Design Debate

When companies have to resort to knocking the opposition you tend to worry about the quality of their own products. That was my initial thought when I saw Apple's "I'm Mac, I'm a PC" adverts, and it has been re-enforced by the latest from both Microsoft and Apple. This post though is to analyse the current Microsoft advertisement. Is there an unwritten law that says, the larger the company, the more banal their advertising? I am certain someone has already made the connection between the " I'm a PC " slogan, and the hopelessly PC approach to its make up. We are presented with a series of testimonials from "quirky" individuals, conveniently made up of photogenic "characters" from all races, backgrounds and age groups. All with a musical bed stolen from Seinfeld, to emphasise the zany nature of the advert. There has been some money spent on this campaign, with high production levels and impressive software on the accompanying websit...

So Bollo's a graphic designer!? And by all accounts, not a bad one. Dave Brown, who plays the ancient gorilla in The Mighty Boosh television and stage show, has designed and art directed their new book, The Mighty Book of Boosh. It is good to see that the design has come from within the core of the show, and not farmed out to a publishers looking merely to cash in on the success of The Boosh. The book features work from a lot of the creatives that the writing team studied with, notably John Chandler , who created the excellent illustrations for the Dixon Bainbridge story. Much of the book's style (as with the show, which I feel can be hit and miss) is not to my taste. I find that surreal art works better when subtly subverting reality, instead of leaping into the purely fantastic. But the cover design of the books within the book - such as Vince Noir’s Childhood Tales From The Jungle and Howard Moon’s A Trumpet Full of Memories - are expertly parodied by Brown. I would be keen...

I think that most people who have seen the Burn After Reading poster will inevitably make comparisons to the great Saul Bass , and one of his pieces immediately jumps into my mind, the poster above from One, Two Three, a Billy Wilder comedy set in Berlin during the cold war. While there are a lot of his other poster designs that have been more readily compared to Burn After Reading's: The design for One, Two, Three seems closer to the theme of the film - a dark, spy comedy. While Billy Wilder's picture was more than likely more light-hearted, it did touch on some sinister issues, such as Soviet torture and the West's overlooking of Nazi atrocities when it suited them. Bass' approach has often wrong footed me when watching the films he worked on. His style seems out of sync with the subject matter of The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murderer. Both were pictures that I expected to be quirky, and instead were surprisingly hard hitting. This is not to say that I...

Think of some of the most stunningly shot films of the last few decades, and there is a very good chance you will be including some of Roger Deakins ' work. Let me run a few names past you: The Shawshank Redemption, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James - it is no accident that these are all considered classics. The last two of these films have really stamped his name in the consciousness of the Western hemisphere, and bring me to my point; will the fact that his stock is so high at the moment take him away from his long standing relationship with the Cohen brothers? Since Barton Fink the names Cohen and Deakins have been practically synonymous, his distinctive style employed on the more comedic pictures such as The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother Where Art Thou? as well as the broader canvas of Fargo. Now we have an Ethan and Joel film, Burn After Reading, without his direction of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki takes up the roll. He...