Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

As they suggest, this is not a film just for type nerds. It's also about changing approaches to communication over the last 50 years; about the pendulum swinging between modernism and post-modernism (and back again); about one part of the communcations machine that is a microcosm of the whole.

As for the unspoken (nerd) question underlying the whole film, "Is it the best typeface in the world?", Johnathan Hoefler sums it up best:

...there's something about it that does have the feeling of finality to it. This was the conclusion of one line of reasoning ... and perhaps everything after it is secondary in some way.

After my previous post about advertising in magazines, it only seemed fair to redress the balance.

E-mail newsletters seek riches in niches - Los Angeles Times

This seems like a genuinely good opportunity, both for the 'publishers' and the advertisers. Of course, with email newsletters, as with traditional magazines, it all comes down to who you write for: your readers or your advertisers.

(Via AdPulp.)

When I was more involved in the nitty gritty of making websites, I was a fan of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. Now I'm becoming more interested in photography, and Philip Greenspun has another site to answer my questions: Photo.net. The same endearingly geeky writing, endearingly crap* photographs and long-winded comment threads going back 5 or 10 years.

Greenspun offers a definition of photography as "the recording of light rays", which strikes me as being a usefully broad perspective. When you think about it in those terms, all sorts of possibilities present themselves.

Which is a roundabout way of linking to these photos from 'lightwriting' collective, Lichtfaktor:

Lichtfaktor: Forest set

Creative Review have an interview with them, which includes some useful tips:

To get the best results you need a tripod. The exposure should be around 10-30 seconds or longer if needed. Stay in front of the camera and do your writing. Do not overexpose! Set the camera to about iso100, and close your aperture as much as possible. If there is still too much light you might have to use an nd-filter. It is always nice to integrate the surrounding into your picture. We have a collection of flashlights, biking-lights and flashing LED lights which all work with batteries so that we are mobile - and you also get nice results with fireworks and torches .

There are 3 different type of lights we use:

Xenon: makes a warm golden light.
LED: makes a thin precise line.
Cold cathode: thick line.

But the best results experiment using filters and things which reflect light.

The comments thread reveals a few haters, but also an idea for a lightsource.

* I don't want to sound harsh. Only some of them are crap, but still, you've got to question his quality control.

Here's a proof of concept experiment to see if I can do anything useful with the RSS feeds from Flickr: a pile of photos from a specified set, which uses a Flickr RSS feed, Movable Type and the FlickrPhotos plugin.

Today also sees the addition of a new top-level navigation item to the site: photos. w00t!

ultrahyper, Walking to the seafront

Look, no hands!

Currently 're-engaging' with Flickr to see if what depth there is to it. Thought I'd start by posting to the Computers Behind Blogs group:

My workspace

Blogwatch: The Year in Pictures

The picture above is taken from Don James' Prewar Surfing Photographs, made before David Carson set the style for surf design and photography and unwittingly codified 'edgy' for the next 10, 15 years.

(Via The Sartorialist.)

Episode 4, Genius of Photography series. This one about street photography and the emergence of colour film. On the former:

Photography discovered its inherent subject in the street The landscape photographers and the portrait photographers were in some ways more stymied because there was an enormous tradition there that they were trapped in...

And going on to talk about the impact of technology on the art:

The street had always been an alluring place for photographers, but to start with at least, it had proved to be elusive. Pioneer photographers could record the architecture easily enough because it kept still, but the life of the street moved too fast for the long exposure times...

So the first street scenes show artfully staged setups or what look like post-apocalyptic ghost-towns. Gradually the technology caught up. Citizens evolved from blurs to all too solid flesh, but the camera's struggle to keep pace with life on the streets left a rich legacy; a visual language of blurs and grain that is unique to photography

Dance, Brooklyn by William Klein, 1956

An essential insight for any kind of successful online marketing, whether that be for a product, person or idea:

The essence of the Purple Cow -- the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows -- is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to.

In Praise of the Purple Cow

I'm looking forward to the release of Anton Corbijn's film 'Control' about Joy Division, due on these shores in a month or so. (Though I'd like to see a film about Martin Hannett even more than one focusing on Ian Curtis.)

