Posts by Joe Farquharson

Pirates – probably not the first thing that springs to mind when contemplating successful branding. Yet in reality they are responsible for one of the most successful and recognizable identities of all time – the skull and crossbones. In her New York Times article, Alice Rawsthorn writes about the pirates’ adopted emblem and its undoubted success as a branding tool.

Like all brand identities, there are three factors that contribute to the skull and crossbones’ success:

Clarity of Message

Using the skull and crossbones as a visual representation of the outcome of resistance (certain death), pirates found that they could remotely instill fear in target vessels’ crews. This use of visual…

This week saw the world’s last remaining typewriter manufacturer closed its doors. Despite typewriters being superceded by the personal computer, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing continued to manufacture them until 2009, when demand saw their production levels drop below 1,000 per year.

Invented in 1870, the typewriter was originally intended for transcribing dictation, eventually becoming the tool of choice for composition used by writers, poets and even philosophers such as Neitzsche, Burroughs, Kerouac, Hemingway and Twain. But alongside its rich history, it leaves behind a legacy of popular terminology and out-dated typographic conventions.

Some common typewriter terminology is still in use today. Backspace, cursor, cut and paste, shift, and tab are all remnants of…

Adobe Illustrator has always been my tool of choice for production of data visualizations, icons, and other graphic elements. Data visualizations need to be customized according to given parameters, and most existing pictogram fonts simply don’t allow the manipulation that drawing in Adobe Illustrator does. More often than not this means building custom charts and icons from scratch, exporting, importing, editing, re-exporting, re-importing… repeat ad nauseam.

Fortunately some typefaces are emerging that make constructing these elements directly within layout applications such as Adobe InDesign much easier. These “Smart Fonts” use Opentype features to allow seamless layering of graphic elements and on-the-fly glyph replacement, the results of which were previously only possible using Adobe Illustrator.

Below are examples of three of these typefaces.

FF Dingbats 2.0

During the last decade we witnessed the building of the Social Layer, which takes our connections with family, friends, and co-workers online. According to Seth Priebatsch – Founder, CEO, and self-titled “Chief Ninja” of SCVNGR – this coming decade will see the building of the Game Layer.

Sitting on top of the Social Layer, the Game Layer will utilize familiar game mechanics – such as points, levels, challenges, time constraints, motivated players, etc. – to influence human actions in the real world. Unlike the Social Layer, which traffics in connections, the Game Layer will traffic in influence – where we go, what we do, and how we do it.

Last decade was the decade of social. The coming one will be the decade of games.

There are a number of different ingredients required to make a successful logo. Simplicity and a strong color palette are two of the key elements that go contribute to what every logo’s end goal should be: instant recognition. The aim of UK designer Graham Smith’s ongoing study on brand and logo simplification is to see which of the world’s most popular brand marks are still recognizable after being ‘unevolved’ – recreated using only circles.

What he has found is that the more unique the positioning of elements, and the simpler the logo is, the more recognizable it will be. However, I think there is another factor that has an effect on recognition. It isn’t…

Over the last several years there’s been a steady emergence of online services that are changing the way we consume digital media. Now instead of purchasing and downloading the latest music, movies and tv shows, you can simply stream content from services like Pandora, Last.fm, Netflix, and Hulu, straight to your computer or tv for a straight fee or monthly subscription.

Recently launched Onlive – a new on-demand video game service – takes on-demand one stage further, allowing remote play of video games without ever needing to download and install the games themselves. A small container application is downloaded to the user’s computer, through which the service is accessed…

I went through several different titles for this blog post, because I’m not exactly sure what the correct way to classify the following type of identity system is. Starting with ‘Evolving,’ I quickly switched to ‘Generative,’ and then ‘Dynamic.’ Although elements of each previous description are still appropriate in some way, none of them seemed a perfect fit. Then the term ‘Polymorphic’ cropped up, an adjective used in biology meaning “having or occurring in several distinct forms.” Considering some of these identities almost appear to be living entities that are constantly evolving, and like living organisms, they’re never (well… in this case rarely) the same as one another.

Over the last several years, more and more of these types of identity systems have been surfacing. From the few I…

“To anyone curious about #NewTwitter proportions, know that we didn’t leave those ratios to chance,” explains Twitter’s Creative Director, Doug Bowman, referring to the site’s recent revamp. The two-pane layout remains the basis for the redesign, but the new proportions are based on an age-old mathematical constant that – applied correctly – can result in some of the most effective, perfectly balanced, and visually compelling creations.

The Golden Ratio – also known as the Divine Proportion – is represented by the calculated number 1.6180339887, and denoted by the Greek letter Phi (Φ). It is all around us, in nature, science, art, architecture and even music – from nautilus shells to spiral galaxies, the Parthenon…

With the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad (April 3rd, 2010), there has been an increasing amount of buzz recently around the change in the way we will consume media. With an estimated 40-50 tablet devices set for release by early 2011, Wired Magazine, in partnership with Adobe, has seen this as an opportunity to rethink the way we connect with magazine brands, leading to a fundamental shift in the way Wired is produced with it’s new digital app.

At the SXSW panel After Magazines: Wired’s Digital Rebirth, panelists Scott Dadich (Creative Director, Wired Magazine) and Jeremy Clark (Senior Experience Design Manager, Adobe) explained the production methods of the app using Adobe

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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text’s name and primary usage…