Fritinancy

This Is Not a Shoe

No, says Sruli Recht, its creator: it is the Hvalsforhúðsskór Dorks, a men's boot made of "minke dork" in "caramel sandstone" with a 2" raw leather Cuban heel.

And here is the descriptive copy:

hunter and hunted, charred end cycles of left over limits.
holes in these things less for the breathing,
chasing that whale, too late in the evening,
"It's the new dolphin - a stand in for the ozone, and that hole itself? is just the next blackman".

Also excellent for achieving the Sarkozy Effect.

Mr. Recht, who calls himself  "a European nomad," was born in Jerusalem in 1979 and eventually settled in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he now dreams up and produces his surrealistic footwear and clothing. The prose, I am willing to bet, is likewise all his own.

Take this item, described as:

The Bullet-proof Handkerchief

For the Promiscuous Idealist whom

Lives in Elegant Danger

Whom? Yes, youm.

Or Death Sequence, about which Recht writes:

This is a seal skin dress. Put away your adopted social morals and enjoy it.

Go. Read. (Especially the About page.) Send an admiring e-mail. But don't attempt to place an order. This is not a store.

(Via Jon Carroll, who paid tribute to Recht in his column last month.)

April Linkfest

This month's menu: Fun, games, made-up names, and pie charts.

The Blog & Website Cuss-o-Meter tells me I'm pretty darned clean, but not as saintly as Mr. Verb, to whom I tip my hat.

Karen at Verbatim pointed me to GraphJam, where users post their own graphs on sundry topics. Here's one of the wordier ones:

And this one appears to have been made especially for me:

Speaking of circular objects, "volvelle" was new to me: it's a Latin word for a type of wheel chart first used in the Middle Ages and still popular today. Eclectica gives a brief review of Reinventing the Wheel, by Jessica Helfand (a contributor to the excellent Design Observer blog), a survey of wheel and slide charts and other pre-computer-age information technology. (Via All This ChittahChattah.) Here's a nice volvelle swiped from Eclectica:

Finally, in honor of Passover, the Four Questions:

Question #1: Can you name 18 made-up drugs from books, movies, and TV? A.V. Club can, from Synthehol (Star Trek) to Mimezine (Wild Palms). The comments are a long, strange trip in themselves.

Question #2, posed by Motivated Grammar: Why won't "willn't" work?

Is it just that modern people are lazy? Or some consequence of the O and I keys abutting on a QWERTY keyboard? Nope. In fact, we’re not even asking the right question.

Question #3: Nancy R. Callahan at Nancy's Baby Names asks, "Have you ever noticed that the names of many oral contraceptives sound a lot like (or really are) female names?" There's Camilla, Portia, Yasmin, and Errin, for starters. (Male contraceptives don't follow this format, unless you consider MAXX a proper name. I once attempted to name a condom Roger, but that's a tale for another day.)

Question #4: Which imaginary animals are kosher? Evil Monkey, at Ecstatic Days, asks an expert:

Mongolian Death Worm - A: “No, because you cannot eat anything that crawls on its belly.” EM: “Does that mean an injured kosher animal that is crawling along isn’t kosher any more?” A: “Yes, because you can’t eat an animal that’s been injured or is sick.” EM: “It’s a wonder you haven’t all starved to death.”

(The fourth question comes via BoingBoing, which last year regretted to inform that marijuana isn't kosher for Passover. Oy. Bummer.)

It Takes All Types

A roundup of reading about typefaces and type characters for your weekend amusement.

Minnesota type designer Mark Simonson addresses "the scourge of Arial":

Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable [i.e., Helvetica]. It has what you might call a "low-end stigma." The few cases that I have heard of where a designer has intentionally used Arial were because the client insisted on it. Why? The client wanted to be able to produce materials in-house that matched their corporate look and they already had Arial, because it's included with Windows. True to its heritage, Arial gets chosen because it's cheap, not because it's a great typeface.

Simonson also provides a handy guide to distinguishing Arial from Helvetica. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

From Adobe's Type Topics, a consideration of the ampersand in all its variety:

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text.

Did you know that the Poetica typeface family (created by an Adobe designer) contains 58 different ampersand characters? I didn't.

It turns out that's not all I didn't know about type. The Rather Difficult Font Game lives up to its name; I scored a humbling 22 out of 34. And to think I used to draw a paycheck as a typesetter. (Hat tip: Dynamist.)

"Down with Arial" handbill graphic from Fawny.org.

