Attention to detail knows no limits

You’ve seen them. Blockbusters with big stars and bigger budgets that place in the distant past. Directors and designers take painstaking care to capture every detail of the era accurately, from the beading on a flapper dress, to the set design, to that vintage Rolls Royce rolling down the street. All the details are in place. Except one.

Fonts.

“It drives me crazy!” says font designer Mark Simonson. “They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure the hairstyle is right in a period piece. The corset has the right number of loops.  The set looks perfectly like the 1800s. And then they drop Helvetica into it.”

Back to the Future: How did Helvetica (1957, top) and Eurostile (1962, middle) end up on a tombstone in the year 1885?

Who Knew?

Helvetica, as type-lovers know well, wasn’t designed until the 1950s. Call us cranky, but it is a funny piece of inconsistency when you look closely. In fact, fonts are consistently mistmatched in a surprising amount of popular movies. Almost Famous mis-designs Rolling Stone‘s cover. Back To The Future uses Helvetica on a tombstone from 1886. And Raiders of the Lost Ark is type-perfect in every sequence save one: the map montages.

Sorry, Indy: In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) which is set in 1936, we see ITC Serif Gothic (designed in 1972).

Typography stumps even the most careful filmmakers. 

Take Titanic. James Cameron had the Herculean task of making the film accurate. He has a reputation for being a perfectionist, and with good reason. When an astrophysicist complained that the stars in the night sky weren’t aligned  as they would have been on April 15, 1912, Cameron re-edited the scene to reflect the proper skyline.

One thing he didn’t get right? The typography. Cameron is what we call a Helvetica-offender, a filmmaker who uses the font in scenes that take place before its creation. Check out the dials on the ship. To most viewers, they’re just numbers. But to typography purists, it’s like pulling out a Blackberry on the Titanic. That’s just wrong.

Mad Men is another offender. Lauded by historians for its point-perfect depiction of the 1960s, Mad Men makes a mess of its fonts. Eagle-eyed viewers have spotted many fonts from the future in shots of the print ads, including Fenice (1980), Balmoral (1978), Amazone (1958), ITC Kabel (1975), Bookman Old Style (1989), and Gotham (2002). Mark Simonson wrote this typographical takedown of Mad Men in his blog.

Oops: these lipstick ads feature Fenice (1980) with Balmoral (1978) for the script type.

As he writes here, “Whoops—Zapfino (1998). I guess they use Macs.”

Hey, nothing’s perfect. Sometimes being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy — something that gives you a bad reaction to otherwise enjoyable moments. Is this obsessive-compulsive nitpicking, or is there something to take away here?

Well for one thing, it shows that while filmmakers take great pains to get certain forms of design right, such as costuming, cars, and set pieces, typography often falls by the wayside. It happens all the time. Other notable films with font bloopers include The King’s Speech, Gangs of New York, The Artist, L.A. Confidential, Chocolat, Ed Wood, and Good Night, and Good Luck. It does seem to be an overlooked detail that many type lovers notice.

The logo and photo look fine, but the main headline is set in ITC Galliard (1978), which was never featured in Rolling Stone.

Helvetica, the fall back font

Tellingly, many of these errors are based on Helvetica popping up where it shouldn’t. This trend shows the all-encompassing reach of Helvetica, the font of the 21st century. It has become so widespread and well-known that it often serves as the default font when designers need something clean and clear, regardless of historical accuracy. Like we wrote, Helvetica is the one font to rule them all. 

D’oh! The CBS News sign is in Helvetica, which wasn’t created yet.

We may be font geeks, but you don’t need to be to get it right these days. Historical information on typography is easier to find than ever. And many true vintage fonts are now available in electronic form. So hey, Hollywood: watch your bloopers and fix your fonts. Don’t you know that typecasting is never good for anyone?

Designers never want to think of ourselves as janitors, but in the 1970′s they cleaned up one huge mess. The subway. How can attention to design tame the beast of a system that millions of New Yorkers and non-English-speaking tourists use every day?

An evolution, not a plan.

