Tag: branding

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Beautifully Briefed 25.9: Generous

It’s fontastic, illustrative, and full of imagery: your beginning-of-fall design round-up here on Foreword. (And A.I., because it’s everywhere.) Enjoy.

This month on Spine

A fun and interesting University Press Coverage post on Spine when you have a moment, including this title from the University of Nebraska:

That was not a simple photograph to set up. Awesome.

Generative Book Cover Design

How 2 Shout Media presents a how-to: 20 cover design prompts for ChatGPT. “Creating the perfect book cover starts with the right vision — and that’s where ChatGPT transforms from a writing assistant into your creative design partner.” (Emphasis theirs.)

There are, for instance, specifics on “the anatomy of an effective prompt” and how to customize the provided templates; they even provide bonus templates to save and reuse, including one to quickly iterate on previous output.

The article contains some good advice, honestly, but the most relevant suggestion — to “[t]hink of ChatGPT as [a] creative director who provides vision and direction rather than final artwork” — is buried at the bottom of a fairly long page. I’m willing to get there are more than a few (especially in the self-publishing space) who read this as the definitive how-to . . . possibly without judging the output versus what a professional can create.

This cover sample is far and away the best of the eight illustrated options:

The prompt: “Design a literary fiction cover for ‘[Title]’ using a single continuous brushstroke that forms both an abstract landscape and a human profile when viewed differently—an optical illusion revealing loneliness and connection. Executed in indigo ink wash on cream paper texture. The brushstroke starts thick and confident, becoming increasingly fragmented and uncertain. Minimal color palette: indigo, cream, with one tiny spot of cadmium red as a focal point (perhaps a bird or flower). Title integrated into the negative space using a classic Garamond variant, appearing to be part of the original artwork. Author name in small, understated caps at bottom. Overall feeling: wistful, sophisticated, gallery-worthy.”

Take a moment to compare the output with the prompt, and you’ll see the generated output ignores several of the items, but overall, is kinda — sorta — close.

The other examples not so much. But I’m not going to spoil the whole thing: Go and see for yourself.

For now, I’d suggest that book design professionals — those that make a living from the art and science that is publishing excellence — are safe. Other professionals in the industry recognize what talent is and how valuable it is, and the designers themselves can take advantage of the power that some of these models offer to help brainstorm.

That said, today’s A.I. models are gaining quality at a rapid rate. In 5–10 years, at most, publishers (and authors self-publishing) that might not recognize that they’re best served by professionals — or those who don’t have the budget, despite the recognition — will have access to what might very well be “good enough.”

From Your Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence

So, where do the A.I. engines get their training material? From you and yours, of course; to quote a source we’ll get to in a moment, “[i]n writing this […] I am acutely aware it will become part of a training data set.” Some sites, such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have seen an exponential upswing in traffic — all from the so-called “bots,” programs sweeping internet content into the never-satisfied regurgitation chamber that is today’s ChatGPT, Claude, and others.1One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.

Ars Technica and Pixel Envy both highlight a new program, modeled on Really Simple Syndication (RSS), designed to “block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.”

To quote Doug Leeds, the founder, “A.I. companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate.” The “Really Simple Licensing” (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that’s designed to block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train A.I[.]
The new standard supports “a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response).”

— RSL Press Release

But — and it’s a big “but” — RSL is only one response to the problem. Another is to wall content off entirely, breaking one of the most valuable qualities of the internet itself: its openness.

We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else.

— Mike Mesnick, TechDirt

Here’s where Pixel Envy agrees:

A.I. organizations have not created a bottom-up rebellious exploration of the limits of intellectual property law. They are big businesses with deep pockets exploiting decades of news, blogging, photography, video, and art. Nobody, as near as makes no difference, expected something they published online would one day feed the machines that now produce personalized Facebook slop.

— Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

“One thing that might help, not suggested by Masnick, is improving the controls available to publishers,” Heer writes, going on to discuss the new RSL standard proposal and what it might do to help. But, in the end, he’s not optimistic:

I simply do not know how much control I reclaim now will be relevant in the future, and I am sure the same is true of any real media organization. I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.

— Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

Yeah.

Special bonus #1: From the you’ve-trained-it-so-enjoy-A.I.-for-fun department,Kottke introduces us to generativ.design. “I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these,” he writes. (Via the new-to-me sidebar.)

Prefab Design

Meet fabricá, a new hair care company, whose identity ticks all the boxes: it’s trendy, eco-friendly, and well put-together:

But there’s a catch: fabricá doesn’t exist — at least not yet. It’s a fully-formed identity, available now at Brands Like These, a new prefab identity outfit from Lyon&Lyon.

Now I’ll admit: at first, this seemed like a Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe thing,2Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk. something that we all had a chuckle over before allowing it to shuffle into the background, readily available for use as a pithy line whenever we needed it: “Ha, we got Lyin’ and Lyin’ selling your precious startup canned … stuff.”

Unfortunately, it’s not a joke.

When Elizabeth Goodspeed, of It’s Nice That, got thinking about it, she had lots to say. “In a good design engagement, the back-and-forth between company and designer pushes the company itself to sharpen what it is; the ‘friction’ people complain about is also the juice that makes the work exciting.” (I find this true in editorial and publishing work, certainly.) But there’s a warning, too:

If this cart-before-horse approach takes hold, it won’t just change how companies buy branding, but how designers make it. The skills a designer needs shift from listening and refining to cranking out polished shells that could plausibly fit anything. […] Even if sites like BLT only sell a brand once, the more ambiguous the design, the more it risks echoing a dozen others (and collapsing under trend fatigue).

These models also threaten to hollow out the middle of the industry. We’ve seen this pattern before: bookstores went from indie shops and regional chains to Amazon or your local holdout; music from affordable CDs to either $50 LPs or all-you-can-stream. Branding may be headed for the same split – prefab kits at the low end, ultra-expensive bespoke at the high end, and little in between. And if prefab becomes the norm, it’s hard not to imagine the next step: why should these kits even be designed by humans? Once clients are trained to buy a look off the shelf, there’s little stopping A.I. from flooding the market with pre-packaged “brands” generated at scale.

— Elizabeth Goodspeed, It’s Nice That

This feels like an accurate prediction. Read the rest. (See also: her item on copyright, covered in February.)

Okay, we’ve dealt with the heavy stuff. Let’s enjoy the rest.

The New Type in Town

Several articles to point to if you’re interested in expanding your font collection — including 50 predictions for what’ll be popular 2026. Nice.

Steven Heller’s Font of the Month

Over at I Love Typography, industry veteran and designer extraordinaire Steven Heller’s monthly column exalts Ritualist.

CreativeBoom’s Best o’ September

They have several, but my favorite is not dissimilar to the above, a new face called Urbolyt, a variable “that represents a clash between geometric rigor and organic forms.”

Zelow Studio’s Nature

Pixel Surplus brings us a new — and free! — variable grotesk typeface called Nature, available in a variety of styles.

CreativeBoom’s 50 for 2026

The vast majority of these are, basically, Helvetica; like Nature, the simple sans serifs are what’s in right now. (Sigh.) However, there are some gems on the list, and I’d like to take a moment to highlight an absolute favorite: Freight.

Freight is a collection of integrated typefaces ready to add unique style to any design project. What Joshua Darden started as a serif family inspired by the warmth and pragmatism found in 18th-century Dutch typefaces became The Freight Collection and now ranges across multiple weights, widths, and optical sizes — from Big to Display, Text, Micro, Macro, Sans, Neo, and Round — all of which include companion italics. That’s 192 fonts that have the ability to be bold and daring just as easily as they can be quiet and unassuming.

— freightcollection.com

I’ve used Freight in a variety of book projects and the breadth of options available always satisfies. It’s referred to as a superfamily: from the standard Text and beyond-excellent Neo (a sans with style), there’s an option for going Big and even two — Micro and Macro — best used at small sizes (readable footnotes!).

