Last year we presented E to a lot of people. This year we’ve redirected our focus and goals of the project. We’ll be presenting some of these details at the Next Web Conference, as well as new visual material. We’re still looking to enrich our team/partners with product enthusiasts, so be sure to stop by our stand.
Today was a big day for the Netherlands. Right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders published his 15-minute anti-islam rant onto LiveLeak.com. People will be talking about this for weeks. Full-blown media frenzy with worldwide coverage. Prime minister’s statement. Therefore we will not bore you with the things you’ve already seen, read or heard in so many different nuances. Let’s talk about production value. With some special attention to typography.
I didn’t expect Geert Wilders to have any sense of good aesthetics, or him being able to pick a good art director/somebody who finished art school. The guy dyes his hair blonde for crying out loud, ‘to appear less Mediterranean’. He actually walks around with that coupe soleil everywhere for as long as we’ve seen him in public. I think this must have influenced his choice of the typeface… wait for it… Papyrus. Yes, Papyrus. Now I agree that is one of the most obvious options if you want to communicate a middle-eastern look and feel to a design. At least in the west. But come on, Papyrus?! Somehow it screams fresh ground coffee to me. Or diapers. And on the internet there’s a niche for everything: I [heart] Papyrus. Now that everybody’s paying attention to the flick, maybe they should also put out a statement.
Papyrus was designed by Chris Costello, an American graphic designer. ‘a font that would represent what English vernacular would have looked like if written on papyrus 2000 years ago.’ (Wikipedia)
Looking at it for a second time, the art direction of the movie reminded me of Discovery channel documentaries from the 90s. Yes, the production value is that bad. And I’m not just talking Papyrus. Yes, Papyrus. No, I’m talking about the whole thing. Blurred out frame covering snippets. Transitions that were sold next to the cheese in your local supermarket. Hell, I can make a better looking feature in iMovie in less than an hour. Maybe we should ask Gary Hustwit to can his star actor Helvetica and make a typographic sequel and hire Papyrus. Yes, Papyrus. But that would be like casting Rob Schneider for a remake of Casablanca.
We had this one coming for quite a while now, a revamp of the Hellomynameise.com website. Since its launch, the project team has changed as well as the products itself. We’ll be presenting our updated plans at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks. We’ll be joined by our friends of ‘Mijn Naam is Haas‘ fame with a modest stand. We’re hoping to meet Mr. Veldhuijzen van Zanten, as well as the Digg guys in person, and who knows who we might run into. Cheers.
This week’s RRI got inspired by Berlin, city united yet so visibly divided in aesthetics. With its bombastic, grand architecture (with a dark history) contrasting the massive amounts of Bauhaus and postmodernist architectural masterpieces, Berlin had much more to offer than a rich diversity of culture. Read on for details.
We added some work to our portfolio today. 7scenes was an assigment with a very short time to deadline, but we managed to put it up before they hit the media. We’ll be developing their brand in the near future. Cheers.
Okay so this a a post I’d like to write weekly to keep things alive over here. In the RRIs we’ll try to include as much sources of inspiration we’ve gathered over the week. These sources can come from anywhere at all. As designers we’re inspirable by anything we might encounter, so here are their web counterparts.
The gang suited up to visit CeBIT 2008 in relation to Project E. CeBIT was rather dull overall; it turned into a large, overcommercial gamerfest. Young geeks sporting oversized AMD and Intel totes with an amazing amount of nice and less nice magazines, pamflets and other advertising material absolutely dominated this conference. And while all the larger companies were having a contest on who could shout ‘innovation’ the loudest, it were the peripheral and smaller Taiwan and Hong Kong pavillions which carried the most interesting products, for us as a design company at least.
While browsing Engadget, I found a very interesting new product. The Swinxs. A ‘toy 2.0′: this could bring children who are used to play behind their computers outside again. Equipping children with RFID tags however, seems to worry a lot of technology pessimists: they have tremendous privacy concerns in their own backyard. The product is utterly simple; it’s an RFID reader with some sort of computer and pre-loaded games. The games themselves are not innovative at all, these are games I used to play as a kid before i found out about the Sega Mastersystem.
