Audi's New Logo

Before

After

I couldn't let this one go. As you may have noticed, I'm a Graphic Designer, and I've produced some pieces of work over the years that weren't quite as considered and cohesive as they might have been , and some which were blatantly half-arsed in their execution. But even I wouldn't have the cheek to deliver Audi's "new" corporate logo and expect them to pay me for it.

The new rendering of the much vaunted four rings is all well and dandy, and manages to give them a more realistic, 3 dimensional look than the older logo, but the new typography is utterly atrocious. Apparently it's a newly designed typeface called Audi Type, commissioned by Audi and designed by MetaDesign. Now, that's all well and good, but it doesn't stop the new typeface from looking very much like Verdana with the tracking increased and the X-height squished down.

The question is, did the logo actually need updating? My opinion on that is yes and no. The rings on the older logo are a little bit flat and two dimensional, but the typography is very, very distinctive and so closely associated with the brand that I find it very surprising that they decided to replace it with something so crushingly nondescript. Sure, the older type isn't perfect, with the odd issue here and there with its kerning, but I would've preferred to see it subtly redrawn and updated rather than scrapped and replaced by something which - I say again - looks like squished Verdana.

My solution to this design conundrum would be to use the new rendering of the rings with a subtly updated, redrawn version of the older typography.

On a side note, Audi have also ditched their fabulously over engineered, beautifully executed gas strut equipped parallelogram bootlid hinges in favour of the simpler, cheaper and uglier bent metal tubes so beloved of considerably more donwmarket carmakers. If this is cost cutting designed to save them a few euros in manufacturing costs, I say shame on them!

Maestro, if you please!

Austin Allegro, an ode to the worst car ever made....

It's hard to think where to begin with the Austin Allegro, a car of such staggeringly, stupefyingly misguided design and production incompetence it's hard to comprehend. Just look at it! It is without doubt one of the most ungainly, poorly proportioned cars ever unleashed on the world. Apparently, the original stylist had something far more lithe and graceful in mind, but unfortunately, he made the terrible mistake of working for British Leyland, a car company that would have had trouble producing an amateur dramatics production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone something as complicated as an actual car.

It's hard to exaggerate just how badly BL screwed this car up. It was originally designed to fight the new wave of exotic and avant-garde hatchbacks that were cropping up all over continental Europe, but management decided that a hatchback configuration was still a tad controversial and ooh la la for us Brits, so they stuck an old fashioned saloon style boot on it. Then the engineers inisited on fitting BL's wheezy, underpowered and hideously tall B-series engine, which buggered up the styling even more. Then, in an instance of seizing defeat from the very jaws of victory - something which BL excelled at - some idiot in the design or marketing department thought it would be a BRILLIANT idea if they gave this upturned bathtub on wheels a SQUARE steering wheel - I kid you not. The poor thing was hamstrung from the start. A scant year before Volkswagen gave the world the genre-defining Golf in 1974, British Leyland foisted this atrocious lash-up on an unsuspecting market.

Of course, the story doesn't end there - once they'd finished buggering up it's development and actually got this pig faced disaster of a car into production, they hurled it together so badly that it started to fall apart after mere months of existence. British Leyland had an unshakeable belief that if a car had to rust, it might as well start doing so on the production line, and as it's going to get dents over the course of its life, it might as well leave the factory with panel filler already applied.
As you'd expect, this reputation for being ugly, wheezy, unreliable and poorly made pretty much killed the Allegro in export markets, but it didn't seem to dent British enthusiasm for the little underdog, as it managed to soldier on for 10 years, 3 facelifts and just over 640,000 examples.

Over that time, the Allegro did get a little bit better, and by 1980 had actually turned into a vaguely (make that VERY vaguely) decent car. Unfortunately, British Leyland, Leyland or Austin-Rover, as it was known that week, undid all their good work a scant four years later in 1984, when they replaced the Allegro with the equally incompetent Austin Maestro.... but that's another story, for another time....

Mock Turtle

"A new retail opportunity has arisen, selling take away food from an old Police Call Box, located on Buchanan Street, in Glasgow’s city centre. The outlet will supply a small range of organically grown, freshly cut sandwiches & hot soup. Decide on a name and produce a brand identity for this new soup & sandwich outlet."

This is my take on the instructions given above. The majority of branding I've seen for outlets selling "organic" produce has always been a little bit too literal in its interpretation of the product, using names, imagery and themes that reference the organic message just a bit too heavily, and in too clichéd a style for my liking. I've always been of the belief that British consumers are savvy enough to get the organic message without having to be bludgeoned over the head with it, and with that in mind, I decided to take a more playful approach, and think I managed to produce something just a little bit cheeky and playful, and removed from the clichéd approach that is often taken with organic goods. I'll admit that I did make one concession to the cliché, and that was the use of green, but as Turtles are green anyway, I didn't really have much of a problem with it.

Into The Woods

These are two of the original pieces from my first interpretation of the Into The Woods brief we received during the first year of my Graphic Design HND. The idea was that we had to design a poster, programme cover, invitation and postcard set for a Tramway Theatre production of Into The Woods, using 1950s graphic design, and in particular the works of Saul Bass, as a basis.

