bloom's blog

what does 'British' look like?

 

We’ve discovered a great new book, UK At Home. It's a visual take on what it means to be British at the beginning of the 21st century. It’s a kind of photographic time capsule of people and their homes.

50 photojournalists spent 7 days capturing 140,000 photos behind our front doors. The beautiful images capture the intimate moments, distinctive rituals and ways in which we interact.

It’s filled with real people in real homes, doing everything from dancing to pheasant plucking! It shows the many and sometimes extraordinary ways in which we transform our houses, flats, cottages, mansions, huts, caravans and boats into places we call home.

It’s also dotted with nuggets like…

‘During an average weekend one fifth of everyone living in Britain will eat a curry’

‘The first item British homeowners would grab in case of a fire would be the family photo album’

‘The average Briton drinks three cups of tea a day, believes in God, is more than £3,000 in debt, is captured on CCTV cameras 300 times a day and drives a Ford Fiesta’

By Emily

felici varini

We love these.  Via Jase.  Via CR.

new coins

The winning design from Matthew Dent.

We think it's mint.

schweppes

Liking this.  Beautiful 1000 frame/second stuff for Schweppes.

pullover provenance

Jemma points out this lovely site where you can track the sheep that made your jumper.  Not MADE it, but you know.

virgle

This was the most interesting (and only?) design April Fool from yesterday, we thought. Google getting the praise it so often does for having a logo that's only strengthened by being fiddling around with, this seemed an apt trick.

Mark L in the studio gives his designer view:

Well they are two brands that are extremely well known, so chopping them together like that isn’t completely unsuccessful as you still get a sense of what they’re both about.

The new name is a nonsense and doesn’t really have much meaning, and aesthetically the logo's extremely jarring - the two are fighting one another. It's also an incredibly lazy way of combining 2 brands and this reflects poorly on their new venture as you think that if this is what they’ll do with their new brand, what on earth will their product be like?

A good example of combining 2 brands, is Sonyericsson. It's been homogenised so well that you don’t think of it as 2 separate, struggling brands. They’ve also managed to take the fight to Nokia, a brand that used to have a complete stranglehold on the mobile market.

Quite. On the subject of good logos, there's a nice article in May's Net Mag on creating the perfect one. Particularly interesting was the idea of almost-symmetry: where a small detail works against perfect symmetry, making for a more successful, unique logo. And the tip of stepping back and blurring your own eyesight when judging your design, to see if it's still unmistakably recognisable as the brand in question's logo (Firefox, Youtube and Apple were all good examples of this).