As the subways evolved, the signage in the New York City subway system became an incomprehensible maze of bad directions and confusing messages. At one point New York Times architecture writer Paul Goldberger declared that the signs were so confusing he wished that they weren’t there at all.

Designers changed all that. With the help of Helvetica, they tamed the beast — Davids against the underground Goliath. Great design took a bewildering labyrinth and created a modern system built to last. The story of New York’s subway powerfully shows that design is not a product of its environment — environment is a product of its design.

It’s A Helluva Town

All designers are familiar with the conflict between the purity of design and the messiness of the real world. And New York in the 1970s was messy.

“The subway made no sense,” said New York historian Paul Shaw. “There was so much clutter and so little consistency.”

Consistency! The magic word. The signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of typography, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. Last week we wrote about brand guidelines. The New York City subway had none. It needed a uniform, and fast.

Say what? Confusing signs of the old subway.

Designing a system

The city, then under the forward-thinking mayorship of John Lindsay, had an idea. They hired the design firm Unimark International to untangle this visual mess. Designers Noorda and Vignelli made it look easy. They didn’t just design signs, they designed a system. They gave the system its sans-serif typeface (the sign-makers could not yet print Helvetica, so they settled initially for Standard Medium). The big idea was to color-code and number the various lines, so goodbye IRT and hello number 4,5,6. “Every line a different color, every stop a dot.”, Vignelli said. The color-coded disks made for simplified, easy-to-read signage. Noorda and Vignelli wrote crystal clear guidelines in a Standards Manual, a document recently uncovered in a garage and now treated as the Rosetta Stone of urban planning.

“It’s pretty much a design bible as far as standards manuals go,” Skourtis says.

Thinking about how people think

Vignelli and Noordis’ design was not merely intended to look good — which it does — but to simplify navigation of the subway for the passenger. They upheld another design principal: you gotta be able to use it.  Like all great designers, they placed themselves inside the minds of the people who would be using their product.

“The subway rider should be given only information at the point of decision,” proclaimed the designers. “Never before. Never after.” The designers anticipated the exact moment when you would need a certain piece of information, and they give it to you exactly at that point. A wonder of precision, the Standards Manual even addresses the heights of conductors with and without hats. Vignelli went a step further and in 1972, designed the extraordinary subway map that we know today. He’s still at it, and recently designed “The Weekender” for digital devices.

One thing that wasn’t uniform? The mosaics on each subway stop. These were created in 1904, without a streamlined system (branding guidelines, people!). During the subway reboot, the designers decided it would be too much trouble to replace them and opted to keep them as they were. For once, inconsistency was a good call. The subway as a whole is completely streamlined, but each stop carries the personal touch its creator gave it. Just because something is in uniform doesn’t mean it can’t also be unique.

Some things have changed in the last fifty years. Standard Medium has been (rather famously) replaced by Helvetica. In an effort to discourage graffiti, signs now feature white lettering on black, as opposed to Unimark’s prescribed black-on-white. It looks better today than ever.

Designers know: order trumps chaos. The best design is often invisible, so clean and efficient that we don’t even realize the way it directs our experience. As the old saying goes, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Anyone who rides the NYC subways knows how well this works.

Think of your brand identity as a uniform for your business. 

“Uniform” literally means “One Form.” An actual uniform helps identify a person from a particular company—think the brown uniform of the UPS guys, a white nurse’s uniform, or the staff in blue at Best Buy. Clients know what to expect from your company. At Network9, we know that visual consistency not only reinforces your message. It builds trust. And, people put their money where their trust is.

But trust is a fickle thing, and building it takes some thought, planning and effort. As fleeting as something like a label or a Facebook profile picture may seem, its influence can echo much further than one glance. If your colors are helter-skelter and you use a different font every few months, clients will get the clue that you don’t have your act together. That’s why brand guidelines are essential: your fonts, image style, logo, and graphics should all follow these guidelines. You should be visually consistent across different mediums, from your newsletter to your business cards to your Pinterest page.

Familiarity does not breed contempt.

