Recent Entries in Art & Design
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All on board the new London bus?
The excellent Boris Watch picks up on whether or not disabled people were engaged up front in the design of the new London bus. The answer? No....
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We Are Enabled By Design event
I'm really looking forward to the "We Are Enabled By Design" event next week. The purpose of the event is to reframe the ageing/disability debate by looking at how universal design can help support independent (and stylish!) living. Thinking well beyond the day-to-day requirements that many disabled and older people have simply to meet their care and support needs, Enabled by Design rightly takes the principles of Independent Living and continually makes the case that...
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2009 in pictures
Following last year's near identical entry, below are some "pictures of the year" compilations: — The Boston Globe Big Picture (1 of 3) (The Big Picture) — The Boston Globe Big Picture (2 of 3) (The Big Picture) — The Boston Globe Big Picture (3 of 3) (The Big Picture) — 2009: The Year in Pictures (New York Times) — 2009 in Focus: Best of Times photography (Los Angeles Times) — 2009 Photos of the...
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Harry Beck in Paris
The Royal Mail recently commem orated one of the UK's greatest works of visual infor mation design when Harry Beck's London Underground diagram was included for the first time on a British postage stamp writes Mark Ovenden. The impor tance of Beck's rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognised and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did - to the nearest major subway...
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Radiohead Shelter
Radiohead have given permission for one of their tracks to be used in a TV advertising campaign for the first time in a campaign for homeless charity Shelter voiced by Minority Report and Longford actor Samantha Morton. The TV campaign, which breaks later this month, is called "House of Cards" and aims to raise awareness of the fragile housing situation in the UK in the current economic climate. You can see the video here. (Aside:...
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smarthistory
Pretty cool: smarthistory: For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. (Via kottke)...
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Francis Bacon at Tate Modern
I was disappointed to miss the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Modern recently. It closed in early January and the end-of-year rush meant there just wasn't enough time to make it along. As ever, the Tate's site on the exhibition is an excellent overview of the exhibition, and provides a good number of onward resources to look at. The guide through the exhibition in several parts is linked to below — well worth a read...
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All work and no play makes Jack an obsessive art maker
A Stephen King fan has 'written' the book Jack Torrance wrote in The Shining, including just one line: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". He repeats the phrase for 80 pages, but makes different shapes with the text as the book progresses. About the project, artist Phil Buehler said: I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays... I thought 'if...
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2008 in pictures (updated)
A non-exhaustive round-up of the round-ups so far. More will be added as they appear. — 2008, the year in photographs (part 1 of 3) (The Big Picture) — 2008, the year in photographs (part 2 of 3) (The Big Picture) — 2008, the year in photographs (part 3 of 3) (The Big Picture) — The best pics of 2008 by Tom Jenkins (Guardian, sports photography) — APF photos of the year (AFP) — Pictures...
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Jan Tschichold
Two good friends once bought me a very thoughtful birthday present: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. In it they had written an inscription which included a reference to the great typographer Jan Tschichold and a comment to the effect that his surname was virtually impossible to spell. They were, of course, completely right; but let this not distract from the great work the man did, including, of course, the Penguin cover re-designs....
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It's all about the buildings
Enjoyable interview with Kevin McCloud, he of Grand Designs: Unlike most reality formats, the personal dramas of the people whose houses it features are not the point of the programme. [McCloud says:] "I'm not interested in filming people just because they've got 18 children or something. What has to be interesting, ultimately, is understanding a building through people." Never the other way around? "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all. It is about...
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Typography for people with learning disabilities
Mencap has recently created, in collaboration with people with learning disabilities, a font which is accessible for everyone to read easily. Mencap has big hopes for the font: FS Mencap will be available for public use, rivaling Arial and Helvetica as the standard accessible font. It is hoped this will make reading easier for thousands. The process for creating the font sounds fascinating, and highlights the importance of typography in communication: Over a three month...
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Peckham library
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Redesign
Taking advantage of a short holiday, I have completed work on a redesign for arbitrary constant. Whilst I enjoyed the old design, I wanted to go for something a bit simpler that concentrated more on the writing than anything else, and that looked a bit old fashioned. This design should also be more consistent across browsers, too. As with the previous redesign there are still plenty of things to be sorted (not least of which...
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Quotation of the week
I can't explain it. I just like looking at type. I get a total kick out of it. They are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine or girls' bottoms, I get kicks out of looking at type. — Erik Spiekermann, typographer and designer...
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The smell of good design
This is a brief post to highlight that Penguin has published both Perfume and One Hundred Years of Solitude — two of my favourite books — in its Modern Classics range (see here and here respectively). This is a very fair assessment of the place of these books in modern literature, and I for one am looking forward to having these new additions on my shelf. For a review of Perfume, please see here. A...
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On rejoining flickr
For some while, I had let my pro account (or membership) of flickr lapse. This was partly due to a lack of taking photos, not having the time to process and upload photos when I did take some, and generally falling out of love with the much lauded "Web 2.0". As a consequence, I couldn't access all of my photos (a fair limit of 200 is applied to those accounts which aren't "pro") and had...
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BBC journalism: an eyesore
On the same day that the bbc was told to become more impartial, a much more fundamental problem with its journalism arose: it is predictable and of a poor quality. The issue on which it was reporting was Architecture Week 2007, and in a wonderfully glib, predictable and, frankly, pathetic fashion, the bbc has welcomed the Week with Eyesore or gem: five controversial buildings and whether they should stay or go. Admittedly, there's history of...
