For as long as I can remember, I've created, made, doodled, drawn and designed.
As a child, I made myself cardboard shoes, hole punched and laced and probably stuck with some Sellotape for good measure (my go to fix for most things back then). Great until you needed to go out in the rain and not surprisingly they never caught on.
I was, however learning a valuable lesson.
" Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. " Said some bloke called Steve Jobs
Design surrounds us, but it's not particularly the fashionable, latest trend and luxury design that I'm interested in, it's the everyday design taken for granted, quietly communicating with us as we go about our daily business that fascinates me the most.
It's a sign
Have you ever considered the road signs that we pass each day? Probably not. Why would you? But I bet you can picture a motorway sign or a road traffic symbol in your mind's eye.
Take a look at the font below. It somehow feels familiar. Friendly even and I guarantee you will have come across it once or twice...
Created with meticulous detail and thought, our road signs and the font they use, Transport were originally designed in the late 50's by graphic designers Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. A system of carefully spaced letters, symbols and colours that subconsciously communicate to us in the blink of an eye as we speed past. They were designed to almost not be noticed, yet they do their job incredibly well.
Left into Privet Drive
David Kindersley was a British stone letter-carver and typeface designer. He submitted his own typeface design to the Ministry of Transport for the redesign of the country's road signs. and although his font was deemed more legible, the all-caps typeface was passed over for that of Kinneir and Calvert.
However, that didn't stop him creating work that you've more than likely come across, including many UK street signs up and down the country, that use his Kindersley font and one very famous one, in particular...
Next stop: the underground
How about The London Underground Tube map? You've probably stared at it countless times, trying to calculate your journey, but ever wondered how it came about?
It was designed in the 30's by Harry Beck an underground electrical draughtsman. Look at the map again. You see it now don't you — an electrical circuit? He threw scale and accuracy out of the window to create a neat, easy to understand diagram of simple coloured lines. that today has become a bit of an icon. Simple but effective.
It's not surprising that these designs and type have endured. There's no two ways about it, good design that works will stand the test of time.
So what do I take from all this? Well, apart from the fact I've discovered I'm a massive geek (I love road signs and Harry Potter for goodness sake!) I also love the fact that design is an everyday problem just waiting to be solved. Quite often the solution is the simplest one, usually only discovered once you've discarded all the bells and whistles!
For now, I'll leave you with a little tongue in cheek motto that makes me chuckle 'Good design goes straight to heaven. Bad design goes everywhere'. It's true that.
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