Sending consistent visual cues helps people become familiar with your brand, creating a safe and comfortable experience. Think of McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter whether the McDonald’s is in New York or New Mexico: the experience is virtually identical. You can count on those red and yellows, uniform packaging, and even the size of your Big Mac is regulated. Mickey Dee’s proves it. Consistency is king.

This strategy works for small companies too. Work diligently to achieve brand consistency. It will do wonders for your business. So throw on that uniform for your business. Here’s a brand that is dressed for business.

Etsy – Gets It Right Across The Board

Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade crafts and vintage finds, is a master of brand consistency. Check out how they stick to their visual formula across different social media platforms, choosing images and a writing style (their virtual voice) that are tailor-made to reflect their corporate philosophy:

Facebook

Etsy keeps true to its earthy, orange-based color palette on its Facebook page and also highlights its unique crafts with the picture of the cloth bird. Its font, Minister EF Book, is a riff off literary typefaces that is coined and owned by Etsy, and appears on all of its digital promotional tools.

Google+

Etsy, in addition to always using their orange color template and E logo, always highlights a different handmade product on each of their networks. This shows that you can add variety to your marketing while still achieving brand consistency. In this case, it sends the message that Etsy as a brand is like the products it sells — one of a kind.

Twitter

Etsy’s gift cards use a hand-drawn icon and jaunty text that speaks to their clientele. Etsy walks the walk. They sell products with a personal touch, and their brand has a personal touch too.

Etsy’s signup form to create a shop, uses the had-drawn icon that appear in their gift cards and other places. They even give their users a piece of their branding with the sale tag below that vendors can put on their sites. Its design is bright, fun, and sophisticated —just like Etsy.

Even if you’re not as big a company as Etsy, you can follow these same principles. Play like the big boys. Act like a franchise. Get dressed for business — and wear your uniform proudly.

Just Do It. Think Different. I’m Lovin’ It. Open Happiness. Achieving stickiness is the Holy Grail of a corporate tagline. But how do they do it? There is no one way to get the magic words, but we explored the hows and whys of several famous lines.

Did you know “Just Do It” was inspired by a mass-murderer?

“Yup, it’s true. An uplifting and positive tagline was inspired by the last words of a criminal,” esteemed Nike copywriter Dan Wieden admits in Art and Copy. Gary Gilmore, the notorious spree-killer, uttered the words “Let’s do it” just before a firing squad executed him in Utah in 1977.

“I liked the ‘do it’ part. I realized that with slight tweaking, it could fit for Nike. We thought, ‘Yeah. That’d work.’ And then it exploded. People started reading things into it much more than sport.”

Whoa. Seriously? That story got us thinking about the genesis of other celebrated taglines over the years. Where does someone get the idea to tag a soda “Open Happiness”? And how exactly does one dream up a “So easy, a caveman could do it” slogan for selling car insurance?

At Network9 we talk a lot about how a truly great tagline isn’t just clever. It serves as a statement of purpose, a lifestyle, and even inspires employees of that company when they go to work. As Carmen says, “If you work at Apple, you know you have to Think Different. If you don’t, go work for Microsoft.”

Ouch. But it’s true: a great tagline that captures the philosophy of your business hits an emotional bullseye with your customers. That’s why Burger King had so much success with “Have It Your Way” and flopped with “Where’s Herb?” One celebrates the customer and their freedom of choice, pointing out the difference between them and the other guy. The other one…well, who even knows what “Where’s Herb?” means? It didn’t show a specific benefit to buying a burger.

Open happiness 

The best taglines use simple writing to say more. “A Diamond is Forever” implies eternal love along with the shiny rock. And “You’re In Good Hands” is about a company that takes care of you, not car insurance. “You have to be a true believer in what you’re selling,” says Milton Glaser, who created the ”I ♥ NY” tagline. “If you don’t have a change-the-world outlook, you’re doing it wrong.” The much-copied visual tagline has achieved ultimate sticky status because it has a simple puzzle to solve, which makes it even more memorable.

