Courtesy of the ever-fantastic Ace Jet 170, this collection of images of the 1958 Penrose Annual. A couple of my favourites at the bottom, but I just had to trace the Amores one, below. I love it. The M-R* ultra-ligature was rather satisfying to do.

UPDATE: I originally thought the R was a K, but Jes Sherbourne kindly corrected me. Despite the whole thing still being rather beautiful, I have to say that’s one of the worst Rs I’ve ever seen!

Farm animal, curiosity or pet? Check out the big cat in this one.


Multiple forms of diversity in one happy package.

In the future, we will all have very low, flat cars, road signs will be hard to read, we will have genetically modified pets and will build large industrial entertainment complexes in areas of astounding natural beauty. That’s the future according to these amazing 1960s illustrations from United States Steel International, by Syd Mead*. Naturally, the implication is that we will be using lots and lots of steel, and will continue to use it to make sleek, shiny cars.

It’s strange how these pictures remind me of a book I had at primary school (I was about 7) which showed two possible futures. One was positively pastoral, with blue skies, happy people cycling along clean white paths through a garden city. The other showed what would happen if we didn’t reduce our energy dependency (apparently), and showed gigantic skyscrapers looming against brown, smoggy skies, with traffic jams and people wearing gas masks. They were both illustrated in an almost identical style to these retro futurist ones, and showed almost the same subjects — they could have been taken directly from this series.

I was going to make a point that all the people in the pictures are white, but there does appear to be one little nod to diversity in there (snippet at right). I think it’s a woman, but the face… ahem.

The lettering on the signs reminds me of the information screens from 2001.

Update: * Thanks to Angel Dominguez for the name

Browsing Drawn! the other day, I followed a link to Craig Ward’s site, showing some of his fantastic typographic illustrations. I’ve posted a couple of crops of two of my favourite images (so you can see the all-important detail) — visit his site for the full images. Beware the we-don’t-need-no-scrollbars site design. Leave your mouse over the word ‘DOWN’ and you’ll be able to see some more of his work… eventually. Are scrollbars so bad? Still, the site does look lovely.

The nonist is continuing with his series of Graphis annuals and has posted a set of scans from the 1957/58 edition. Go and take a look! If you’re in the UK, you might notice something rather familiar, something that reminds you of an advert much more recent than the late 50s. Now, I’m wary of assigning nefarious motives to people about this kind of thing, but it’s quite interesting to compare and contrast the two:

I’m fascinated by imaginary products created for films and games — there’s an art to creating something just similar enough to real products to be recognisable as a brand type, but without actually copying any particular identity. Some films and games come very close to existing brands (RUF in Children of Men; GAP for pets, Tube in GTA 3; Subway) while others work within the conventions of a product type so you know what kind of thing it’s supposed to be (pretty much everything in the Truman Show). I have an article I’m writing on brand conventions, but that’s not for today. The reason for this post is some of the work featured in this interview with Sarah Bradley, graphic designer and typographer at Pixar, and ex-lead title designer at Disney. In the article is a matrix for a box of rat poison shown in Ratatouille, which I just had to make into a fake box shot — I do this a lot at work and it’s fun to do, so I couldn’t resist.

The original matrix:

I’ve had some images from these articles in my ‘inspiration’ folder for about two years now, maybe even three. I’ve only just got around to looking closely at the lettering on them — it was the virtuoso watercolour technique that attracted me to them originally. The most interesting one for me is the Sudana chocolate poster… or is it packaging? The article doesn’t say. I think the best way to understand lettering is to redraw it using beziers — not a technique that works for everyone, but it works for me. I noticed right away that the letters are drawn with refinement and precision, and it was a very pleasant job to reproduce them with (almost) every point at extrema. The ‘S’ needed a couple of extra points along the main stroke, as if Holwein applied a little extra pressure at the midpoint to create a subtle bulge there. The swirly ‘a’s are a little more involved, and to draw them so they can be rendered reliably means a few extra points and outlines, and what with this being lettering they are of course different from each other. I doubt I’ll want to create a font out of these, but I’ll keep them handy for any lettering projects I have, that ‘R’ especially.

I remember as a kid finding a load of little glass bottles buried among some building waste in the garden. I’m not sure where they came from or what they were for, but I know one still had a bit of cork stuck in its top, and each one had a different shape embossed into the front. I was fascinated with them, and what they could have been for — clearly nothing environmentally persistent, nothing toxic anyway. I washed them out and kept them for a while, eventually losing track of them in the whole growing-up thing. So, when I came across this collection of perfumes (via Non 2) I had quite a nostalgic moment. It’s an oft-remarked phenomenon that things that are individually uninteresting or unremarkable gain a special significance and appeal when collected together. A scan of a coffee stain on paper is nothing special, but scan a whole load of coffee stains in and upload them to Flickr, hey presto! It’s interesting!