The Friedman Museum of Vintage Products

My parents bought their house in 1968; since my father's death two months ago, my brothers and I have been sorting through the contents--an emotional task made especially daunting by the fact that both parents were champion Keepers. We've found receipts dating back to the early 1950s, multiple photocopies of trivia quizzes from Elderhostel trips taken almost 20 years ago, and unopened packages of twin-size cotton-polyester sheets in perky floral patterns from the late 1960s.

And last weekend, on an expedition into the deep recesses of the walk-in pantry, my brother Michael discovered more artifacts.

I don't remember ever seeing this can or hearing of this brand. Right under the "Gumption" product name you can just barely see the line "Made in England." But someone evidently Americanized the copy on the reverse side, which includes the words stove and aluminum. In Britain they'd have been cooker and aluminium. That aside, what a great name and what a fabulous use of type! I counted seven fonts, but I may have missed one. Though difficult to discern, at the very top there's a cartoon mascot whose head is shaped like a scrub brush. That's "Little Gumption" himself.

Gumption was apparently acquired by Clorox, which continues to sell it in the United Kingdom.

I wasn't familiar with this product, either:

From the looks of the spokesmodel drawing, it dates from the early 1960s. At the time, Zud was manufactured by Boyle-Midway in New York; the company was later acquired by American Home Products, which sold it in 1990 to British household-products giant Reckitt Benckiser. And whaddya know: you can still buy Zud, albeit with a snappy new logo. The product must be really good to have survived such a leaden name.

I definitely remember Peter Pan peanut butter, although not necessarily this 28-ounce can:

According to a Wikipedia entry, Peter Pan peanut butter was introduced in 1920 by the Derby Foods division of Swift & Company under the name "E.K. Pond." That may have sounded uncomfortably close to Pond's cold cream (introduced in 1914); for whatever reason, the peanut butter got its current name in 1928. You opened the can with the key that you detached from the base. (In a kitchen drawer, Michael and I found a small collection of peanut-butter-can keys.) The Wikipedia entry says that cans were discontinued during World War II because of metal shortages, but this design appears to date from the late 1940s or early 1950s. Wikipedia jogged my memory about a Peter Pan slogan: "Picky people pick Peter Pan peanut butter, it's the peanut butter picky people pick." 

The Peter Pan brand is now owned by ConAgra. It was the subject of a 2007 recall because of a salmonella outbreak.

Finally, this bit of paper packaging, saved for who knows what reason:

The futuristic logo (and the pricetag from Fedco, a consumers' cooperative where our family frequently shopped) would seem to date this package from the early 1960s. Again: amazing use of typography. The Goodell Company of Antrim, New Hampshire, was established in 1875; besides the Hampshire Spreader, it also made the Perfect Pencil Pointer, a pencil sharpener. The Antrim website mentions the company in passing and includes this poignant paragraph about the town:

Today most farms and factories are gone. Some of the mill buildings still stand, but they are no longer used for manufacturing, The schools and Frameworks are the largest employers. Most townspeople work in bigger surrounding towns like Peterborough and Hillsboro.

And most of the utensils used in American kitchens are manufactured in China.

My parents didn't hang onto these products because of their nostalgic design. I'm sure they believed there was some useful life left in them. The Gumption and Zud were still part full; the Peter Pan can served as a container for paper clips and such. The cardboard spreader package? Possibly saved as a reminder of the bargain price.

But I started wondering: Is there any current consumer packaging that I treasure enough to save? How about you?

Word of the Week: Pilcrow

Pilcrow: The paragraph symbol. Rhymes with "will throw."

From the blog of typographers Hoefler & Frere-Jones:

Like most punctuation, the paragraph mark (or pilcrow) has an exotic history. It's tempting to recognize the symbol as a "P for paragraph," though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for "chapter." Because written forms evolve through haste, the strokes through the C gradually came to descend further and further, its overall shape ultimately coming to resemble the modern "reverse P" by the beginning of the Renaissance.

Visit the site to see examples of the firm's pilcrow designs and to be entertained by passages like this one:

In any case, Pilcrow & Capitulum would make a fine name for a pub, and a grand place to host a typographers' wayzgoose. Or perhaps it's a buddy movie about crime-fighting bibliographers: Capitulum wears cable knit sweaters and drinks single malt, and Pilcrow is a ladies' man who drives an Austin Healey. Catch their madcap adventures.

The etymology of pilcrow is uncertain. According to a Wikipedia entry:

The name may be a derivation of paragraph through parcrafte, but this etymology is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word originated as pylcraft, a corrupted form of "paragraph" (earliest reference c.1440).

That entry also includes this interesting bit of information:

In Chinese, the traditional paragraph sign is a thin circle about the same size as a Chinese character. This same mark also serves as a “zero” character, as a stylistic variation of the Chinese character for “zero”. As a paragraph sign, this mark only appears in older books. Its current use is generally as a “zero” character.