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Quotation of the week
The "quotation of the week" has lapsed on arbitrary constant. This post aims to re-introduce it with the following long quotation from Raymond Chandler's The Long Good-bye: There's a peculiar thing about money[.] In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of...
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Centre Point
There was an excellent article in the Observer a couple of weeks back about Centre Point, which I'm going to post about soon. In the meantime, here's a quotation from that article (by Stephen Bayley) on the three worlds beneath Centre Point's tower: What Williams [Paul Williams, the architect looking to change Centre Point] and his partners did was Google Earth the entire plot and realise that a grimy confluence of buses and junkies...
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Redesigned arbitrary constant
Having been pleased with the first major redesign of this site for a while, the itchy fingers started playing around with the white space and ended up with this latest offering. There are still a few bits to sort out and tweak — and I've no idea what it looks like in other browsers (probably knackered at a guess) — but I'm much more pleased with the header and navigation at the top, as well...
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Design in development
By chance, I recently came across an excellent archive of historic London Underground maps. This archive has (geographically accurate) maps dating from 1908 and contains all of the major updates made to the London Underground map — including some disastrous changes made throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I have long been fascinated by the London Underground map, though for no reason that I can particularly identify. At a base level, the map is so simple...
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Positive thinking and Architecture Week
In a typically British move to celebrate the coming of Architecture Week in the uk, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (cabe) has launched a scheme to identify the most badly-designed building in Britain. The concept behind the scheme is to identify the costs of bad design and how it can impact on every day life — with the example of Centre Point at the end of Oxford Street in London cited...
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Schamp revisited
Thanks for being patient about the lack of posts on arbitrary constant of late. All real world responsibilities are done and dusted and the real business of life (i.e. blogging) can start again in earnest. Some time ago, I highlighted that some photographs I'd taken of the National Theatre were up for inclusion on an interactive-mapping tourist guide thingy, going by the name of Schmap. Since then, I've heard that my photos have been included...
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Modern notice
Following on from the Guardian's recent special feature on Modernism comes Tate Modern's "Albers and Maholoy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World" exhibition, which is athought-provoking and visually stunning exhibition [—] a long overdue opportunity to rediscover two pioneers of Modernism: German-born Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946).The exhibition is currently on now and runs until 4 June 2006. I'll post my thoughts on it here when I've had a chance...
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National Theatre on Schmap
Now, I'm not much of a photographer but I certainly enjoy wandering around places and snapping away at interesting buildings etc. — as the photo above and the others at flickr attest. So imagine my surprise when I was told that two of my photos — including the one above — have been shortlisted for inclusion in the Schmap London Guide, to be published late March 2006. So far as I can tell, Schmap...
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Canary Wharf: night and day
I'm a big fan of the Jubilee line extension, out Eastwards through Canary Wharf and stopping, ultimately, at Stratford. I'd like to write more about the regeneration aims of Michael Heseltine back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of which the Jubilee line extension was one manifestation and on which there is more history here. Before that time, though, here are two images below of the main exit at Canary Wharf underground station —...
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Sir Giles Gilbert Scott
The image above is of a section of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, located in the unremarkable North Kent town of Northfleet. What is remarkable about this church, built between 1913 – 1916, is that it was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect who later went on to design Liverpool Cathedral, Waterloo Bridge, Battersea and Bankside Power Stations and the traditional K2 red telephone box. The Church of Our...
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Baby it's cold outside
Whilst it is so cold out and about, I thought I'd post an appropriate picture from my flickr collection. It was taken during Christmas 2005 at the Somerset House ice rink off the Embankment in London....
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At the Tate Modern
Where the Tate Modern is concerned, this is something of a holding post. Whilst visiting the gallery recently I discovered that much of its permanent collection has been rearranged. This process is due to be completed by May 2006, which will probably be the time I'll go back and see what the finished article looks like. I'll write more about the new arrangements then and will, I hope, have had chance to visit the planned...
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Beyond zero — LRB (7) vol. 26
An interesting and informative article on the Russian Supremist painter Kazimir Malevich, a man that took abstract art through futurism and on into a new realm that incorporated more than our own three dimensions.Kazimir Malevich was the most enigmatic and the most provocative painter of the early Soviet period. He can be seen as a pioneer of abstraction and of the minimalist works produced many years later by such artists as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko...
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A day at Tate Modern
The original purpose of my visit yesterday, aside from celebrating my birthday, was to visit the Edward Hopper exhibition. Unfortunately, it being a Saturday and all, I was too late to miss the queues and could not fashion enough time before my visit to the National Film Theatre to see Nightnawks etc. Coincidentally, or rather not, given the position of Tate Modern in the general scheme of free things to do on a Saturday afternoon...
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Cubism and mathematics
Taken from Fragments of the Universe, an article in the review section of today's Guardian:We can't go around every day acknowledging that space and time are a continuum. We know clock time is a convention but that is no help when you're late for a meeting. In the same way, the insights of cubist painting are useless. It doesn't help to know that the form you call a bottle is really a little universe of...
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Independent on Sunday
The Independent on Sunday has undergone somewhat of a transformation since I last picked it up. Despite the cover price rising from £1 to £1.40 in what seemed like a very short period of time (less than one year, my sense of time tells me), my loyalty to the paper was maintained not only by the arts (and in particular film) writing, but also the wonderful design. (My weekly purchase of the saturday version, however,...
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Twenty faces
I have very much enjoyed the Twenty Faces feature on textism. As is clear from this article on A List Apart - and indeed from any cursory glance of typography-aware sites - the ability to choose a font from a group that to many seem to have no difference to each other is a fundamental part of the construction of websites, if not only for sanity-based purposes. There was a time when Georgia would have...
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