Yes, it still matters where the apostrophe goes. (Should it be there in the first place?)
This man has had an incredible influence over the graphics and design all around us for the last twenty years.
Okay, so an image is worth a thousand words. But sometimes a good paragraph is better than a book full of images. So why are words increasingly treated with such disdain? Words and the spaces between them still matter, damn it! And at Screenset we still care about them.
Competitors of ours. Well, not really. We are tiny, they are huge. We bow before them. Their work is incredible. They reinvented digital imagery throughout the nineties. All hail.
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website
Hated by web designers the world over. Why? Because sites should be about the people using them, and the fact is that many of the bells and whistles in the web world — Flash to name but one particular offender — get in the way of simple, robust and easy-to-use sites that behave as people expect. This isn’t a message that many designers and agencies want to hear. Their reaction? Shoot the messenger.
Saul Bass was the first designer to really get to grips with producing motion graphics that prepared an audience into the world they were about to enter. A lot of the whizz bang stuff we see on television and at the cinema today owe a lot to Saul Bass. Many have followed, but he blazed the trail.
Another hugely influential designer.
PageMaker was the first DTP package. It started the desktop design revolution. Together with the Apple LaserWriter it brought design to the masses in the same way the printing press spread books to the masses. As a consequence it also helped inflict some of the most appalling design on the world, as everybody thought that all you needed was the software. Hey, all good things have a dark side!
Today we use InDesign and Quark. We love InDesign for its typographical control, its great integration of type and graphics features, and its onscreen separations display. We love Quark for ... well, we just do. Like you love your idiot brother or that embarrassing drooling elderly relative. How can you not? They’re family.
ILM - Industrial Light and Magic
Regardless of opinions about the Star Wars, George Lucas was a visionary when it came to foreseeing how digital technology would revolutionise film production and sound. And the computer graphics group that started life as an ILM department would eventually become a little company called Pixar.
ILM also (indirectly) gave us Photoshop. A guy called John Knoll was working at ILM and needed a software package to manipulate images for matte paintings. He convinced his brother, Thomas Knoll, to expand an application called Display that he was working on at the time. And thus Display slowly evolved and became Photoshop when the Knoll brothers took it to Adobe. John Knoll still works at ILM. Thomas Knoll still works on Photoshop.
Another company that has continually pushed forward in the field of motion graphics and design, both on television and the cinema. Hey! They’re associates, just like us. The similarity ends there. They are huge. We are small.
Forget all the reams of fluff that have been spouted; a design is about communicating an idea into the mind of the person who sees the design, whether it’s a brand logo, advertising, an exhibition stand, a product brochure or a web site. That idea might be “buy me”, or “we are a reputable company”, or “we’ll make you look good”, or any of a hundred other possibilities, but the principle is always the same. So you can wade through gibberish like “leverage”, “repositioning”, “brand values”, “audience profiling” and “visual audits” if you really want to, but keep something in mind: people with less to say tend to be the ones who dream up all the jargon and pseudo-babble to hide this fact. Edward Tufte is about communication: transmitting ideas from one brain to another, as clearly and accurately as possible.
A great American designer.
Danny Kleinman started designing the title sequences to Bond movies with Goldeneye. (Taking over from Maurice Binder, another great.) We love the titles to Day Another Day. Great motion design. Shame about the film. (But then, good design will frequently be a front for something quite dreadful lurking in the background!)
Mr Curtis reinvigorated motion design on the web, at time when it seemed that all Flash was good for was tedious intro sequences and crappy rollover buttons.
An excellent creative diversion for when one needs a little distraction from a day that’s not going too well.
When all other distractions have failed and the last best hope is a little humour.
From hot metal to Postscript, Truetype and Opentype fonts. This company has been through the lot. Where would we be without them?
Print and creative visual communications in four colours. CMYK; cyan, magenta, yellow and black. (Hang on ... they’ve forgotten about spot colours. Never mind. And what about Hexachrome?)
DTG: Design, Type and Graphics
What list would be complete without Pixar? The company that showed that just because it’s done with computers doesn’t mean that it can’t have the same heart, soul and wonderful design sensibilities as the original hand drawn stuff.
Beautiful French design.