Honeyee.com has an interview with Daniel Mason of ‘Something Else’ about his work on the sleeves for the re-issued albums. He talks about some of the challenges in reproducing work digitally that was originally subject to the constraints of an analogue process:

What transpired was that major improvements had been made which impeded a like-for-like copy. What has been produced is a 2007 facsimile, looking to the past, being familiar to the viewer, yet strangely new.

It also reminded me of a rather good exhibition I went to at the Design Museum a couple of years ago, covering Peter Saville's work for Factory. Long since disassembled of course, but there is an accompanying book.

Before I got into this internet/blogging malarkey I was producing zines. I've never understood the appeal of mass market magazines and the associated advertising.

The Magazineer looks like a great niche blog, and you should never under-estimate the appeal of having your prejudices reflected back at you, especially in such a well-considered manner.

If anything has changed, it’s the amount of product-driven content. This issue contained 18 pages in the front of the book that were devoted entirely to products (What’s Inside Lotrimin Ultra? Play Super Mario! Wow, Expensive Motorcycle!). Then there’s the Wish List, “a survey of the stuff we’re dying to get (and give) this holiday season,” which includes a Top Ten that lasts for 12 pages, plus 24 pages of some of the most blatant product placement I’ve ever seen in a magazine.

The Magazineer - How to Read Wired Revisited

Meme-tracking: corporate social networks...

Because they seem so natural to use, the social networks end up being incredibly sensitive mechanisms for recording the real life of a human organization. They serve not only as a flexible communications medium but as a means for identifying, refining, and recording valuable information. They do what corporate systems so often fail to do: they make the codification and sharing of valuable information easy.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: My(Work)Space

Anyone who gets excited about the Hipster PDA or OmniFocus coming out of beta (myself included) should read this first:

Is David Allen’s Getting Things Done too long winded and complicated for you? Do you find yourself spending hours on sites like Lifehacker instead of simply getting the fuck on with the things that need doing? Do you have a healthy respect for (and fear) of aging punk rock icons? Then do I have a time management system for you...

Visible Monsters - GTTFD with Henry Rollins...

Somehow I missed this interview with Mike Banks of Underground Resistance in the November issue of The Wire magazine. Fortunately, there's a full transcript on the website.

Obviously, you should read it all, but the parts where he talks about context and 'metadata' had particular resonance:

So, if someone was to say 'Hey man, Why did you make Hi-Tech Jazz?' and I described why I did it, because I did have something I was thinking of, if I was to do that I would have fucked up his vision of why he listened to it. So I learned not to describe anything and just leave it like water, clear, with no shape and no form. I think that's what people really enjoy about UR, they get to paint their own picture. We might just make the canvas for them, with the record, and in their mind they paint the picture and that's one of the reasons we sold for so long. We just went faceless, there was no reason for you to know what we look like, you just concentrate more on what the sound was. Unfortunately, people need a face all the time, and for many years I didn't give em any face. But now - internet, cell phone - people take pictures of me, the shit's all over the internet. I figure well, hopefully the people will still have some honour and honour my wish not to be seen in front of my music.

I don't go in front of the music. I believe that if you put your ego in front of the music, and place it in front of the speaker, then the people trying to listen to the music can't hear your music, they just listen to your ego. So I really ask the people who do have pictures of me to be honourable and just leave me out of it, man.

(My emphasis.) As with photography, music can be transformed by what is left out, as much as by what is put in.

Update: I can't help but feel some guilt in putting a picture of the guy at the top of this article, but I figure if he's happy to appear on the front of a magazine then this is small in the scheme of things. And you've got to love the range of branded techno-warrior gear he's modelling in the full cover portrait. It's worse than 50 Cent...

Episode 2 of the BBC's Genius of Photography series; this time focusing on the inter-war period in Europe and two approaches to the medium. One documentary, as typified by the typologies of Karl Blossfeldt and Bernd and Hilla Becher and one opposed to objectivity and the recording of the world 'as it really is.'

