My Funny Girl Journey

I don’t know about you, but for me, the best part of a trip is often the unexpected detour, the crazy coincidence, the unscheduled side trip. The same can be said of design research.

Back in December, I came across the the theater and movie page of a mid 1960s newspaper, and I was struck by how recognizable and iconic the "Funny Girl" logo was. But who designed the upside down roller skater in the dress made of type? That’s where my journey began.

Googling didn’t get me very far—too many pages with the terms “funny girl” and “logo design” that had absolutely nothing to do with the play or the movie. The poster was designed by the extremely prolific Bill Gold studio, but that didn’t give me my answer.

I scrolled through other movie posters of the mid-late 60s looking for a related illustration/type treatment. There were the hippie movies with shaped psychedelic type, but those felt like a different sensibility.


The poster for "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" was somewhat closer in feel.

I thought that I was making progress when I discovered that the titles were designed by Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, who died January 8, at the age of 88. He was also credited for the titles for "Dr. Goldfoot an the Bikini Machine." I watched the clay animation sequences and found that they clearly had nothing to do with the type or poster design.



The “Bikini Machine” sequel, "Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs," did away with animated titles and just used the look of gold clay for the typography.

None of this stopped me, however, from taking a detour into early Art Clokey. In 1953, he was studying at the University of Southern California and working on commercials for Budweiser and Coca Cola. Clokey talks about his early work with clay and the making of "Gumbasia" in an interview:

The Budweiser commercials were live action, featuring basketball, airplanes, baseball people, and so on," Art told us. "But they had a close-up of a Swiss cheese sandwich and they wanted to show the cheese disappearing with bites. The beer is good with Swiss cheese. It was actually a piece of clay that we made and we formed it to look just like a piece of Swiss cheese, to fold and so on. And we began animating bites out of it. That 's the first time we ever used it professionally - clay. Then I had a two week break between commercials. So, in my father's garage, we put a 4 x 8 piece of plywood on two saw horses and put clay on there, painted it, formed it into abstract shapes, pyramids, etc., and shot them using the kinesthetic style film principles that I was learning from [Slavko] Vorkapich

The film is 3:11 minutes and you can watch it here.










Clokey also made the very trippy "Mandala." His entire family participated in its production. Its goal was to communicate "the idea of evolving our consciousness from primordial forms to human form, and then beyond the human to the spiritual and eternal. The theme was the evolution of consciousness: we begin in the mud and we just go out and up."

The film runs 6:28 minutes and can be seen here.






I got back to Funny Girl just last week. it still bugged me that I could not find the designer, so I gave it another shot, this time googling Funny Girl upside down roller skates logo.

Up came a post on the Health News Digest site, “Misdiagnosed Amyloidosis - Passing of Renowned Artist Highlights Dangers,” about the the death of illustrator Talivaldis Stubis on December 23, 2009. And finally, "Perhaps the artist’s most memorable image was for the Broadway musical, “Funny Girl,” an upside-down girl on roller skates whose body spells out the title, but he worked on literally hundreds of other now-iconic posters for stage and screen." In addition to posters Stubis illustrated nearly two dozen children’s books.

I still think it odd that I had to wait for an obituary on a medical news website for my answer. It also seems that I was misdirected in my research. I was looking for clues in the type, when I should l have been looking for clues in the legs!

Crayola's Law

A chronology of Crayola’s chromatic growth from 8 colors in 1903 to 120 colors today (not including metallics and neon). Weather Sealed reports that the average annual growth rate of 2.56% means a doubling of available hues every 28 years. That’s 330 colors by 2050. So every generation’s “standard” box has twice the variety its parents had. Thirteen colors over the years have been officially retired and three colors underwent official name changes.

Shiseido at MIT

Shiseido, the Japanese cosmetics and skin care company, started as a Western-style pharmacy in 1872. In 1888 they became the first Japanese company to manufacture toothpaste, and in 1897 their cosmetics line launched with Eudermine, a scented skin toner still sold today.

Shiseido is one of the meticulously documented subjects of Visualizing Cultures, a program launched by MIT in 2002 to exploit the Web as a platform for image-driven scholarship. Of particular interest was the ability to study and present large quantities of previously inaccessible images.

The result is a website rich with visual and textual information. It’s kind of like a bottomless, scholarly, coffee table book, where you can wander as you please, through historic details and scores of hi-res color images.

As for the Shiseido archive, the past hundred plus years of Japanese history is all there. Industrialization, mass-market consumerism, urbanization, Western influences, modern warfare, and of course the enormous shift in the lives of women.

Here is just the tiniest taste of the ads, posters, and magazines you will find on the site …


As a company focused on image and aesthetics, Shiseido was a constant innovator in product design, promotion, advertising and marketing. There were customer loyalty clubs, promotional giveaways, and magazines.