I cannot recommend more highly. Indeed, I could only take one font family with me to a desert island, I’d take Freight.

Illustrations Open Doors
Illustration Awards 2025

CreativeBoom: “From playful packaging to poignant explorations of identity, the World Illustration Awards 2025 showcase the breadth of contemporary illustration. With over 4,700 entries from 85 countries, this year’s winners reveal how artists are shaping how we see, think and connect.”

One of the overall winners is this great poster:

Léane Ruggli – RTD’s Cocktail Campaign

Book covers (adult and children’s):

Jennifer Dionisio – The Talented Mr Ripley
Jenya Polosina – The Country of the Blind
Camila Carrossine – The Girl, the Ghost and the Beetroot Forest

Site Specific:

Ren Kyles – Pride mural in Wilsonville, Oregon

The awards underline “how illustration continues to thrive as a medium of both beauty and urgency”: from packaging that delights to books that challenge taboos, the winning works reveal the versatility of illustrators working today.

See the whole list of winners and commended artists at the WIA 2025 Online Showcase, including interviews and insights into their creative process.

Illustration for Branding

Another CreativeBoom article suggests that, “[f]rom murals to motion, illustration is starting to reassert itself in advertising,” because “illustration still offers unique advantages. Distinctiveness is the obvious one because, in a sea of photography-led campaigns, an illustrated execution can […] cut through precisely because they are unexpected.”

As this great TfL poster exemplifies:

“A Riot of Color and Joy”

Yet another example of illustration done well, this time from — wait for it — 1956:

A Saab 93 full-car cutaway.

I still miss Saab. See more at The Autopian.

Special Bonus #2: These minimalist cat illustrations define brilliant:

Illustration by ShouXin.
September’s Photography Highlights
International Pet Photography Awards

While we’re on the subject of cats — and dogs, whose entries far outstripped those for cats (and horses, rabbits, pigs, and all the other things folks keep for pets) — this year’s pet photography contest has some pretty spectacular results:

Photograph by Mirka Koot.
Photograph by Shandess Griffin.
Photograph by Janneke De Graaf.

Getting my dog to stand still long enough for a photograph is nigh-on impossible; some of the accomplishments shown in these winning photographs are fantastic. Kudos.

Special bonus #3: Cats, book matched.

Audubon Photography Awards

The 15 winning entries for 2025 have been announced, including this one:

“Burrowing Owl.” Photograph by Jean Hall.

See more at PetaPixel or This is Colossal; explore galleries of this year’s winners and honorable mentions, or grab a copy of the Fall 2025 Audubon Magazine.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year

This is Colossal: “The universe’s workings may always remain a mystery. So it’s no surprise that when peering up at the night sky, whether it’s homing in on distant stellar clusters or simply watching the moon rise, photography helps us appreciate its enigmatic beauty.”

“ISS Lunar Flyby.” Photograph by Tom Williams.
“Saturnrise.” Photograph by Tom Williams.

I didn’t realize until after I’d selected them that these were both from the same photographer, but unlike some that are just (amazing) night sky, these have an almost-science-fiction quality.

’Course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg: “The Royal Observatory Greenwich’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 17 contest showcases the best astronomical and night sky images of the year, captured by exceptional photographers worldwide,” writes PetaPixel.

Two more that aren’t quite what you expect:

“Encounter Across Light-Years.” Photograph by Yurui Gong and Xizhen Ruan.
“Fourth Dimension.” Photograph by Leonardo Di Maggio.

See the more winners, from here and beyond, at PetaPixel or This is Colossal.

Special bonus #4: While we’re on the subject of Earth and sky, PetaPixel profiles Italian photographer Gianluca Rubinacci:

Photograph by Gianluca Rubinacci.

Special bonus #5: The UK’s Weather Photographer of the Year 2025 Competition list of finalists has been announced, including this one:

Photograph by Lukáš Gallo.

See all of ’em — and vote (until October 16th) — here.

Natural Landscape Photography Awards

This one’s a little different, in that there can be no generative AI, no compositing of different photographs, and RAW files are checked by judges to ensure authenticity. (Refreshing, honestly.) “The competition is designed to promote photographers looking to work within the constraints of the natural landscape and traditional bounds of photography.”

From the Project of the Year, Sápmi (Lapland). Photograph by Hanneke Van Camp.

See more at Petapixel, or to see all of the contestants head to the Natural Landscape Photography Awards website.

“Cyberpunk” and “Gotham” vs. “Otherworldly” and “Forgotten”

To close out this month, I’d like to mention a couple more book projects. Let’s start with Ben Moore, whose new photo book is titled Above & Across London. As the name suggests, he found high-up vantage spots: “I’ve always loved the look of a cool, urban, cyber-futuristic world, and at times I catch glimpses of that in London,” he writes.

Photograph by Ben Moore.

Meanwhile, photographer Bryan Sansivero feels a strong pull to document and explore forgotten dwellings; his new book, America the Abandoned, explores deserted homes around the country in 200 striking images — including this one:

“The Grand Room.” Photograph by Bryan Sansivero.

Have a great October, everyone.

  • 1
    One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.
  • 2
    Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk.
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Beautifully Briefed 23.10: Shifting, Branding, and Creating

A variety of interests addressed this time: a bit on Shift Happens, a great question on branding, and Leica’s new M camera — and its content credentials. (Plus, bonuses.) Happy October!

Booking a Keyboard

We talked about this title back in January, but it’s worth the reminder:

A 3D rendering of Shift Happens.

Marcin Wichary has long been interested in keyboards. In his words,

Keyboards fascinated me for years. But it occurred to me that a good, comprehensive, and human story of keyboards — starting with typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones — has never been written. How did we get from then to now? What were the steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the same now as it did 150 years ago? I wanted a book like this for years. So I wrote it.

—Marcin Wichary, Shift Happens

This title fascinates me, partially because it’s an interesting subject — one we’ve all interacted with, often without thinking about — and partially because it’s a great, well-covered exercise in book design.

A very cool photograph of an IBM Electric. Photo by Marcin Wichary.

Further, Marcin has done a fantastic job in getting the word out. He’s designed a killer web site, written some great updates, and gotten some good press — including a recent interview with Ars Technica, in which he says:

I am a web guy, and I used to think that the web (just like typewriters, once) took away a lot of hard-won typesetting nuance and tradition. But it turns out that the web also makes it much easier to do certain things. To have a word be surrounded by a rounded rectangle—a visual representation of a key—is a few lines of CSS or a few clicks in Figma. But for the book, I had to cut my own font and then write Python scripts to do typesetting inside the font-making software, which I’m pretty sure you are not supposed to do[.]

—Marcin Wichary, Shift Happens

Really looking forward this title. Copies are, as of this writing, still available.

Let’s Talk Branding.

It’s Nice That asks a great question: “Are rebrands starting to look the same? The challenges facing commercial design,” in which author Elizabeth Goodspeed discusses whether “shortened turnarounds and economic tensions” are taking a toll on originality.

Westinghouse branding guidelines from the ’60s.

The answer might seem to be, “Well, duh,” but it’s nonetheless a thoughtful and insightful article that asks the correct question: “how does one define originality in an age saturated with visual stimuli?”

[T]he digital applications more often associated with modern rebrands, while comparatively easy to update, may counter-intuitively promote less care and attention towards their making. [A]nother possible issue contributing to rebrand redundancy: lack of rollout support beyond rebrand launch. Even a unique identity may lose its spark when its primary consumer touchpoint is what a social media manager produces on Canva after skimming the brand guidelines once. Further still, many clients no longer approach design studios to harness their expertise but, instead, with preconceived notions of the result they expect; design studios may want to create original work, but sometimes clients are willing to pay more for a rebrand that mirrors their own preconceived ideas of what the work should look like.

