: Comparing M&Ms (left) with British Smarties (Photo: fritish, Flickr)

So, to avoid confusion (and lawsuits) Canadians have the nearly identically packaged Rockets instead—and Americans, unfortunately, miss out on the chocolate variety.

Timeless fizz

60 years after its introduction in North America, Smarties and Rockets are still instantly recognizable. With its timeless packaging and Tuscan-style slab serif type, it has gone mostly unchanged for decades… except as designer Rob Giampietro points out:

Today’s Smarties differ in one unfortunate respect: they depict the package on the package itself. Maybe it’s a symptom of our meta-obsessed times, or maybe it’s a fear of pure abstraction, but this minor graphic revision leaves the prospective Smarties consumer feeling a bit of the Dröste Effect…

In North America, Ce De Candy currently sells an astonishing 2.5 billion rolls of the candy per year—proving that kids today are still addicted.

Also see:

• Parallels: Krispies & Bubbles

Thirty Conversations on Design is a collection of thoughts from 30 inspired designers, authors, and creative professionals.

Releasing the conversations in groups of 10, the project’s initial offering features insight from Erik Spiekermann, Ellen Lupton, Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, among others. The project, created by Minneapolis-based design firm Little & Company, asks participants two simple questions: “What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

Some interesting insight on the ‘green design’ trend by architect Edwin Chan (Gehry Partners):

As designers today, we should address the problem of how to reconcile our own survival on the planet with the quality of life we’ve been accustomed to. Nowadays there are a lot of talk or rhetoric out there about ‘green design’ or being ecologically conscious. Frankly speaking, I think that’s a lot of bullshit. In fact, it’s a little bit of a fad. There’s always been talk about [designing] energy conscious since the ’60s, and to me the current trend is just a rehash of what’s been good design all along.

Massimo Vignelli (Vignelli Associates) says to design for the people:

We really have to define what people need rather than what people want, which was what was done before by marketing. Marketing was looking for what people want—people do not know what they want… Design has to be more responsible to towards design itself, towards the user, and towards society.

Check out upcoming conversations throughout November with Chip Kidd, Debbie Millman, and others at Thirty Conversations on Design.

Following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, all-time low sales, and a new partnership with Italian automaker Fiat, it comes as no surprise that Chrysler wants to reinvent itself.

Yesterday the new Fiat-directed Chrysler Group unveiled its long-awaited 5-year business plan, announcing a plan to sell smaller Fiat-designed vehicles and pay back billions in U.S. bailout loans by 2014. The 7-hour marathon press conference also featured a presentation (PDF) on the Chrysler brand by marketing chief Oliver Francois, which introduced a new logo for the struggling car manufacturer.

Chrysler seen from a different perspective (Source: Oliver Francois, Chrysler)

The new logo was leaked earlier in the week after its U.S. trademark application (originally submitted in July) was spotted online. Clearing up media speculation in the presentation, the new logo will be featured on all Chrysler-branded vehicles, but not replace the logo of the corporate logo of the parent company (which will retain the Pentastar logo). Chrysler also announced its intention to do a ‘complete overhaul’ of its Dodge brand by mid-2010.

The new logo appears to be a heavily streamlined take on the previous winged logo, which has adorned Chrysler vehicles since the late 1990s. While I’m sure it’s the intention of a company billions of dollars in debt to look ‘streamlined,’ it goes too far, creating a strangely wide shape (which almost feels like its been run over by a car). The odd size also renders the tiny wordmark featured in the center of the logo illegible. Although, judging from the proposed website design (below), it looks like the Chrysler wordmark will be repeated again below the logo in some cases (another issue).

Proposed marketing vision for the new Chrysler website in 2010 (Source: Oliver Francois, Chrysler)

Chrysler branding, a brief history

Top: Medallion (1925) and variations (1947); Middle: Forward Look (1955), Pentastar (1962); Bottom: Winged medallion (1998), Pentastar revival (2007)

Chrysler has seen their fair share of logo redesigns since the company’s inception, beginning in 1925 with their classic medallion logo. Variations of the logo followed until 1955 when Virgil Exner’s “Forward Look” redesign took Chrysler into the future, dropping the medallion in favor of space age arrows. By 1962, the company adopted the Pentastar which soon became their most recognizable mark. The original medallion logo was later revived in 1996 and sprouted a pair of silver wings after the Dailmer-Benz merger two years later. The winged logo can be seen on Chrysler vehicles made from 1998-2009, while the a new metallic Pentastar was revived in 2007 to become company’s corporate logo.

With recent reports of Ford making a profit, perhaps Chrysler has a chance to turn things around—but it’s going to take a lot more than this new logo.

