These beautiful posters were a little better concealed than most design masterpieces: they’ve been on the walls in hidden tunnels in Notting Hill Gate Station for more than 50 years, and as a snapshot of advertising at the time, they’re unparalleled. The posters date from 1956-1959 when the station’s lifts were removed and replaced by escalators.

I thought this video was a great look into what we do as graphic designers.

Looks like every web designer’s arch nemesis web browser, Internet Explorer 6, has finally kicked the bucket, at least ceremonially. A funeral will be held today, Thursday, March 4, 2010 by the Aten Design Group of Denver, CO.

Released in 2001, IE6 was the standard for Web surfing for most users until 2006, when Microsoft launched IE7. The most recent version, Internet Explorer 8, followed in March 2009.

The web has evolved so much over the last ten years, and old browsers like IE6 have a hard time running many of the new interactive applications like video and voice, unlike their spry youthful competitors. In fact, IE6 really isn’t dead yet. It still occupies 19.8% of the browser market (as of Feb 2010) much to the dismay of fellow web designers who have to spend countless hours tweaking and wrangling code to comply with the decrepit old geezer. Looking back, I guess I owe a slight debt of gratitude to the deceased… it taught me to be a better coder.

Rest in peace old friend.

The underground subway map in London may be one of the ultimate examples of form following function… one of the keystone principles of effective graphic design.

The fantastic Tube map that is recognized across the world was the brainchild of Underground electrical draftsman, Harry Beck, who produced this imaginative and amazingly simple design back in 1933.

Beck based the map on the circuit diagrams he drew for his day job, stripping the huge Tube network down to basic forms.

The result was an instantly clear and comprehensible chart that would become an essential guide to London – and a template for transport maps all over the world.

Beck’s revolutionary design, with certain modifications and additions, survives to the present day and is set to serve London Underground and its millions of customers for many years to come.

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read more about Objectified at director Gary Hustwit’s post about the film.

Sol Sender tells the story of conception and birth of the Obama 08 logo, including the strategy behind it, developmental concepts and finalist designs for the identity not chosen by the campaign. Sender, now a strategist with design agency VSA Partners in Chicago, was creative director and principal of his own design firm, Sender LLC, when he was hired to create the campaign logo. In the fall of 2006, Sender and his team were engaged to do the work by MODE, a Chicago-based motion design studio with an existing relationship with David Axelrod, the Obama campaigns chief strategist. Obama 08 campaign took on design responsibility for the logo in mid-2007, and extended the identity across multiple applications.

Part 1

Part 2

{F is for Fail}

There’s a great interview at CreativeBits with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo. That simple Apple with the chunk bitten out is as iconic as the company and products it represents. The logo has undergone several tweaks over the years, from the original rainbow to the aqua version that accompanied the original iMacs to the glassy version we see today.

Fanatics will remember that the logo was introduced with the Apple II in 1977. Rob talks about this and other insights into the design’s history, like the fact that he originally presented only two versions of the logo to the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak): One with and one without the “bite.” Other tidbits include why the original design had stripes and what the bite really represents. It’s an interview worth reading.

Most people generally love Flash. It looks cool if used properly and it can add some zip and zing to your site, hey… it’s “flashy” afterall.

But from an SEO standpoint, in the past Flash has left much to be desired. Search engines like Google had a difficult time indexing the text content from Flash files since it was sort of “trapped” inside the file itself and not readily available in the HTML page’s code where searchbots and indexing spiders like to poke around.

In the past, legitimate work arounds have been few and far between. This made things extremely difficult for businesses who wanted to create a rich user experience with a Flash home page or navigation menu. So, these businesses often sacrificed rankings for the user experience, since they could rarely have both while still following all of the guidelines set forth by the search engines.

Recently, Google announced that they can now index “textual content in SWF files of all kinds” and “extract URLs embeded in Flash.” This is great news for web designers and owners of Flash websites. In the past, we would approach the use of Flash carefully, usually using it only for a visual punch, so we may be more inclined to pull it out of our design tool belt more often. Google’s advancements are no panacea solution however. There is still no substitute for a web page’s natural keyword-rich text content when it comes to playing nice with Google’s indexing spiders.

In truth, Google has actually been able to hamfistedly index text content and follow links inside Flash for years. Even with the recent improvements, SEO with Flash isn’t perfect, though there are many techniques and practices which can help significantly. Here’s an article which outlines many key points to consider when considering search engine optimization with Flash.

Again, Flash is a great tool when used properly and thankfully it is becoming more and more friendly to search engines… so we’ll certainly continue to use it for visual impact when appropriate.

We love it when everyone learns to play nice.