The peculiar art of making faces with type. Lol, ;–) If you’ve never used either of the above in an email or text, you’ve either avoided the Internet altogether or you really are a bit of curmudgeon. A text-only medium blocks the non-verbal, unspoken emotional indicators that give a richer context to our communication. The…
“Hello. I’m Keith Martin, and welcome to Keith Martin presents: Fun with Flags”. No, hang on, I promise this won’t be like Sheldon’s infamous vexillology video podcasts… even though one or two of my students have compared me to Sheldon. I’ve always found national flags fascinating from a graphic design sense. They are meant to…
Camouflage is the art and design of staying hidden. But there’s more to camouflage than blobs of muted green, yellow and brown – just look at the modern Marpat patterns and WW1 dazzle ship designs. Seeing patterns in things is one of the most basic instincts we have. It is a survival instinct, something that…
Helvetica is the world’s most popular typeface. Not everyone likes it, often precisely because of this, but it’s everywhere you look: shop signs, clothing labels, corporate logos, packaging of all kinds, the iOS interface – and now of course Mac OS X itself. One of Yosemite’s many changes was the booting out of Lucida Grande…
Sometimes, when you need to get something done, the simplest approach is to cut to the chase. Colour matching is a case in point. This stuff is important but it can also be annoyingly, sometimes mind-numbingly, complex. What I’m about to say may sound a trifle heretical, but hear me out. Forget science, forget abstract…
The evolution of a graphic identity There’s a well-known saying from early last century that travel broadens the mind, and this applies to graphic designers as much as anyone else. Every culture has its own graphic signatures; visual elements that are often missed when it’s your own culture, but stand out as identifying characteristics and…
Back on August 23rd (note: this was written in 2012) Microsoft announced something new. It wasn’t software, and it wasn’t hardware: it was a new corporate logo, launched officially as it opened its new store in Boston, Massachusets. Technically it appeared in July on new keyboards and mice, but a slight fudging of the unveiling…
What’s the future of text? I’m going to be talking about this at a seminar in October [Note: this was written in 2012], and it’s a fascinating subject. But right now I’m thinking about something a bit different: as things go increasingly digital, will video take over traditional magazine content? Strange question. Here’s where it…
Would I get a tattoo? I don’t have a specific thing in mind, but the concept is an interesting one: can I come up with a design that I’d like to apply to my body? Something that I can’t change, at least not at all easily? That’s a tough one… as a designer I’m used…
Skeuomorphism is probably not a word you’ve heard much in your life. Not until summer 2011, anyway, when it took the Mac world by storm, thanks to Apple’s design retro-realism in key parts of Lion and iOS5. A skeuomorph is, in a nutshell, something that retains ornamental design cues to something that was necessary in…