Despite the page heading, this is not a pilcrow; it's a section symbol, derived from the letter S. It is used mostly in legal documents.

Hat tip: Swissmiss.

Image: Wikimedia Commons. 

"Ho" Begone

Sodexho, the French multinational food services company, has dropped its aitches and become Sodexo. And last month it gave its logo an all-lower-case Web 2.0-ish slant:

 

Armin at the design blog Brand New (where I found the side-by-side logo comparison) is skeptical:

Sodexo has fallen into the trap of thinking lowercase makes for a friendlier logo. I don't see a rational reason behind this change.

It's the same irrationality behind the recent Xerox logo change, which also involved lower-case-ification.

In the new Sodexo logo, the curving red element is supposed to represent a smile. But its lopsided skew resembles like nothing so much as the slash of red lipstick a three-year-old applies to her face while playing dress-up.

And what about the spelling change? Sodexho was a compression of Societé d'Exploitation Hotelière (Hotel Services Company). In its 2006-2007 annual report, the company explained the decision to de-aitch by saying that "in certain languages an 'x' followed by an 'h' is difficult to pronounce."

Sodexo was founded in 1966. It took them 40 years to discover this little language problem?

Commenters to Armin's post focused mostly on the logo redesign, which they mostly disliked, but Chris observed:

Biggest improvement would be they took out that "h" in the brand name. Take the "od" out of "Sodexho" and you'll get what we called them in college.

And Brandy nailed it, crudely but effectively:

Kickin' the "ho" to the curb!

By the way, the company's U.S. subsidiary appears not to have gotten the memo.

Mismatch.com

What's the story with Match.com's newest logo?

 

I mean that question literally: what story is the design telling?

Let's take a closer look at the graphic element:

One boy, one girl. From the looks of it, they met on the door of a public restroom. He's standing rigidly; she's leaning against him, one knee bent in the classic swoony pose immortalized by Alfred Eisenstaedt in his famous V-J Day kiss photo for Life magazine:

At least in the photo the guy is doing something. In the Match.com logo, he's static. But that's doesn't seem to trouble Green Gal, who appears to be swept off her feet (or off one foot, anyway).

Here's a more recent take on the same pose. This one's from a recent "Modern Love" column in the New York Times:

And you've surely seen countless other versions of this clinch in movies and on TV: the man firmly rooted, the woman swaying giddily on one foot while the other foot dangles in mid-air. You can imagine her saying breathlessly, "My hero."

That may be what she's saying. But what is Match.com saying? That the ideal match--the one you are shopping for right now--is one between a stolid male and a dependent female who doesn't just stand by her man--she leans on him for support?

That's how I read it. And I find it troubling--not least because it belies Match.com's home page copy, which touts the dating service's "global, diverse community" for "young and old, gay and straight." Oh, really? The logo is unambiguously hetero (not to mention retro), perhaps in a bid to trump competitor eHarmony, which famously refuses to provide matchmaking services for gays and lesbians.

Previous Match.com logos omitted any representation of people. This one, designed by Raspberry Media, dates back to the mid-1990s, when Match.com was founded:

  The next logo incorporated a new tagline:

And as recently as 2006, Match.com was using the simple wordmark shown in this screen shot: 

I've been thinking about male and female stereotypes more than usual lately, having recently read Susan Faludi's latest book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. The title is slightly misleading: as in her previous books, Backlash and Stiffed, Faludi writes here about American men and women and their culturally defined roles. In periods of crisis, Faludi writes--the early colonial era, the westward migration, the 9/11 attacks--Americans turn reflexively to a myth that depicts men as stalwarts and women as ninnies. When necessary, we rewrite reality and print the legend. Daniel Boone, who in real (18th-century) life got along pretty well with neighboring Indians, was transformed into a fierce Indian-killer in increasingly fanciful written accounts. Likewise, 21st-century New York City firefighters who admitted to being afraid during rescue attempts were edited to sound like "heroes." Women who actually performed heroically--the United 93 flight attendants who boiled water to hurl at terrorists, for example--were simply written out of the story. Public macho posturing (as exhibited by, say, a brush-clearing president who issued ultimatums like "dead or alive") was applauded, and feminism was declared inappropriate, distracting, and defunct.

Six and a half years later, we're still seeing a strained effort to maintain this fiction. In the run-up to Tuesday's primary elections, how many times did you hear John McCain called "a hero" or "an American hero," as if that were his sole qualification for leadership? (What's next--Batman for president?)