Looking back, many designers fondly remember a particular class project that helped build their first portfolio. Design School Confidential is a new book that attempts to showcase these ‘extraordinary’ class projects, compiled from design schools around the world.

Curated by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico, over fifty international art and design teachers were asked to present their most interesting or challenging class projects. The result is 200 pages of fresh ideas—some inspiring, some forgettable, but all lending to an accurate overview of the work coming out of top design schools from Chicago to Seoul.

What can we learn from these projects? Aside from seeking fluency and expertise, the teachers are attempting to instill as sense of wonder in their students, and the students are trying to use their design talents to convey narratives as well to explore forms that they will use later in their careers.

A few of our favorite projects from the book:

Helvetica Nation, Maryland Institute College of Art (Maryland, United States)
Students were asked to create a set of icons using only the typeface Helvetica Bold and Illustrator’s knife tool (no scaling or skewing allowed). Icons pictured above by Alex Roultette (left).

Development of Type Families for Magazines, Senac University Center (São Paulo, Brazil)
Students were given real magazines and ask to design typefaces that were not only original, but also technically and aesthetically sound. Vazari Sans family, pictured above, by Marcela C. Santaella Mamede (Regular), Irina Serrano (Bold), and Felipe Zveibil Fisman (Italic, kindly available for free download).

What Happened? School of Visual Arts (New York, United States)
Students were asked to select a period in their lives and tell the story using traditional information design, without any decorative illustration of any kind. Above infographic by SVA student Lesley Weiner.

Product Design, Alberta College of Art and Design (Calgary, Canada)
This project asked students to create a powerful and memorable identity system for a hypothetical product, featuring work (above) by our own Josh Smith, a contributing writer at idsgn (so we may be a bit biased on this one).

Do you have a favorite class project?

Dig up your old portfolio and share your link in the comments below. Design School Confidential is available now in bookstores and Amazon.

Typography on the web

The future of web typography is coming… but not quick enough.

Nearly fifteen years ago Netscape 1.0 was introduced. With it came the (now retired) <font> tag, giving web designers the ability to adjust text sizes in HTML for the first time.

Since then, the Internet has progressed enormously in many ways—you can watch your favorite TV show in high-definition or chat in real-time with friends across the world—but little has changed in the world of typography since the introduction of CSS a few years later.

Web designers have been stuck using the same tired web-safe fonts for over a decade, resorting to hacks like CSS image replacement, sIFR (guilty), Cufón, and others to spice up headlines at the expense of usability.

How did this mess happen?

With the release of CSS2 in 1998, the two big browsers at the time (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape) added support for a new specification called @font-face, making it possible to embed fonts on the web. The world was about to change—but thanks to the proprietary nature of each company’s chosen format (EOT and TrueDoc, respectively) and legal issues due to the lack of copy protection, the specification was (sadly) shelved.

Skip forward a decade, and 2009 is proving to be an exciting year for rich typography on the web. Now with a working draft of CSS3, @font-face embedding is back, this time opting for raw TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) fonts. The specification has already been implemented in the most recent versions of Safari, Opera, and Firefox (Microsoft is still partial to their EOF format).

So while its now technically easy to link to a typeface, copy protection issues are still present—an obvious deal breaker for any commercial fonts you hope to use.

So when can we finally say goodbye to Georgia and Verdana?

Two competing proposals, EOT-Lite (Embedded OpenType) and WOFF (Web Open Font Format, formerly known as WebOTF, ZOT and .webfont), are currently under consideration by the W3C with various levels of support in the type industry.

Typeface foundry Ascender Corporation is behind EOT-Lite:

We came up with the EOT-Lite proposal because we saw a way to bring a single web font format to all the browsers in the shortest time frame. Yes, other proposals like [WOFF] might even be better, but these will take 3 to 5 years to reach a significant adoption rate.

-Bill Davis, Ascender Corporation

3 to 5 years? Yikes.

With support by Monotype and Adobe, EOT-Lite (a variation of Microsoft’s EOT) has the added benefit of being backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 4 and higher, typically the slowest browser to adopt new standards.

At the same time, an overwhelming amount of foundries also support the Mozilla-backed WOFF format, which offers speed, compression and advanced features over EOT.

Erik Spiekermann and FontFont show their support for WOFF.

WOFF has the support of a wide spectrum of the type community; from peers such as Emigre, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Commercial Type, etc and larger foundries such as Linotype and Monotype… it has also gained the support of Mozilla in their release of Firefox 3.6. We hope and expect that WOFF will quickly gain support in other major browsers as we support, endorse and expect to license our library for use on the Web in the WOFF format in the future.