Shiseido cemented its chain store network’s shared corporate identity and values through the circulation of engaging public relations publications such as Shiseido Monthly (Shiseido Geppō) launched in 1924 (later renamed Shiseido Graph [1933 to 1937] and then Hanatsubaki), which was a free giveaway geared toward customers, and Chainstore (later renamed The Chainstore Research [1935 to 1939], The Chainstore [1938 to 1939], and then Shiseido Chainstore Alma Mater [1939 to 1941]), which was an in-house organ that communicated practical product and promotional information to chain store affiliates.

Above, newspaper ad from 1915.

Holy Fractal!

According to Wikipedia, this veggie has been around at least since the sixteenth century, but my first encounter with Brassica oleracea, or Romanesco Cauliflower, as it's called in NYC, was right between Christmas and New Years. I couldn't buy one at the time, but I was so looking forward to trying one. I haven't seen them since. So I guess I won't be getting any better photos either...

Raven Chanticleer

This is a bit out there, and the MLK Day tie-in is completely coincidental.


I went to catch the last day of a show yesterday at Triple Candie, a nonprofit gallery in Harlem. The exhibit was being dismantled when I arrived, so I ended up attending the opening of an exhibit about Harlem’s African American Wax Museum creator, Raven Chanticleer.
The gallery, which describes itself as “ …a place-based, research-oriented gallery that produces exhibitions about art but largely devoid of it,” write about the show:

From 1989 until his death in 2002, Raven Chanticleer was the owner and sole proprietor of the Harlem African American Wax Museum, housed in the basement of his brownstone on West 115th Street. Consisting of some two-dozen statues -- Frederick Douglass, Mother Hale, Madonna (yes, the Material Girl) -- paintings, African sculpture, and other items, the museum was a total-work-of-art.

Chanticleer made the two-dozen life-size statues himself from chicken wire, paper-mache’, and beeswax and though some bore only scant resemblance to their subjects, neither mimetic nor historical accuracy were his primary concern. His goal was the creation of an ambitious installation that would outlive him and be his crowning achievement. The museum no longer exists. When Chanticleer died, his nieces and nephews gutted the museum and sold the brownstone, over the objections of many of Chanticleer’s friends. The family, which is deeply religious, remains determined to obliterate every trace of the man and his art, in part, many believe, because they refuse to condone Chanticleer’s “flamboyant” lifestyle. This thoroughly researched exhibition -- consisting of photographs and ephemera -- will, we hope, be a first step towards re-establishing Chanticleer’s legacy.
With no actual wax sculptures to install, Triple created paper mache sculptures of local Harlem characters, in “homage”. The real flavor of Raven Chanticleer, however, is on the walls, which are covered with newspaper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera pertaining to his life and career.

The photos, below, are of the museum, dismantled.

Photos by Nikki Johnson

Though the museum was his passion, there was plenty more to Raven than wax. He attended FIT and the Sorbonne, designed clothes for Bergdorf Goodman, and founded a dance troupe. He held a fashion show in a prison of mannequins in see-through garb, and was committed to designing clothing for “stout, voluptuous women”. Way before green was chic, he designed furniture and objects from found and reused materials, and promoted thrift and recycling with his 50 tips for “How to live well on a shoestring!”


From his New York Times obit in 2002:

One of the most convincing statues is that of the great African-American artist Raven Chanticleer. Mr. Chanticleer explained in a radio interview last year that he included his own likeness ''just in case something should happen to me, if they didn't carry out my wishes and my dreams of this wax museum I would come back and haunt the hell out of them.''

For all his bravado, Mr. Chanticleer was serious about teaching youngsters the importance of black history and economic self-sufficiency. He started a foundation called the Learning Tree that gave toys to needy children. And Mr. Chanticleer was passionate about fixing up Harlem, whether it meant chasing drug dealers off his doorstep or lobbying public officials.”

WNET's “Hidden New York” site has a panoramic clip of the museum.
Back to Haunt the Hell Out of You -- The Splendid and Bragadocious Raven Chanticleer
January 17-April 4, 2010
Triple Candie is located at 500 W. 148th St.
Hours: Thurs-Sun, 1-6 pm

Earthquake's Toll

It didn’t matter which picture in the New York Times’ earthquake portfolio you clicked on yesterday, she was always there, slightly down and to the right, luxuriating in her tub from Kohler in her new Toll Brothers Home.

I don’t quite get why a home builder, especially one named Toll, would want to advertise anywhere near the rubble of an earthquake …

or promote luxury bath fixtures “free with purchase” next to victims desperate for water.

As a reader, I cringed.
I wouldn’t say Atlantis was exactly the best adjacency either.