Looking back, I'm not quite as happy with them as I once was, as I think the use of dark tones constrasting with the bright white may be slightly overdone, and the tree on the main poster did turn out looking more Christmas Treeish than I'd originally planned, but I don't think they're hideously ineffective, and I'm still impressed that I managed to draw my own font in Adobe Illustrator and put every element of the project together after little more than a few weeks of using the software.

I tend to be something of a Photoshop monkey, but working on this project showed me that Illustrator can, and does, have its uses.

I just watched Twilight....

OK, so I just got round to watching Twilight, and I really wish I hadn't bothered. It was a complete waste of time, and also a complete waste of a plot - vampire falls in love with human, has to control his "urges" around her, human discovers vampire's secret - that should've been at least vaguely engaging, but just fell totally flat. I have no idea how this film managed to make the thick end of $400 million worldwide. I have a whole list of problems with it in my head, but I'm not sure if I know how to put them all down. I guess I'll have a go...

Firstly, the romance between Edward and Bella was totally unconvincing. Perhaps if the story had given us more to go on than uncomfortable silences, sidelong glances and half baked emo-style "angst", I would've been able to invest a bit more in the supposed love affair between the characters. As it was, it came across like they weren't especially interested in each other, and were just getting on with the business of falling in love because the story told them to. I'm not sure if its the fault of the writing, the directing, or perhaps the acting, but both characters seemed to be a tad on the boring side - with Edward in particular coming off as an awkward, charisma-free personality vaccuum. You'd think someone who's lived for over 100 years would have learned how to have a little fun, wouldn't you? Bella didn't come out of it much better though, as she seemed to be a whiney little thing who wanted nothing more out of life than to be completely miserable.

Also, Bella's uncovering of Edward's secret was almost totally glossed over. It seemed to me like it was a case of "there's something not quite right with this guy, I shall use the powers of Google to find out what it is!"... cut to approximately 5 minutes, one trip to a Native American bookstore, and an encounter with some buffoons with naughty things on their mind later and we have... "aha, he's a vampire, I think I'll go out with him!" These things never, ever end well - didn't she watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Then there's the Cullen "family" to consider, they just seemed like cyphers to me.... there to do nothing more than advance the plot without actually contributing much to it. The story didn't really spend any time in giving us insights into what it's like for them to live amongst humans and suppress their urges to hunt and kill. The only hint of their difficulties came from a throwaway line about their newest member finding things a "bit difficult" - I'll assume that's why he spent the majority of his scenes looking like he was suffering from a severe case of constipation.

Another problem I had was with the pacing. Nothing of any real interest happens, apart from a few unexplained deaths, until the dodgy, no good vampire James takes a decidedly inexplicable fancy to Bella and decides to kill her just for the hell of it - going so far as to track down her old address and tricking her into meeting him. Surely he could've found a himself an equally satisfying meal without resorting to such fiendish means?

So there's the negative aspects of the film. Now for some positives:

It looked fabulous, with excellent cinematography and deliciously desaturated colours throughout, which helped to draw attention away from the rather wishy-washy and underdeveloped storyline. Some of the visual effects were a little bit on the ropey side, but I'm willing to forgive that, as the movie was made on a comparatively modest $37 million budget.

Taylor Lautner turned in a decent performance as Jacob Black, who apparently has a much meatier, expanded role in the follow up. I can only imagine that to be a good thing, as his on screen presence is far more engaging than either Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson. Perhaps it's because he's not playing an awkward, self absorbed and introverted weirdo?

Apparently the sequel comes out in a few months time, and the third movie is already filming. I can only hope that they're both more engaging, and less soporific and morose than the first outing turned out to be.

I haven't blogged in forever, but I'm back...

MG TF relaunch - this isn't quite original, as I saw something very similar on SniffPetrol a few months ago, but I thought I'd go for a more professional, polished looking take on the same subject matter. Joke car adverts are pretty much my main stock-in-trade, so you can expect to see a fair amount of them...

Auto Express - I threw this together as a pisstake of how hilariously inaccurate Auto Express usually is with its reporting of car related "news". Sometimes I think they just make shit up when they're having a slow news day....

Men's Health: Clearly the most heterosexually inclined magazine anywhere on God's green Earth!

All Graphic Designers should be FORCED to sign this pledge at gunpoint!

My take on the advertising for District 9, suitably altered to suit my locality.

This is just me revisiting a brief we tackled during the first year of my Graphic Design course. I may post my original interpretation of the brief at some later date. In fact, I might post everything I produced on the course - well, all the stuff I actually liked...

Auntie Mame - I decided to come up with this, cos I loved the movie, and I wanted to see what I could do with the theme of 50's style artwork - I don't think it came out too badly.

Ah.... British Leyland, quite possibly the worst car company ever to have graced us with its sheer incompetence. This poster came from the idea of marrying the classic "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" propaganda poster from WW2 with some of my acerbic wit, and barely concealed hatred for all things Leyland.

This is actually VERY mild by my standards, at least when it comes to Leyland products. I'm usually a lot more vicious, as you'll probably see over the course of this blog, in the fullness of time.