ICM - Leeds Design Agency

A while ago I wrote a blog about Aicher’s pictogram work for Munich 72, I thought I’d follow it up with another classic year for Olympic graphic design which was Mexico 68, the logo was created by US designer Lance Wyman. His concept was radical – it hinted at Op Pop while embracing the vernacular visual culture of the host city – and, like London 2012, it was essentially a graphic stamp, rather than a traditional image with accompanying city name, rings and year.

Lance had this to say about the London 2012 design.
“My gut feeling though is to give the logo a chance, he continues. “It has a recognizable, brash character and might offer an open book of application possibilities that will keep it fresh into 2012.

“I remember, in the early stages of designing of the Mexico Olympic program, a Swiss journalist commented that the Mexico 68 logo didn’t work because it wasn’t very legible. It really frightened me but I knew what we had in mind and stuck with it.”

One of the main issues when designing the Mexico 68 logo, tickets and information boards was Language. Problems associated with guiding and informing participants and the general public were minimized through the use of concise Olympic symbology.

Below is a ticket from Mexico 68 and this is a brilliant example of how pictograms can replace words and be understood by all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ticket with so few words on.

The simple graphical style was put to good use on a variety of other applications.

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Last night Flux showed the animated short “Logorama” in their screening lineup at the Hammer museum in L.A. Why is this worthy of a blog?

Logorama is an Oscar-nominated short film by François Alaux and Herve de Crecy and presents us with an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks. The characters within it are all composed of corporate logo art, for example there’s a “Pringles” man, and even a villainous Ronald McDonald. Unsurprisingly all of the brands have been used without permission.

Jonathan Wells of Flux tells us,
“The short was created by directors within H5, a French graphic studio renowned for its CD front covers (Superdiscount, Air, Demon…) and artistic direction (Dior, Cartier, YSL…). Members François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain directed many music videos (Alex Gopher, Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Röyksopp…), and are regularly invited to exhibitions for their artistic talents (2007 Nuit Blanche, Beaubourg, MoMA). Logorama is their first short film, and premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Kodak Short Film Discovery Prize at the 48th Critics’ Week. The short was 4 years in the making, and features a voice cameo by filmmaker David Fincher as the Pringles man”.

Check out a preview here Logorama...

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Photoshop turns 20 this week, the product that has become the byword for picture editing, and is seemingly ubiquitous in the modern world.

Adobe, the company behind the software, are going to conduct a celebratory broadcast bringing together the team that first created Photoshop to discuss and demonstrate their work.

In a recent interview, Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Executive Officer at Adobe, said: “For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”

In 1987 Thomas Knoll developed a grayscale pixel imaging program that blossomed into a way to process digital image files. Called Photoshop, it was licensed by Adobe, with the first product hitting shelves in 1990. Knoll recalled that originally Adobe expected to sell 500 copies of Photoshop a month.

“We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us,” he said. “The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”

Here’s a look at how the main tool palette has evolved over the years:

So what has made Photoshop the industry standard?

For one, it integrates perfectly with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop’s native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings.

The software’s popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, print and the Web.

Photoshop can utilise the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write both raster and vector image formats such as .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, and Adobe Fireworks.

It really has to be in every professional creative’s toolbox. With CS5 due out in mid-2010, rumoured to have new 3d brushes and warping tools, there seems to be no end to the continual development.

Here’s to the next 20 yea…

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