— Elizabeth Goodspeed, It’s Nice That
The logo’s the same, but the applications vastly different.

The whole article is great (and richly illustrated) — give it a few minutes of your time.

Special Bonuses #1 & 2: Let’s look at a couple of places where branding has been in the news recently (pun intended). Also from It’s Nice That, an article on The Irish Independent rebrand. Here, as is often the case recently, it’s the custom illustrations that carry the day:

“Andy Goodman is the illustrator responsible for the lively work found throughout, which toe the line between measured and playful,” It’s Nice That writes. Agreed 100%.

Less successful is England’s The Guardian, whose ongoing campaign to raise money — they don’t have a paywall, relying instead on reader contributions — perhaps could have used more work:

These ads don’t really have me on the fence: The Guardian deserves better.

Meh. (And this from a huge fan of The Guardian.) Creative Boom is more positive.

Special Bonus #3: From the wildly successful, original branding department comes, of course, the brilliantly-named Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. They’ve been covered here twice before, but are back in the news with a new branding Manual. See why that’s capitalized at Dezeen.

The Eames Institute branding oozes positivity, class, and — you guessed it — infinite curiosity. Nice.
Leica, Adobe, and Content Authenticity

One would assume that Leica users are the epitome of content authenticity — there’s nothing like the world’s best lenses (IMHO), attached to some incredible cameras, to provide photographers with all that’s needed to make the best possible images.

Leica’s new M11-P, however, packs a world first: hardware encryption that supports a system called the “Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).” In CAI corporate-speak, it’s “the future of photojournalism […] usher[ing] in a powerful new way for photojournalists and creatives to combat misinformation and bring authenticity to their work and consumers, while pioneering widespread adoption of Content Credentials.”

Leica’s new M11-P. A bargain at $9,195. (Lenses extra, of course.)

B&H puts it another way:

The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is a collaborative effort initiated by Adobe in partnership with various other organizations, including The New York Times and Leica, among others. Announced in late 2019, its primary goal is to develop a standard for digital content attribution. The rise in manipulated digital content, deep fakes, and misinformation has underlined the need for a more transparent system of content attribution, which the CAI seeks to address.

The interesting thing here is Adobe’s initiative. What’s their goal?

Adobe has been suffering a few hits recently. They’ve just raised prices — on the heels of record profits — and “monopoly” is not in any way a stretch. Photoshop? Entered the lexicon. InDesign? No credible alternatives. Illustrator? Professional standard across multiple industries. In other words, we’re stuck with ’em, and they know it.

This line of thinking is expanded at CreativeBoom: “Is Adobe Becoming the Frenemy of Creatives? But that’s not all.

Ignore’s Adobe’s unfailingly cute examples: AI + texture = exactly what some “creative director” needed. Seriously uncute.

They’re pushing hard into AI, too, and surprisingly up-front about it changing creative work in ways potentially less creative:

Firefly 2 was unveiled yesterday at the 2023 Adobe Max conference with the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool incorporated into Lightroom’s new lens blur feature that simulates depth of field along with a host of other tools. However, it was the new “Generative Match” tool that will allow users to upload a reference image to guide the AI image generator to a specific style that prompted Adobe to comment that the new tools could mean less work for photographers. 

Adobe is appealing to companies who want a “consistent look across assets.” It is offering brands the chance to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of similar images for different uses such as websites, social media, and print advertisements.

— Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel

Or how about this example: An agency or freelancer working on a vector image in Illustrator, and need to add something that they either don’t have the time or talent to do myself. Previously, they could find either a stock item — made by a human (who is paid, by the way) — or hire it out (again, to a human, and again, one who is paid for their work). Now? Just tell the computer what you need.

Get more from Ars Technica’s Unlimited Barbarians Dept.

All of which ties nicely back to the previous section on whether branding is beginning to homogenize. Is AI going to accelerate that process? You betcha.