Taglines have shaped our culture to a huge degree. You might thank (or curse) the ad makers who dreamed up the lines that get stuck in your head, from “It’s Miller Time!” to “Where’s the Beef?” or “It’s a spicy meat ball.” But these real life Mad Men (and women)—and the ways they find inspiration—can teach us a lot. When it comes to a tagline, you have a few words to do a lot. It should be no more than three words. Two is even better. One word? You’re a genius. Don’t we all want to own a tagline as good as “Just Do It? You can just do it too.

“It’s Not Even English…It Worked!”

Look for something that has visceral, immediate impact — even if it isn’t grammatically correct. “Think Different” isn’t grammatically correct, a fact Steve Jobs grappled with before deciding that “Think Differently” just didn’t pack the same punch. It wasn’t well, thinking different. Good call. Here’s our Pinterest board of Apple’s finest vintage ads. 

Some of the most successful taglines came close to meeting an early death. Wendy’s almost canned the “Where’s The Beef?” ads just days before they were put on the air. Many people on the “Got Milk?” team thought it was lazy, not to mention grammatically incorrect.

“It’s not even English,” recalls ad honcho Mr. Silverstein, expressing his initial distaste for the idea. He gleefully adds, “It worked!”

Get everything you can out of your tagline. It should be a philosophy, a call to action, aspirational and (how else to say it?) cool. As Maxwell House Coffee might say, it should be good to the last drop.

Think Different

The best advertising is based on big, simple ideas and powerful emotions. Taglines permeate our culture, from art to journalism to politics. What are Reagan’s “It’s morning in America” or Obama’s “Yes, we can”, and “Change We Can Believe In”—if not killer taglines? What was Romney’s tagline?

Exactly.

As Presidents and businesses alike can attest, a tagline helps you make the leap from mere mortal to icon. It changes you from a company into The Company You Keep. It turns you from a product into a lifestyle. It gives your people something to aspire to. Who exemplifies this better than Harley Davidson, whose “Live to Ride” is not just a slogan, but a way of life?

Think about it. A lot.

When creating a tagline for our clients, we brainstorm for hours. And hours, talking about the key benefits of the product, and why it’s different. We talk about who the company is, what it stands for, and what core idea it embodies. We write down a million words and phrases and talk about them ad nauseum, until we distill it down to something that everyone says “That’s it. That’s who we are.” You can do the same. Your tagline is your identity. Make it a good one. And make it one you can stick with.

Just do it.

Spring is here. It’s always a good time to get the dust bunnies out from your site to refresh and refine your web presence. We took a broom and dustpan to our own site, and thought we’d share the steps we took to make our site current and running better.

1. Check the simple things

It’s a drag when you click on a broken link or encounter an error message on someone’s site. Or if they are still advertising a promotion that ended months ago. Make sure none of your content has reached its expiration date. Check your links, forms and widgets to be sure they are functioning. Google loves websites that are frequently updated. We were surprised at the number of broken links on N9. Your portfolio should include your newest work, your bio may need an update and your latest blog post definitely shouldn’t be from 2012. Which brings us to…

2. Start a blog

We’ve said it before. Blogs add value. Period. Many people start a blog but then life and work get in the way, and it goes to the back of the closet. This is a marketing opportunity to boost your SEO and attract new visitors with interesting and fresh content. Article writing is like planting a garden; sow the seeds now, add fertilizer, clean out the weeds, and enjoy the spectacular results that come in the future.

3. Already have a blog? Check your keywords, tags and titles

Win the SEO game. One of the big reasons to blog is to boost your search engine presence. At N9, we checked every post to be sure they had the proper keywords, tags, and page descriptions. We discovered quite a few posts that didn’t. Sound like mumbo jumbo? Let’s break it down.

Tags should be “general, relatable and repeatable,” says Network 9-er Brigitte.

You should aim for 5 tags to a post, max. Keywords, on the other hand, should be more specific to the article. If your business is located in a particular city, always be sure to add that to the keywords. Network9, for example, always uses “NYC” along with our keywords to help people looking for a NYC design studio. Make sure your page titles are strategic. That will ensure that your blog is doing the maximum work for your website and for your business. Read more about SEO in our post.

4. Get Mobile.

People browse the Internet on their phones just as often (or more) than they do on their desktop. So when they check out your site from their iPhone, why not give them a mobile version of your site that is slimmed down and has just the info a mobile searcher would want? Network9 just went mobile, with a conversion tool that allows us to convert any website to mobile. Feel free to check out ours or contact us for help, or investigate other ways to make sure your site is Phone Functional.

5. Check your site speed: be a speed demon

Sometimes people’s sites will be slow as molasses and they’ll have no idea because they never thought to check their site speed. Don’t let that be you. People are impatient; if your site takes too long to load, they’ll click away and go somewhere else. And just as bad, Google incurs a penalty for slow sites that hurts your SEO. At Network9 we used Pingdom.com to see how our site was doing. We needed a few tweaks in the back end, so we engaged a speed demon professional to help us interpret the results and make the changes. We got the need for speed. So should you.

6. Different browsers, different results?

Have you checked your site on another browser lately? Sometimes sites look great on Safari, decent on Chrome, and terrible on FireFox. Remember that your visitors are using different internet browsers, and you want your site to render the way it should on all platforms. Make sure your site looks as good on Opera as its does on Internet Explorer. That way, it will be pleasing to the eye for every potential visitor — and most importantly, it will work.

7. Convert to WordPress

You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about WordPress, including from us. WordPress is a content management system that lets you manage your content and control your site, has tons of plugins and widgets and is highly supported by the development community. You don’t have to be an engineer wizard to figure it out. Take your website into your own hands. Convert your site to WordPress.

8. How’s your social media footprint?

Check your social media pulse. What are your goals? Where could you make an impact? Are your updates frequent enough? Do your widgets work? Is your content unique? Think of three ways you can expand and improve your social media presence. Get out there and engage.

Network9 wanted to expand our own social media footprint, so we went for it. We wrote about it along the way, and the lessons we learned can help you with your own site. Here’s our cheat sheet called Batting 1000 to outline the steps we took to get for 99 Twitter followers to 1000. Our second article shares how we got to 2000.

9. Check out the competition

We took a look at other design firms to see how we measure up. Who are your competitors, and how are their websites working for them? See what they’re doing and make sure you’re doing it — better.

Get your site out of hibernation. Wake it up. Get the weeds out. Spring is here, so lets get cleaning.

The Boss’ butt. There, we said it. Forget J.Lo or Beyonce — Bruce Springsteen gets our vote for the most iconic ass in rock’n'roll.

We’re not just being cheeky. The Born in the USA album cover, also known as the butt shot scene ’round the world, had something truly special about it. The image — and Bruce’s assets — instantly became a classic. Bruce’s butt stands alongside The Rolling Stone’s mouth and tongue, or Elvis’ hips, as a body part that became a rock’n'roll icon.

“Most of Springsteen’s biographers and music critics are men,” says Carmen, chief Network9-er and Bruce diehard. “They talk about his intelligence, his writing, his music, and his charisma, which of course, are mind-boggling, but they don’t talk about how gorgeous he really is, front AND back. Annie Liebowitz really got it.”

Ass aside, let’s look at the album design

Annie Liebowitz photographed the iconic Born in the USA cover, which was the perfect visual language for Bruce’s music. Below is an outtake from Springsteen’s session shot from the front that didn’t make the cut. It’s a terrific photo and iconic in its own right. So why didn’t it make the cover? In other words, why the butt?

The one that didn’t get used. Still amazing.

The final image has two elements: Bruce’s body and the flag. Both images are fragments of the whole, shown close up. There is no need for stars on the American flag — we fill them in. Bruce’s blue jeans provide the blue in the red, white and blue imagery. The body could be anonymous, but we know it is Bruce himself. Decked out in the rock’n'roll uniform of blue jeans and a white t-shirt with a confident stance, this is the Bruce that men want to be and women want to be with.

The hat

The red baseball cap stuffed into his back pocket belonged to his old pal Lance Larson from New Jersey. When Larson’s father died, he gave Bruce his dad’s favorite red baseball cap. Springsteen decided to wear it on the cover of Born in the USA in tribute. He told Larson that his father would always live on in music history. How right he was.

