iancul

Beautiful work for IKEA by Karmarama. Be sure to check the tv ads (and the rest of their excellent portfolio). Freakin’ hilarious. It would be a pleasure to see this kind of advertising in Romania. Bold, fun, effective, no BIG prices and useless information about the product. And no big logo.

(via PPA Marketing)

After The World Of Logotypes book, here’s another great resource, still from the 70’s.“Top Symbols And Trademarks Of The World” was published in 1973, written by Franco Maria Ricci & Corinna Ferrari. There were actually two volumes. The books themselves are very hard to find now, maybe if you’re lucky you’ll find them in some old bookshops (like AceJet was, with a similar book - preface by Paul Rand).

Fortunately, you can view all the pages on the TypoGabor website (along with other great examples of design). I’ve made pdfs to save you the clicking: download volume 1 and volume 2 :) (8 and 17 megs).

Here are some images to make you drool:

(thanks Alin for finding the TypoGabor website)

Superb photo by David J. Nightingale.

(photo from Chromasia)

Nice tribute to Jozef Muller-Brockmann (feeble wiki, it’s weird that there are so few good articles about one of the greatest and most influential designers). Made by Gary Butcher (Creative Director for Motion Graphics at Apple, it seems).

(via brockmann)

(via ready 2 spark)

In spite of the plethora of logo books nowadays, good ones are but a handful (there’s a paucity - smallness of number, quantity - of good design books, contrary to what Amazon would let you think). Al Cooper’s World of Logotypes is one of these, first published in 1976, then several years later, now unfortunately out of print (still available here and there, if you’re lucky). It seems that it had 2 or 3 volumes.

The logos are all in black and white, most of them have been replaced or redesigned since then, some just “passed away” together with the corresponding companies. Some of them are easily dated, but most are ageless, strong, showing that those years’ designers where thinking more about what a good logotype is. Not to mention that the majority are designed by grid, something less and less used now in the age of online photo and vector editing software. The book proves once more that good logos don’t need no “web 2.0″ effects. It seems that with the easiness of Photoshop and Illustrator comes great responsability (glows and shadows weren’t exactly easy to ink on the drawing board), or tempting the path to the web 2.0 flashy design it is, as wise Yoda would say :P

Eric Carl kindfully scanned the book (not sure which volume this is or even if it’s the whole book) and posted it on his Flickr. The guys at Logoblink helpfully made a pdf. You’ve got to download it (you can find other mirrors on Logoblink’s site).

Here are some images as appetizer:

Striking poster from Leonard Hoss.

(via Grain Edit)

Last night my blog came out as the 3rd Best Design/Creative Blog (link in romanian) at RoBlogFest (the competition for the best and most popular romanian blogs). Even if I wasn’t interested in participating, I can’t say that I’m not glad. Appreciations are always welcome as long as you don’t let them fool you.

I want to thank Diana (www.creativecheaters.com - another great blog about advertising, design and especially ideas, that came close to taking my place :P ) for subscribing my blog in the competition. All the fame and glory (read traffic :P) should go to her :) And thanks Oana, she almost started a crusade in my name, saying I should’ve won :)) It’s better to be the third or the second, that means you’ll try harder than the first ;) Actually, third is the best, as Jerry Seinfeld says. Thanks go to the jury as well.

All in all, it took this prize to make me think again about why I’m writing this blog and how I want it to be like. I’m still not very sure about the “why” part, but the blog really needs the redesign I’ve been thinking about for quite some time now. Either do something right or don’t do it at all.

The biggest change will be the name, since “ibarbar”, even though an abbreviation of my name, hard to find elsewhere, lacks the ease of pronunciation and memorability a good name should have. So I’ve already bought the .com domain for the new name, I already have the logo, now I have to redesign the blog. Since I’m no webdesigner I’ll have to either be incredible lucky and find a good wordpress theme, sluggishly design one of my own or ask somebody’s help :) Anyway, I’m hoping it’ll be up and running soon enough. In the mean time, should you have any ideas, comments or tips, I’d be glad to hear them, as always.

Thanks for reading.