Value human creativity, folks. Artists, teachers, writers, thinkers: all the people pushing at the edges of the envelope will now have to push even harder, in an era when envelope-pushing is increasingly demonized.

Special Bonus #4: Ars Technica argues that the U.S. Copyright Office’s blanket ban on the copyright-ability of AI-generated images isn’t going to age well, using photography as an argument.

Special Bonus #5 (Updated 31 Oct): Via Nick Heer’s excellent Pixel Envy, we have a great explainer from Tim Bray regarding The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), the actual implementation of CAI. Better than my brief description by a country mile.

Special Bonus #6: To round out this post, from the department of envelope-pushing: PRINT Magazine put together the book covers of the 11 most-banned books in America. Dangerous, indeed!

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Beautifully Briefed, Early April 2022: Eames Institute, Loony Backgrounds, and … Condor!

Three completely unrelated items for you this time, ranging from the serious and interesting through the loony and interesting to something of a whole different stripe.

The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity

Update 2, 25 Apr: Brand New discusses this logo, with the usual catchy title: The Fast and the Curious: Counterspace Drift

Eames Institute’s “curious” logo variations, discussed at Brand New

Update, 8 Apr: It’s Nice That has more: The Eames Institute launches with a curious, “Eamesian” identity, and a logo that observes

Original post: Practically everyone has heard of an Eames Chair:

A particularly awesome example of an Eames Chair (and ottoman).

What you might not realize is that the legacy Charles and Ray Eames left behind enriches our lives to this day. It’s a shame, then, that while their house is a mid-century masterpiece (and museum), much of their lives have remained behind closed doors.

For almost three decades, a barn-like building in Petaluma, California, contained remnants of one of the most iconic design legacies of the twentieth century. […] We created the Eames Institute because we want you to examine the archive of what you know—the collection of your experiences, understanding, memories, and questions—and connect to the provocations that call to you. We want you to tap into that same fount of relentless curiosity, and its power to shift your perception and open you to innovations and discoveries.

Now, however, there’s the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. Awesome name aside, it introduces us to the more personal side of one of design’s strongest partnerships.

Items from the Charles and Ray Eames Institute.
Drawings from the Charles and Ray Eames Institute.

The website requires some interesting scrolling to get where you need, but the results are more than worth the time — and is one that earns (Eames?) its suggestion of satisfying infinite curiosity. Explore and enjoy. (Hat tip: ArchDaily, The Newly Launched Eames Institute Brings Insight into the Eameses’ Design Methodology.)

Loony Toons Backgrounds

Design You Trust: “Looney Tunes Without Looney Tunes: Existential, Surreal, And Creepy Backgrounds.” The post sends readers to an Instagram account, which I’m not going to link to, but the images themselves are fascinating:

Crossed wires, anyone?
Imagine who might run up to — or even get pushed off of — this cliff.
A nice, innocent factory. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Next time I treat myself to a Loony break, I’m going to make sure to spend some time looking beyond the action and appreciate the backgrounds. Nice.

Condor Airlines Rebrands

Most of you have probably never heard of Condor Airlines; they’re mainly a European thing, a “leisure” airline associated with Thomas Cook, formerly owned and run by Lufthansa. (Here’s some history.)

It doesn’t particularly matter. What does is the bravado exhibited by management. Before, a typical airline logo — dare I say, typically Germanic:

Condor’s OLD livery.

Then someone said yelled, “HEY. WE DO VACATIONS. LIKE BEACH TOWELS. LET’S DO STRIPES.” The result:

Condor’s NEW livery. Wow.

Armin Vit:

The new livery has zero fucks to give and just plasters every plane with thick vertical stripes that go against pretty much every single assumed tenet of what makes a good livery. It doesn’t look speedy, it doesn’t look nimble, it requires a lot of paint, and by all other standards it is just plain ugly and I love it.

Read more or see images at Condor, see the Brand New post, or even hear from the armchair pilots at Airliners.net. Now: anyone got a beach?

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Beautifully Briefed, Late March 2022: Type Museum, Toshiko Mori, and … Buick?

Catching up with a few unrelated stories that I’ve been meaning to post — including one pretty significant failure on my part, one potentially significant failure, and because not everything should be about fail, an extremely interesting and thoughtful interview.

Tiny Type Museum Sold Out

I was cleaning up open Safari tabs on my phone the other day — the detritus that results from checking things on the fly when out and about, often or never closed — and noticed that I’d sort-of bookmarked something for action and … missed it. Crap!

The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, with specimens and those beautiful drawer pulls.

The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule is a celebration by journalist and printing historian Glenn Fleishman of type and printing, and an effort at preserving history for future generations to re-discover. Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds several dozen genuine artifacts from the past and present, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with a custom message), along with original commissioned art, a letterpress-printed book, and a few replicas of items found in printing shops.

The Tiny Type Museum. (Bottom drawer.)

The museum includes a letterpress-printed book written for the project, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, in which Fleishman traces the development of type and printing starting before Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1450 up through the present day. This book acts as “docent” for the museum, providing insight into the stages in technological and artistic development that took place, and explaining the importance and nature of the artifacts. It also slides out neatly as part of a sled from the top of the museum case, and provides the visible name.

The letterpress book is still available: get your copy, or subscribe to the podcast. But even if you don’t, take a moment to appreciate the work that went into this — well done, indeed.

Buick’s New Logo

This one … I dunno. The race to do car logos flat black-and-white has seemed like a race to the lowest common denominator. (See previous coverage of BMW, Volvo, Cadillac, and more.) Below, Buick’s old (left) and new (right) logos, courtesy of Motor1:

The trademark filing for Buick’s new logo.

Thankfully, there’s been a leak — Instagram, natch, so no link here — demonstrating that it’ll still be in color:

From Instagram (alas): The new Buick logo in living color.

Still, not sure. Will have to see the official announcement and package that goes with it; Motor Trend suggests that it might be part of an EV-only future. Stay tuned for Brand New’s take, I guess….

Toshiko Mori

The former chair of Harvard’s graduate architecture program has given a great and wide-ranging interview to New Reader:

I think innovation doesn’t come in one huge leap. It’s a series of small steps. Accumulations of small discoveries, followed by incremental implementation. And then it all adds up. Innovation is not a single idea—it’s incredibly incremental and additive. Even these small discoveries can change the way we think about things very quickly. So I think every step of the way—problematizing “what are the issues?” and “what are the solutions?” filtering issues of sustainability, supply chain, accessibility, will eliminate many solutions which are not possible. And then you end up with small nuggets of potential. In a way it’s very systematic, innovation, and so is experimentation. It’s the elimination of what’s not possible and focusing on goals.

Toshiko Mori. Image courtesy of New Reader.

You know, history is not about the past, really. History is about the story of an individual interpreting history. Historians cannot be unbiased narrators. Every history is a story, and then yes, there are facts—which are important, but the way you connect facts and then make diverse narratives is super interesting. 

As you can see, Fox News provides false narratives, and a lot of times they skew the facts, and that’s a problem. It can be used dangerously, but it can also be used productively. I think that’s what makes history rich. It’s not about the past, it’s about projecting into the future. So when I teach students, I ask them to make their own story based upon their research. But it’s a story—so that’s kind of their own reality. And based upon that reality, they can develop diverse narratives and then communicate the story to others. It’s not as if you have different opinions, but you have different stories to share. It’s not about controversial opinions, but about the way we each look at life very, very differently—and that enriches everybody.

The whole thing is definitely worth a read: Archinect News called it a “nuanced interview,” and if anything, that’s an undersell. Please go, reflect, and appreciate.

Side note: New Reader‘s notes throughout the interview deserve special mention (see the red Greek letters and separate, well, sidenotes). Nice.