What can we learn about design?

Shooting Bruce from behind “shows a unique point of view,” says Carmen. At the time, the shot caused controversy (what’s rock’n'roll without a little uproar?). Was Springsteen facing the flag in admiration, or was placing his butt in front of it a subversive gesture? Some even suggested he was urinating on the flag, because in Born in the USA Bruce points out how America neglects our veterans, and is not the rah rah anthem Ronald Reagan thought it was. But we think it’s more about creating drama by leaving something out.

We learned a few things form studying this cover, once we got past its obvious qualities.

• Look at things differently.
• Try another point of view.
• Make objects larger, or smaller.
• Focus on something unique and interesting.
• Show emotion.
• Be authentic.
• Leave something to the imagination.

As great album design should, the image reflects the content of his music, Bruce’s attitude, and creates an emotional response, even with all his clothes on and not showing his face. It works because it is authentic, which is a messaging strategy all bosses can learn from The Boss. So be like Bruce. Show off your assets.

A truly great brand is more than a business or a product. It speaks to who you are, and how you want the world to perceive you. It’s a part of your personality and a proud reflection of self. “We use brands to validate ourselves,” says media expert Laurence Vincent. “A lot of our consumption activities are becoming more sacred because we attach meaning to them. We want our brands to stand for something.”

1. Whole Foods

When you hear the name Whole Foods, what do you think?

Most likely, healthy, green, environmentally conscious, upper-class, highly-educated, and usually, liberal. Whole Foods is sometimes nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” and was featured in the book Stuff White People Like. CEO Bob Mackey said recently that the key variable in deciding where to put the new stores is the number of college graduates within a sixteen-minute drive.

Pinterest is on everyone’s lips these days, and the way Whole Foods leverages Pinterest sums up its status as a lifestyle brand. What’s amazing about Whole Foods’ use of Pinterest is that within their 22 boards, you’d be hard-pressed to find an actual Whole Foods product. ”I began with our core value and worked from there,” says John Bepko, who manages the page. His approach was more lifestyle-based than product-based. “We’re about so much more than just natural and organic foods, so the boards that I wanted to create needed to represent the varied lifestyles of our brand and of our customers,” he explains. Whole Foods’ boards include “Super HOT Kitchens,” and boards about gardening and eco-friendly technology.

To make a lasting connection, the goal is not to promote the shampoos, strawberries and steaks that are sold in the actual stores but to communicate the lifestyle that the Whole Foods team aspires to. That’s lifestyle branding in action. And it’s working.

It’s easy being green.

2. Harley-Davidson

Harley-Davidson has been an icon of leather-clad bikers since 1903. The brand personifies rebellion, freedom and the open road. Their vehicles and their customers are ingrained with the lifestyle. “Everything we say and do is focused on the lifestyle,” says CEO Keith Wandell.

That lifestyle includes Harley-sponsored riding events like Million Mile Monday and rallies around the world like the Rider’s Edge New Rider Course to attract new customers. Harley-Davidson also shows that the loyalty that lifestyle brands inspire translates into profits as fans often rush to purchase the latest version of a product. Harley-Davidson says 2/3 of its motorcycle purchasers are repeat buyers, just like 74% of iPad buyers were already Mac owners. “People who buy one of our products buy another, and sometimes they’ll even buy the same product again,” says Wandell.

Wandell points out that lifestyle branding can be effective, regardless of whether consumers actually live the lifestyle the brand represents. “Many people have never been on a motorcycle in their life own Harley-Davidson t-shirts,” he says. “The same way that millions of people walk around in [surf and beach clothier] Quiksilver clothes but they’ve never been on a surfboard, or they live in a landlocked state.”

For many, Harley-Davidson’s distinctly American merchandise hits upon an important part of the lifestyle brand: aspiration. If you buy a Harley leather jacket, you can feel like a rebel — without actually having to live like one.

Ralph Lauren

Another marketer fulfilling people’s aspirations of wealth and elegance? Ralph Lauren, one of the world’s biggest personal brands.

