THE NEW BOOK

Building a community by the book. By IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm. Crazy hyper-future land. Prepare for head explosion.

(This video has great art direction, especially with the use of color as organization tool. Yellow, Turquoise Blue, Red.)

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

LIVING BUILDINGS

OpenBuildings' header imagery is charming in its simplicity. Their mission is to aggregate and organize great examples of architecture across the world by using crowdsourcing. Orange is a lively, fresh, and energetic color that fits with the dynamicism and creation inherent in building. The curved line feels like a heart monitor, which brings the design the association of life and vitality. The rounded corners help the design feel friendly and the buildings found therein are as simple as possible while still in possession of individual characteristics such as columns or round, left-justified windows.

NEW TOC-ING

Who says a table of contents has to be a list of topics in order of appearance? Sometimes this is not useful to an author's book. Perhaps writers should take a stab at information design and come up with alternate ways of presenting their information concisely. David McCandless supplants a traditional table of contents in his data visualization book, The Visual Miscellaneum, with headings drawn to prominence by use of scale (big), shape (circles naturally attract the eye), and color (basic coding technique). He creates a deservingly simple two-level organization with the type of graph as the first (Pop, Health, etc.) and the location or page number as the second, deeper level.

FILM PROMOS... 60s STYLE

A great film deserves a great promotion. Even in 1964.

Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie is a complex psychological drama about a beautiful compulsive liar and thief (Tippi Hedren) who helps herself to her various employers' safes and vaults before changing her address and identity. One of her bosses (Sean Connery) falls for her and uncovers the truth behind her actions, but takes her as his wife rather than sending her to jail as he gets at the root psychological trauma. It has been said that Marnie is like a culmination of Notorious (1946), Rebecca (1940), and Spellbound (1945). Its cinematic triumph is the use of framing and its exquisite color palette.

The film was introduced to audiences with a bang in July of 1964. In the lead up to the release, there was a contest with the theme of "Who is the Prettiest Secretary," which surely grabbed female audiences. Then at the actual opening night select movie theaters displayed a large safe that was filled with merchandise from neighborhood retailers (jewelry, clothing, gift certificates, etc.). Moviegoers were invited to take their shot at cracking the safe, for if they succeeded the contents would be theirs.

An assortment of movie posters were created billing it as Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspenseful Sex Mystery" with headlines like the below. In the image above, the list begins and ends with the most powerful selling points: sex and love. Additionally, the borders are designed in a modern 1960s style, which again sells it to a younger, more culturally immersed audience that doesn't want their mother's same old romantic movie.

Selection of poster headlines:

"On Marnie's wedding night he discovered every secret about her... except one!"
= Allowing the viewer's mind to wander to interesting places to figure it out, creating expectations they want to know will or will not be met in the actual film

"Thief...Liar...Cheat...she was all of these...and he knew it!"
= Painting a character will ill traits and adding second level of intrigue with a "he"

"Only Alfred Hitchcock could have created a woman —so mysterious —so fascinating —so dangerous as Marnie"
= Banking on Hitchcock's directorial star power as well as setting up intrigue for a character

"Alfred Hitchcock's love stories start where others fail to go!"
= Banking of Hitchcock's directorial star power and asserting success via the negative "fail"

THEY SEE THE SAME STYLIST

These two men have something in common besides a big bottle of peroxide: Christianity. Or, perhaps more correctly, religion as a means of maintaining power and a position in the far right wing. Bill Keller (left) is a salesman turned insider trader turned jailbird turned television evangelist. And Geert Wilders (right) is a Dutch Freedom and Democracy party politician turned Group Wilders politician turned "Freedom" party politician. Both men fuel their existence by attacking Islam and advocating for things like banning the Qur'an and taxing Burqua-clad women while they peddle the Islam-as-religion-of-hate-and-death bigotry.

Keller and Wilders both sport bleach-blond hair, which is a curious similarity given the above. They each strive for pure whiteness of the follicle and subsequently go to great lengths to achieve such "purity." Of course both are on television and are in the public eye so image is everything. They want to stand out. But why blond? Perhaps the extreme brightness and lightness on their crowns helps them better piggyback onto the God connection. And pumping up the volume on their hair is a gesture meant to reach up to get them even closer to the heavens. Pure. Clean. White. Light. Right. Divine. The world is mine.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING