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Character of Accidents
During the printing of the 1999 Melways Directory (the most popular Melbourne streetmap), a solitary ant accidentally wandered onto the black printing plate of Page 1A, a detail of the central city....
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Space for All
Many years ago whilst standing in a student cafe looking at the accommodation notice board for a room to rent, I found myself startled by one particularly striking notice. Its bold headline stated...
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Young Family
The scenario in the office was becoming a familiar one – a client casually passing by one of the monitors would pause, let out an exclamation of either astonishment or at times pure horror – what they...
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Australian Typography 1995-2005
On the tenth anniversary of Australian Creative, it seems an opportune moment to recall a statement about the state of Australian typography written a decade ago — ‘Whenever I read text set in Gill...
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Taxonomy of Type
“Of all the arts and crafts, none lives in the dirty tepid bathwater of the past than does typography” . It seems to be a part of human nature that whenever anything is produced, people immediately...
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It’s in the Stars
Every now and then one discovers a publication that is truly and captivatingly bamboozling. Something that, even upon close inspection, is virtually impenetrable to the reader. It’s an extraordinary...
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Peeling the Onion
In an era of rising real estate prices and ravenous development, virtually not a week goes by without sighting a brief but beautiful uncovering of an old piece of sign lurking behind torn down...
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After the Shouting
Perhaps the most succinct way to visualise contemporary french graphic design is to conjure up the image of a teenager simply turning up the volume of a walkman as a response to a parent’s lecture....
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10 Vignettes
Vignette 1 | Mention the name Osbourne Ruddock and you’ll probably be greeted with a puzzled expression. Mention instead his pseudonym King Tubby and they’re more than likely to recognize the pioneer...
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Putting the M in Rock Poster
Posters announce. Posters exclaim. Posters proclaim. No other graphic design medium carries such a heritage of direct public engagement as does the poster. Considering the strong and legacy of this...
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The Glue Forecaster
Trying to forecast the lifespan of a business is difficult for anyone. These matters are usually left to business managers, bankers, or accountants – but certainly not the installers of the signage. A...
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Look Here!
Look Here: Considering the Australian Environment (1968) Australian graphic design is going through a particularly interesting period at the moment — you may think that I’m about to talk about the...
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After the Gig
Nothing excites a graphic designer more than a visual language of systems and informational order. You only has to see the endless folios sporting Feltron-esque graphs of ‘what I did on my holidays’...
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Ghostfaces
Typefaces come and go, they live and die. When bespoke corporate typefaces are created, their designers have no way of knowing the lifespan of their creations. Some of these typefaces are commissioned...
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Imaginary Alphabets
Ever walked past a hand-drawn sign and thought that it would make a great typeface? Elizabeth Carey Smith did just this over a number of signage sites in Melbourne, producing these as entire alphabets...
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Polite Signage
Whether it is standing, smoking, drinking or delinquency, public signage forever dictates a series of authoritative ‘nos’ to regulate public behaviour. Letterbox and Frankston City Council have sought...
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Utypia
‘Why do we need another typeface?’ It’s a question that anybody who works with type hears a lot. And it’s a perfectly valid question. Why do we need another addition to that ever-lengthening font...
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Cluster
As a child growing up in a 1960s housing estate on the outskirts of Melbourne I would watch in excitement as new streets and courts were created seemingly overnight, and with them the skeletal wooden...
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Face and Place
Fifteen years ago, I produced a series of ‘typographic proclamation’ stickers which we mailed out worldwide for free. One of these brashly stated ‘Never trust fonts named after cities’. It proved to...
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Punctuation Marks
When we were approached by Smith Journal to create a set of new punctuation marks, we couldn’t say no. They asked a fine selection of writers – Peter Carey, Nick Hornby, Jon Ronson and Judd Apatow –...
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