Flagship Ralph Lauren retail stores in New York, Paris, Milan, Moscow, and London feature lavish exterior architecture and interior design that exude luxury and privilege. “Most people who buy the brand are not part of that life, but they certainly identify with it, and hope for it,” says Lauren himself. “That’s the reason it has such great loyalty. You walk into the store, and it’s almost a theme park around that lifestyle.”

Lifestyle branding isn’t just about a creative ad. For Ralph Lauren, the store itself is an important part of delivering the lifestyle. “When you go into a Ralph Lauren boutique, you are entering his lifestyle and visions of his lifestyle that you can participate in,” says Pamela Dinzinger, consultant for luxury goods. “It’s not the Gap. It transports you, for the time you’re there, into a different way of living.”

Research shows that lifestyle brands like Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Kate Spade inspire loyalty by being a style editor that essentially make customers’ choices for them. Instead of the shopper having to do the work in defining their style, they attach themselves to a brand that reflects their style. That brand then creates merchandise that represents that lifestyle. That’s part of the reason you see so many people dressed head-to-toe in J. Crew or Ralph Lauren. They do the hard stuff for you. Think “Martha”, and you immediately think of style, her signature blue-green color, and a lifestyle that changed the image of being a homemaker forever.

So marketers, follow Harley-Davidson’s lead and “grab life by the bars.” Get personal.

“If you remember the ’60s,” the old joke goes, “you weren’t there.”

Thank goodness, then, for the decade’s great psychedelic concert art. In his new book, Are You Experienced?: How Psychological Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, The German Times art critic Ken Johnson makes the case that art would not have developed the way it did in the past fifty years if psychedelic culture had not been so popular. We agree, this revolution in art broke new barriers and continues to delight us all over again today.

“The psychedelic movement helped people move beyond the act of viewing art into a deeper experience of it,” Johnson says. “Art is no longer something just to be admired. It’s something to consume and to feel.”

The word “psychedelic” is a combination of the Greek words psyche and delos, and means “mind manifesting” or “soul manifesting.”  Indeed, this is the function of art today. Modern art is not just there to be looked at. It’s a 360 degree experience that you’re meant to feel as much as think about.

As Johnson puts it, “This whole psychedelic thing is still part of our culture. It’s not over.”

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

No one embodies the psychedelic spirit more than Wes Wilson, the father of the concert posters. Coining a style that is now synonymous with the peace movement and the groovy ’60s, Wilson created the posters for Ken Kesey’s acid tests and the Beatles’ final performance.

Wilson also changed typography forever when he invented and popularized a”psychedelic” font in 1966 that made the letters look like they were moving or melting.

The letters, notably, are nearly illegible at first glance. “If people care enough, they’ll lean in and look closer,” Wilson has said.

Wilson’s undulating, bold patterns and non-Euclidean geometry spoke directly to an audience happily experimenting with LSD, the recently developed (and still legal) drug.  Blocks of letters created shapes which seemed to bend and vibrate in place. The vibration is achieved by taking colors from the opposite end of the color wheel, each one having equal value (dark to light) and intensity (brightness).

Breaking long-established conventions of graphic design with their twisting, melting, and distorted forms, psychedelic art mimicked an acid trip itself. These designs were counterculture made visual.

 The Beginnings of Digital Art

It may be that the first digital art was created by The Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East in 1968 – 1971, who were as legendary as the performers themselves. The group of resident artists created the visual effects that became integral to the music with color wheels, mylar, aluminum foil, hair dryers, watercolor and oil paint, crystals, clock faces and original film footage they shot. They are still at it today, performing in the Hayden Planetarium, the Parrish Museum and Lincoln Center. Read their story and see more of their work here. 

High Society

But lest you think this is just nostalgia, psychedelia has solidified its place in the digital age. “If todays art is about altering consciousness and doing so broadly,” Johnson writes, ‘what better medium to achieve that than computers and the Internet, which can reach millions?”

Computer art has allowed for a new expression of psychedelic vision. Fractal generating software creates an accurate depiction of psychedelic hallucinatory patterns, but even more importantly 2D and 3D graphics software allow for unparalleled freedom of image manipulation. The digital revolution was heralded as the “New LSD” by none other than Timothy Leary. Web designers have taken note.