I'm guessing that Match.com got hold of some research that said there's big money in "traditional" sex roles: men as defenders, women as defenseless. Sorry, but that doesn't connect with what I know about the way real men and real women regard each other these days. In fact, a quick scan of current dating-site profiles written by men and women in their 20s and 30s reveals that they want--random sampling here--"someone who can hold their own," "an equal partner," and "no princesses."

So I'd call this design concept a bad match. In fact, I'd call it--there's no other word--sexist.

Looking Presidential

A couple of type designers analyze the logos of the presidential candidates for readers of the Boston Globe. Some excerpts:

• "The Hillary logo has the look of an '80s newspaper layout or an investment company."
• "The Edwards type is very Wal-Mart, tabloid, middle class. Not a whiff of high-powered lawyer."
• "Obama's ... serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit."
• "Huckabee has the most inexplicable selection of typography and graphics, from the six floating stars to the white stripe seemingly stolen from the Coca-Cola logo."
• "[Romney's] graphics are puzzling. The eagle logo has the head of the US Postal Service logo and body of the Norwegian flag flowing behind it."
• "[Giuliani's] message is all about Rudy, name recognition. The enlarged R introduces the other letters like a big, protective parent."
• "From the perfectly centered star to the perfectly spaced type, [McCain's] entire design looks like a high-end real estate company."

In conclusion: "If we were to predict the results based on typography and design, we would pick McCain and Obama."

Via The Ridger, who's peeved--as am I--by the misplaced apostrophe in the Globe's sidebar heading, "All the Candidate's Logos." (Just one candidate with many logos?) Not only that, but on the "all logos" page there's an extraneous comma: "type designers, Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith..." Does anyone work on the copy desk anymore?

Bonus link: Obama has the hardest-working logo of any presidential candidate.

Read my earlier post on candidates' logos.

January Linkfest

A few links to amuse you while I spend the next several days offline.

The Tensor (of Tenser, Said the Tensor) answers all the unanswered questions posted by the Explainer at Slate.com. One of the terser Tensor explanations:

Q:  Can a baby get drunk off of nonalcoholic beer?

A:  Only if that baby is a total lightweight.

Designer Corey Holms has created an elegant taxonomy of the animal species in logos. I can't quite place the dog... (Via Jason Kottke.)

On any given Sunday, you're likely to hear one of the well-roasted chestnuts in the Sports Cliché database. Looking for a non-sports cliché? Check out the Political Cliché list or the list of media clichés at Banned for Life. Also useful, if only to know what to avoid: the encyclopediac Cliché Finder maintained by Morgan Friedman (no relation).

Pinsetter, a project of the creative folks at the Chicago ad agency Coudal Partners, lets you express yourself in 1-inch pin-on alphanumeric buttons, just US$1 each, or a complete set of 87 buttons for $39 plus $2 shipping. While you're on the Coudal site, you could do worse than to check out all the other great stuff there, including Lowercase Tee (love that kid-size Obama-bama shirt). I wrote about other Coudal projects here.

Josh Parsons, a lecturer in philosophy at Otago University ("New Zealand's top-ranked university for research"), assigns letter grades to the flags of the world according to some highly subjective and very funny criteria: graven images, colonial nonsense, "makes me nauseous, " etc. The United States gets a C+: "too many stars"; "too busy." (Via Dynamist blog.)

More from the Southern Hemisphere: Derek Abbott, in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide, has compiled a table of animal noises in 17 languages, from Dutch to Urdu. Scroll down to see multilingual animal commands and animal pet names.

More on the Xerox "Rebranding"

Armin Vit, at the Brand New blog, fumes articulately about the new Xerox logo, which I wrote about earlier this week:

The new identity ... may signal a new era for the company but, as far as we designers are concerned, it merely signals the full embrace of the senseless threedimensionalization of the corporate world. ...

I find it rather humorous — and please excuse me while I get my biggest gripe out of the way — that this logo "animates" better and how it's a key strength. Yet, the best that could be done (at least at launch) is this? Seriously?

(Scroll down the post to see the witless animation in action; I can't manage to embed it here.)

Why is that marble not rotating? Or exploding? Or building out of thin air? Heck, morphing into Xerox's CEO would be more interesting than a pedestrian zoom and shine.

Lots of "amens" in the comments (Michael Bierut of Pentagram: "I wish I were dead"). And keep scrolling to see Von Glitschka's comment with the visual of the kid shooting logo-ized marbles.

And while we're piling on, here's my own gripe du jour: Redesigning a logo does not equal "rebranding." A logo is a representation of the brand, not the brand itself.