Signed by Design?

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, 1962
Here are some particularly well-signed album covers. (Hey, how do you sign a download?) Some even had me wondering, if they weren’t, in fact, designed to be signed?

The Beatles, Help!, 1965


Harry Belafonte, Belafonte, 1956


Fleetwood Mac, Rumors, 1977
Designed to be signed?



Stephen Stills, Stills, 1975


Aerosmith, Draw the Line, 1977


Tony Bennett, I Wanna Be Around, 1963


Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 1975


Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, 1980

Images are from auction sites and Joe Merchant's flickr site of close to 500 signed LPs.

Steve & Me

I cannot count myself among those lucky enough to have worked with, interviewed, met, or even to have seen Steve Jobs. The chart, above, is the closest I ever got to the man who changed forever how we think of design.

1n 2002, Fortune magazine’s Andy Serwer wrote a piece about Dell and it’s mounting domination of the PC market. To accompany the story was to be a fairly standard chart showing shifts in market share of the top ten U.S. PC makers.

I plotted the data in various chart formats. The fever chart was very dramatic. It showed Dell zooming from sixth position in 1994 to the number one position five years later. But the bar chart was impressive too. That showed how enormous a chunk of the market Dell owned, selling a quarter of all PCs, up from less than 5% in 1994. The problem was that the fever chart showed movement, but didn’t communicate the size of Dell’s share, while the bar chart showed size, but didn’t visualize Dell outpacing the competition.

Instead of choosing one, or showing both, I decided to try combining the fever and the bar chart. It might not seem like a big deal now, but at the time, what has become know as the “ribbon chart,” was a huge hit. I got lots of letters asking me what software I used, and the magazine got letters to the editor for once about a chart, which didn’t have to do with an error or other misrepresentation.

A few weeks later, I got a voicemail from our writer on the West Coast who covered the technology industry. Steve Jobs wanted to use the chart in a presentation and could I provide a PDF?

A couple of things struck me. One was how validating it is to have God (Gawker's claim not withstanding) ask to use your chart in a presentation. The other was that the CEO interested in using the graphic was certainly not using it to self-congratulate. By late 2001, Apple’s market share had slipped from third to sixth place—exactly where Dell had been when our chart began in 1994, and with the same 4.2% share. I guess the chart made Jobs see red (the color used was coincidental), and an opportunity to somehow “motivate” his audience.

And motivate, he did …

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

For all those who keep meaning to watch the video of the commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, here is the text of his wise words.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

From the Stanford University News. You can view the video there as well.

Nicholas Feltron Wine Label

Bottles of Between Five Bells 2010 Geelong Red Wine sport a most mouthwatering label. It’s an infographic by none other than Nicholas Feltron. Owner of the Australian winery, David Fesq, tapped the info-viz wiz in the hope of achieving “transparency” by sharing vineyard data with the consumer.

Fesq explains the graphic on the label:

This is actually all the data of the various grape varieties as they entered the winery and went through primary fermentation. There are eight axis at play, including the heat of the ferments, the time on skins and the ripeness of the grapes. These are all things I find interesting, and even for a casual drinker, with a little research, they can tell you a lot about the flavours to expect.

As we move forward, each label will be unique to that wine. As they are data driven, no two labels can be the same

As it turns out Fesq and Feltron are cousins (same great-grandfather) which is how, as Fesq explains, he secured the designer’s services, and how, as Feltron explains, he got the gig. I’m still trying to decide who is luckier.

As I am somewhat of a purist—infographics, not wine—I am a bit disappointed by what appears to be a mislabeled key to the left of the graph. As you can see on the details of the label, below, Shiraz is blue in the key, and green (lichen?) on the graph, while Zinfindel is blue on the graph and green on the key. Too bad, because with the graph so clearly labeled, a key was not really even necessary.

Key
Label detail
While I'm at it, (because I probably would not pick on this by itself), what looks like another key to the right of the center graph (detail below), is not a key at all, rather a chart of general information.

Not a key
So what’s an information graphics editor to do? If I had had a glass or two before reading the label, perhaps I would not have noticed. And if the wine is any good, then after a glass or two it might not bother me anymore.

In fact, if the wine is good, then for the next go-round, my expertise is available for barter!