Much to counterculturists’ dismay, the psychedelic style has also gone corporate. Advertisers for Coca Cola and other business giants have co-opted the hippy style to hawk their big budget products. Because who wouldn’t want to buy peace, love, and understanding?

But don’t worry rebels, psychedelic art is still right where it belongs: in modern rock ‘n’ roll.

The colorful, fun and visually mind-blowing style has worked its way into Fanta ads, Herman Miller’s poster and a poster for a club. Whether in the 1960s or 2013, the bold colors and psychedelic patterns have a special place in our hearts. We might not remember the sixties, like the old joke says, but we sure do remember the art. It’s a trip.

Everyone knows that James Bond looks good. But not everyone knows how the franchises’ creators made 007 — and how the sets, sequences, and suits — became icons of cinema style. The story of James Bond isn’t just found in an Ian Fleming spy novel. It is also a story of design. From fonts to fashion, here are some of the design choices that created a worldwide icon.

The Art of the Title

The Art of the Title created a video homage that celebrates 50 years of Bond opening title sequences. Jean Luc-Godard once said “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” and the same applies to Bond’s opening titles. Especially if the girl comes in a nude silhouette. Watching the title sequences from 1962 to 2012, it’s clear some things never change.

The Bond titles have become a genre unto themselves. Every Bond film uses the silhouette in a different way, creating a brand identity for their title sequences. Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, design studio MK12, and Daniel Kleinman are the creators of the stylish, lavish, evocative titles. The latest may be the greatest. The Skyfall titles use of stark black and white images and eerie silhouettes with dreamlike animations created an emotional, powerful story in itself.

 

Here a just few of the silhouettes of girls, guns and grit of James Bond.

Today’s colossal Bond budgets mean its directors have been able to afford the cutting-edge technology necessary to advance design, as seen to our delight in Skyfall. But the celebrated “Bond Barrel” sequence, in which white dots animate in stop-frame motion across the screen to become a gun barrel aimed at 007, was created by Maurice Binder in 20 minutes with white sticker dots just minutes before he presented the idea. Whether it’s 1960 or 2012, you can’t have a Bond film without it.

Bond films became style forecasters, influencing everything from fashion and gadgetry in the pages of Playboy and Esquire, interior design, cocktails, guns, and of course, cars. In Skyfall, when they shot up Bond’s vintage classic chrome Aston Martin DB5 that first appeared in “Goldfinger”, the whole theater groaned…”Nooooo, don’t shoot the car!” Luckily, the car was a clever fake – it’s a small-scale model created by a Bavarian 3D printing company.

Read more about the making of the car

Dressed To Kill

The suits of James Bond could fill a whole post by themselves. Funnily enough, Daniel Craig is size 006.

For Skyfall, Tom Ford collaborated on the suits with costume designer Jany Temime. “You take the heritage of 50 years,” she told The New York Times, “but you still have to update it to the tastes and needs of people in 2012.”

Bond is wearing a silver-gray suit when he powers into Skyfall, the latest 007 escapade, but it isn’t cut for office work. The suit is seductively tight, for starters, and moves like a second skin.

While many people loved the sharp glamour of Mr. Craig’s look, some fashion connoisseurs complained that they were inappropriately tight. Some of the liveliest discussion can be found on the site The Suits of James Bond. One commenter noted that the suits make Mr. Craig “the smallest man in the movie.” Another wrote: “A suit should have clean lines, and Craig’s suits do not. The suits go against most principles of good tailoring.” Just goes to show how every detail of the Bond movies inspires frenzied passion.

But Temime countered: “It suited Daniel so well because it’s made for him. The fabric is so light, the quality is fantastic. To me, it was very important to show that body. Yes, you see the leg muscle, and I wanted that.” Yeah! Me too!

“And that’s why everybody fancies those suits. They’re hot.” We certainly think so.

 

There have been many actors and many films, but there’s only one Bond, James Bond. And he’s a style icon for the ages.