-Ben Kiel, House Industries

We have light at the end of the tunnel, but until the foundries and developers hash it out—and the all major browsers begin to support the new format(s)—we’ll have to wait patiently.

Fortunately we do have some other options.

Fonts as a service

A relatively new concept in font embedding is the font subscription service. Launching publically this week, Typekit is at the forefront of the concept which licenses fonts on a monthly ($7 - 49 USD) or yearly ($25 - 250) basis. With TypeKit, you are essentially ‘renting’ fonts instead of purchasing them. Behind the scenes, the service takes advantage of what the browsers already support—unprotected font embedding—and adds a layer of obfuscation to deter potential font thieves.

One of the gems from Typekit, Bello Pro by Underware.

Typekit currently features fonts from several independent font designers, but you are out of luck if you hope to use any mainstay like Futura or Gotham. Much like the limited nature of web-safe fonts, you have to design using a limited selection of fonts (that you probably would never use otherwise) to take advantage of the service.

That said, as the Typekit library grows and gains support from other foundries, it should become a much more viable option (in the interim). We can also expect some yet to be seen competitors pop up.

Foundries themselves are also getting in on the action

Typotheque, an independent foundry based in the Netherlands, recently launched their own font subscription service. We got in touch with Peter Bilak of Typotheque, who explains:

We’ve been running a type foundry for 10 years now, focusing on developing new fonts and licensing them directly to users… Many type foundries are taking cautious stand, and wait to see what will happen. We decided to be active and influence the way fonts are being served.

Claiming the service works in 95% of browsers, users have the ability to take Typotheque’s fonts for a test drive before licensing at one-time cost of around $25 USD each (depending on the font). As a small foundry the selection is slim, but if you are in the market for one of Typotheque’s multilingual fonts it sounds like it could be a good solution.

A demo showing Typotheque’s range of web fonts.

As Bilak admits, however, the solution is not perfect. “There is still a lot of work ahead of us—we want to cover the missing gaps, support of fonts for the iPhone, improve font rasterizing on the Windows, implement the new web font format (WOFF), and lastly learn from the user feedback…”

Will other foundries follow suit? We asked around, but it seems most are keeping their plans under wraps for now:

We’ve got all kinds of thoughts and plans about web typography, but nothing we’re ready to talk about just yet.

-Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler & Frere-Jones

What about open source?

Copyright protection issues are clearly the last major hurdle in making embedded web fonts a reality. To avoid this, some designers have (passionately) decided to go with free open source options.

With plenty of attractive typefaces out there, even popular sites like Boing Boing decided to give open source fonts a whirl. In a redesign last month, the site incorporated the open source BPreplay (via CSS3’s @font-face) in what Webmonkey called “a daring experiment.”

An experiment that didn’t go so well…

Boing Boing’s (short lived) redesign, as shown in Internet Explorer, using open source typeface BPreplay designed by George Triantafyllakos.

The result was hordes of angry Boing Boing fans complaining that the new headline font was ‘ugly,’ ‘an abomination’ and ‘plain nasty.’ Of course, the culprit wasn’t really the font, but rather how different it looked depending on which browser and operating system the viewer was using…

The problem is that while modern browsers, like the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome, all support @font-face, the Windows XP operating system often doesn’t have anti-aliasing turned on by default. The rule, which is still part of CSS3’s draft specification, is also not supported by any version of Internet Explorer.

-Scott Gilbertson, Webmonkey

Within a few days, Boing Boing completely abandoned its short-lived redesign.

Although it seems Internet Explorer was to blame, perhaps John Gruber was right when he said, “The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.”

I guess in the meantime, we’ll just keep hacking away.

No doubt CSS3 will be a hot topic at this year’s Future of Web Design conference in New York City. idsgn will be there covering the event, be sure to check it out if you are in the area November 16-17th.

For web designers, it has always been a struggle to make websites look the same in every browser. With new technologies like web fonts and forthcoming versions of HTML and CSS, it’s even harder to keep up with the numerous browsers and devices out there. And that’s okay.

At the Future of Web Design conference yesterday in New York, web designer Dan Cederholm showed off some ‘fancy’ new tricks made possible in the latest versions of Safari and (to a slightly lesser extent) Firefox. Transitions, rotation, opacity, shadows, and rounded corners are just some of what’s possible now, but as Cederholm’s presentation boldly stated, “None of this stuff matters.”

Echoed in Elliot Jay Stocks’ presentation, a recurring theme emerged from yesterday’s conference: It’s okay for websites to not look the same in every browser. Web designers should take advantage of new advancements to progressively enhance content today—as long as the focus remains on user experience, other browsers aren’t going to know they are missing a few rounded corners.