Fesq number-stamping labels for the 2010 Red.

Honey Labels

Belgium, 1920s
These honey labels, mostly from Belgium, date from the 1920s onward. They are just a few of many for sale at bees-and-things.

Today starts the Jewish Year 5772. May it be a sweet one!

Belgium, early 1950s


Belgium, 1920s


Belgium 1950s


Belgium, 1930s


Netherlands, 1980s


Netherlands, 1980s


Belgium, 1930s


Belgium, 1980


Belgium, 1930s


Belgium, 1930s


1980s


Portugal


1950s


Belgium, 1940s


Flemish, contemporary


German label for beeswax

Yoga Stamps

Bhujangasana
Cobra Pose

How, you may ask, do I dream up some of these posts? Well, this one I literally dreamt—as in, while I was asleep.


In my dream, I saw posters on the wall of a building that were blowups of vintage yoga postage stamps from the 1960s or 70s. When I googled “yoga stamps” the next day, I learned that it’s not exactly a popular philatelic subject. There are stamps featuring Swamis and Maharishis, but on the subject of yoga itself, I found only this series issued in India in 1991. The stamps depict four asanas (poses) rendered in a straightforward, almost clinical style. They are nothing like the stamps of my dreams, but, quietly lovely in their own right. I think they’d be cool as posters!

Dhanurasana
Bow Pose


Ustrasana
Camel Pose


Utthita Trikonasana
Extended Triangle Pose

iPhone Fashion Sketches

Last week was Fashion Week in NYC and stunning models were stopping traffic everywhere. This week’s traffic choke-hold is the UN General Assembly meeting. From the ridiculous to the absurd, I’d say.

I’m finding the Brushes app for iPhone quite addicting. I still have sketches from my trip to Croatia to post, but I figured these Spring 2012 looks have a much shorter shelf life.

Marc Jacobs


Max Azria, BCBG


Oscar de la Renta


Bill Blass


Rodarte


Calvin Klein


Ralph Lauren

Wasser, Gas

I was drawn to them right away—the curious primary-colored plaques affixed to the buildings in Berlin. Each was a deliberate, yet mysterious typographic composition of letters and numerals, with the occasional word “wasser” or “gas.” Was I unaware of a utilities signage project by Schwitters and Lissitzky?
International Dada Archive, Univ. of Iowa
Of course these found Merz poems actually mean something, and
Dr. Lee D. Han, a professor at the University of Tennessee, seems to have cracked the code.

Dr. Han recently visited Berlin to give a presentation about microscopic simulation and mass evacuation to a group of university transportation researchers. Scroll down to read about the puzzle he so proudly describes solving. He even provides a diagram!





From Professor Han's blog:

I’ll have to really sit down and write more about my short visit to Berlin. But one thing I want to report here is finally having time to solve this little puzzle. Basically, I had noticed these little placards on the side of the streets, on walls, and on poles with a “T” shaped marking typically in the center of the placard and with some numbers all around it. I’ve seen them in Vienna, Budapest, here in Berlin, and later in Sarajevo. I thought instinctively that they have something to do with pipelines, but never had the time to look closely. Well, this time I took the time and figured out that these are markers for the access “hole” for water, gas, hydrant, etc.

The word “Wasser” is water in German, which is not hard. But the “T” in the middle really means, I think, an access point to the water line 2.1 meters from this placard (perpendicular to the face of the placard) and 2.2 meters to the left of the placard. If the access point is to the right, the number would be written on the right side. If it is behind the placard, which is not uncommon, the number 2.1 would be negative.

I think this system must have been around for many a decade and widely employed in many European countries. As utility workers walk or even drive around, they can see these placards and easily identify the access points. There must also be a nice GIS-based asset management system with everyone of these access points inventoried, which is not hard as they are already clearly identified.

I’m sure the simple rules of these placards are common knowledge among utility workers. But it is still interesting to figure them out. As it turned out, everyone I asked along my trip acknowledged that not only they didn’t know what these placards are or how they work, but most of them never even noticed these little colorful markers. Perhaps somewhere on Wikipedia or a website in some other language all this is explained in detail. But this is where you read about it first. :)

Danke Herr Professor!