As an example of the latter, they bring up Man Ray and his work, "Dust Breeding,' (1920) a photograph of an artwork by Marcel Duchamp.

'Dust Breeding' delights in photography's infinite capacity for ambiguity and mocks its obligations as a sober recorder of reality.

David Campany continues:

There's no sense of scale, no reference to anything that we'd really be familiar with ... it's being offered to us, perhaps, as something between an artwork and a document. If it's an artwork, it's haunted by the idea of the document, and if it's a document, it's haunted by the idea of the artwork.

Peter Barberie goes on to talk about it in relation to the Surrealists and 'found objects':

[A found object could] disrupt your mental state and thereby project you into another consciousness or another understanding.

Interesting enough in relation to photography, though you could of course say the same about techno.

I've been thinking about the possibility of networked information tied to location for 4 or 5 years now. What would be possible with ubiquitous networked portable devices (like, say, cellphones...)?

What are the creative or commercial possibilities? And what would you need to make it happen?

Well, one of the things we're still waiting for is clearly a 'digital camera for location':

Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.'

zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don't Or: the case for object-centered sociality

An approach to a common situation that seems entirely natural now (though not necessarily pleasant, comfortable or in any way a good idea), but was not always the case.

Nancy Martha West, talking about the marketing of the first Kodak cameras in the BBC's Genius of Photography series:

...People are encouraged through Kodak ads to smile at the camera rather than make it a serious enterprise...

As someone who loathes putting on a rictus grin for the camera, I'm pleased to find out that it was just a marketing wheeze and I can go back to the inscrutable deadpan look.

Economic opportunities of mass collaboration over the net: “The wiki way” on Guardian Unlimited

Essentially a feature-length book review of Wikinomics, which looks like it might be an interesting book. Buy the book from Amazon (UK) or US.

Update: make that 'quite' interesting. (In the manner of 'fairly' harmless). So far it's the usual suspects: Linux, Wikipedia, P&G, et al. Maybe it will improve...

Stefan Gandl's essential book of silhouetted objects, organised according to an intriguing (yet simple) taxonomy: man-made objects, the natural world and the relation between them.

You can of course buy it from Amazon.

Industrial and Industrial Heritage Photography by Haiko Hebig

This goes in my 'ideas for record sleeves' pile.

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.

Wikipedia: Liminality

It’s almost like someone installed an ‘auto send to friend’ function onto the Internet.

Iain Tait / Crackunit: Why Marketeers Are Too Excited About Facebook

While I agree with the entire entry, I think it's worth it just for Calvin's conclusion in the last panel.

Talent imitates, genius steals: Hyperbubble and The Nature of Cool

A few related posts about social networking that resonated with me recently:

zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don't Or: the case for object-centered sociality

The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

Gapingvoid: why the "social object" is the future of marketing

I can’t help wondering if the internet coming along at the same time as the Hyper-Clutter Era reaching critical mass was a historical accident, or did the internet evolve as fast as it did in order to circumvent the Hyper-Clutter? I’m guessing the latter. If the purveyors of one-way conversations had offered something more sustainable and satisfying, maybe our need to “talk to real human beings” again would not have been so pronounced.

Also:

THE BAD NEWS IS, MOST PRODUCTS ARE BORING. THE GOOD NEWS IS, MOST WORD-OF-MOUTH IS BORING.

If you’re an average marketer, chances are that Alas! you don’t sell Mercedes’ or Apple iPods for a living. You probably sell some fairly prosaic, utilitarian product. Like Brand X.

And just in case you need a primer: Gapingvoid: social objects for beginners

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

The path that has led to Etsy begins with a motto — do it yourself — that implies distaste for consumer culture.

Handmade 2.0 - New York Times

The greatest problem marketeers have these days is that no one really cares what they say.

Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing: Goodbye Branding (It Doesn't Matter What You Say)

There is only one potentially revolutionary concept in Facebook Ads: the "trusted referral" from one person to others. How Facebook handles this will determine whether the platform truly represents a new kind of advertising--or whether Facebook will have to make do with demographically targeted CPM-based display ads.

Facebook Ads: The Devil's In The Details* - Silicon Alley Insider