You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Design' category.
The eagerly anticipated 2009 Philosophical Gourmet report has been released recently. For those who are unfamiliar, the gourmet is a ranking of anglophone philosophy departments. As usual, the rankings have been scrutinized and discussed endlessly on blogs and in real-life. But I want to examine one shortcoming that I think has not been noted:
The typeface used in the logo.
(old logo)
(new logo)
To the best of my approximation (with the help of Identifont and WhatTheFont), the old logo uses Alinea Sans Bold (see comment below) and the new logo uses Arial Narrow Bold. (The oldest logo seems to use Univers Bold.)
The question is, why the change? As anyone who lists Helvetica as one of their favorite movies on their facebook profile knows, Arial sucks. That, and the fact that the old logo was perfect serviceable, makes the change mysterious. Even on a first pass, I thought the old logo looked better. I especially liked R. So I think the Philosophical Gourmet has really taken a step back this year. Bummer!
Some people think I have way too many blogs. This is true.
Anyway, I saw Chip Kidd speak today. He mentioned that one of his designs got trashed by one of those blogs that review book covers. I like this kind of blogs–I regulardly read Brand New, which critiques logo designs–so I searched for some. The best I saw is The Book Design Review.
In the interest of finding the smallest niche ever, I thought to myself, why not a book design review blog that only reviews philosophy books! Great idea, self. I think a total of two people would read this blog. But they’d probably find it interesting. To begin, I would probably talk about some great covers I saw in the latest MIT Press catalogue; especially this and this. If anyone has information on the designer, let me know!
I will let you know if I ever start this blog.
UPDATE: Funnily enough, apparently the author of the book design review blog also went to philosophy graduate school.
UPDATE: I am pleased that another philosopher has taken up this idea.
as mentioned in the about section, michael docherty came up with the clever phrase ‘go grue’. however, he was very silly in suggesting that the graphic displaying that slogan should be gradient from blue to green. come on, michael, we all know grue is time-sensitive; it just looks blue because you have seen it after the year 2000.
today lina jansson came up with an equally clever suggestion. in addition to making so-called blue ‘go grue’ shirts, we should make vintage ‘go grue’ shirts… in so-called green! these pre-washed, ragged shirts are also grue, but they were first seen before the year 2000. we’ll merchandise the hell out of this concept.
on that note, i think the typography is very bad on the prototype ‘go grue’ graphic i’ve made. if anyone could identify the typeface used in ‘go blue‘ and ‘michigan‘, that would be greatly appreciated. the distinctive M should really be easy, but i am not very competent, nor is whatthefont. so, some trained human eyes would be helpful.
edit: for the record, i am currently using college (but manually kerned) for ‘go grue’ and verdana for ‘michigan’.