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? The answer as seen in Safari 4 (left) and Internet Explorer 7 (another example).

We should treat these visual details as rewards for the browsers that support the advanced code… rather than something missing or broken in the browsers that don’t yet support that advanced code. That’s a big shift in thinking for a lot of folks.

—Dan Cederholm, Handcrafted CSS

If you are reading idsgn with Internet Explorer you might notice our rounded buttons look square, or if you are using an iPhone you’ll have to read our headlines in Georgia instead of Auto—but that’s okay, it doesn’t affect the overall user experience.

Perhaps best put by Bill Buxton (author of Sketching User Experiences), the quality of user experience is the only consistency that matters. “Just forget about graphical consistency across browsers. When you think about browsers and the interactions we have over the Internet as being this rich, it’s just absurd… Basically, the only thing that matters in terms of consistency going forward is consistency of the quality of user experience. And until we get that, by trying to make things consistent on every single browser on every single platform, we completely degrade the quality of user experience—or we homogenize it to the point where it’s just boring and mediocre.”

So go ahead, don’t feel guilty about going into the future (and leaving Internet Explorer in the dust)—focus on user experience and, as Dan Cederholm reminds us, “Subtle is key.”

To hawk a centuries-old spirit, vodka manufacturers concoct innovative flavors and get creative with the bottle. Bacon-flavored shot, anyone?

Vodka. It’s the most basic of spirits—colorless, odorless, and nearly tasteless. The drink of the czars, produced in Russia and Poland since the end of the 9th century, presents modern distillers with a thorny dilemma: how best to sell an essentially neutral product to a restless generation that demands a wide range of choice in everything they buy, from triple soy half-caff lattes to sneakers? Two front running approaches are to offer as many different flavors as Vitamin Water, and to package the product in a memorable bottle.

The many flavored vodkas (L-R): Devotion, Bakon, Stolichnaya’s Stoli Ohranj, Smirnoff Melon.

Adding flavors is not a new idea. To mask the off-tastes of early vodkas caused by crude production methods (some were filtered through sand or felt), distillers added fruit, herbs or spices including acorn, cherry, and horseradish. But only the 21st century could have conceived of protein vodka. Devotion Vodka packs as much dairy-derived casein protein as a Balance Bar or protein shake. Then there’s Bakon: bacon flavored vodka (vegan jackpot: the actual flavoring is not derived from real bacon so it’s guilt-free).

Before you can convince a consumer to buy the vodka, though, the package needs to somehow pique his interest first. Stolichnaya chose to keep their plain, basic bottle shape and to vary the label design for its flavored versions. The timeless illustrations speak to an adult customer looking for a change of pace from plain spirits, yet also wanting to stick with a familiar trusted brand.

Smirnoff Twisted took a louder approach to marketing its flavored vodkas, available in 12 versions including melon and pomegranate. The bottle seemingly has been possessed by a tornado round about its midsection. Labels are bright and garish. Overall, the product looks custom-made for a frat party or a 20-something ladies drink free night. The brand is clearly aiming to resonate with a younger, less sophisticated customer.

Absolut Flavors: the (large) family of Absolut vodkas.

Some brands take a loftier view, striving to align themselves in a consumer’s mind as the equivalent of works of art. From its launch in 1979, Absolut positioned itself visually as an artistic endeavor, using the long running ad campaign “Absolut (fill in the blank)” to link the product’s image with creative interpretation. Like Stolichnaya, they keep the bottle shape consistent and change up the typography and color schemes for their different varieties.

Vodka packaging trends (L-R): Samurai, 1000 Acres, Double Cross.

Moscow-based designer Arthur Schreiber’s package for Samurai vodka is at the moment just a concept. The box and graphics are gorgeous, but even more rewarding from a design perspective is the way the bottle looks as though it had been cut clean through with a sword, then restacked with the pieces slightly off-kilter.

Arnell’s design proposal for 1000 Acres vodka shows a number of different sculptural bottle options, and Double Cross claims that its bottle is “unlike anything in the world. Elegant. Powerful. Graceful. Striking. A sacred vessel.” Well, maybe. The thin, slab-shaped bottle is gracefully proportioned, but frankly the graphics remind me a lot of the Tazo Tea boxes, striking in their own right but already starting to look a bit dated.

It seems the design challenge of reinventing ways to sell something so basic and simple as vodka perhaps has not been entirely cracked yet. A toast, then, to the next great idea.

Na zdorovie!

Angela Riechers is a graphic designer and second year MFA student in the new Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts. Previously, she was Art Director of Home Magazine and taught undergraduate graphic design at SVA and The City College of New York. You can find her design work at www.angelariechers.com, and blog posts at NounVerbDesign.