Originator of designs for album cover dies, age 94

Like many designers of a certain vintage, I ended up in this profession because of long hours studying album cover designs in my youth. This exposure to the graphic arts was a key part of the vinyl experience - I remember well many awful albums that were purchased solely for their cover art.

This NYT obituary highlights the career of Alex Steinweiss, the art director and graphic designer who is credited with the idea of adding custom artwork to album covers in 1939.

Before that point, vinyl albums were sold in blank sleeves, or with a graphic identifying the record company. In 1939, Steinweiss persuaded Columbia Records to let him create an “ad” for a collection of Rogers and Hart songs on the cover of the record sleeve - and the album cover design was born. Sales of albums with cover designs were soon outpacing their generic equivalents by up to 900%.

In the current times, when absolutely everything seems to comes with a visual message, it’s intriguing to imagine a time when this didn’t happen. It’s also worth asking: Is there any experience, service or product that could still be revolutionized in this way using design?

A 2010 Highlight: Our Posters for the Haiti Poster Project

As we try to clear our desks of work (and our cars of snow) before Christmas, we’re taking the chance to catch up with what we’ve been up to over the past 12 months.

Like many, we were stunned by the devastation in Haiti earlier in the year - which led us to submit designs to The Haiti Poster project. (We blogged about the initiative earlier this year.) This international charitable project brought together designers from around the world to raise funds for Médicins Sans Frontières. We were honoured to have two designs selected for inclusion, alongside posters from elite agencies from around the world like Pentagram and Sagmeister.

DesignTactics funded the printing, production and shipping of the posters to the US distribution centre, which means every cent of their sale price goes to charity. Some of the limited edition run of 80 signed prints are still available for sale. Click here or here to get the perfect New Year’s gift!

How (and why) to think & act like a designer

If you have 10 minutes to spare on a sunny Friday, check out this presentation by Fred Durst from design practice IDEO. He makes an evangelical (and witty) case for the power of design to change behaviour, and how we can all “think like designers” to create a better world.

(I’ve made it sound irritatingly smug; just trust me - it’s worth a look.)

Thanks to Tumblr-pal creativeinspiration: for the find.

As print-media gently slides into the abyss created by the worldwide recession, all eyes are on the forthcoming Apple Tablet - and other similar ideas -  as possible saviours. These new communication devices could be particularly important for magazines, which haven’t been served well by the typical web viewing experience.

However, there is a particular challenge in how magazines will be experienced on a tablet device: For starters, designing a tablet-based magazine requires a hybrid of skills: From user interface design, to the creation of a layouts that engage the user as powerfully as a printed layout.

Swedish media group Bonnier and UK agency Berg have created a fascinating video of their R&D process as they start to explore how to solve these problems: It’s well worth a look, as are their respective blogs on the topic. A San Francisco based IA firm called Kicker is now working on turning these ideas into a “robust prototype”, according to their blog - watch this space!

We’re very excited by the way the values of print-centric design are starting to be demanded for screen-based communication. Perhaps because web-based design typically has to convey so much information to the viewer, its visual language has become dominated by complexity and detail. The ease, engagement and communicative power of a printed spread has never truly been matched by the on-screen experience - but perhaps the tide is now starting to turn.

All credit to finding this video goes to a fellow Tumblr user called Dugan.

I came across this quite late in the day - it’s a ‘creative futures’ project sponsored by Creative Review back in February of 2008. (Remember that far-distant time when we had a functioning economy?)

To me it seems like a nice film to start warming you up for the festive season: It features two brothers - one an award-winning lettering artist, and one a regular kid - hand-rendering the alphabet, one letter at a time. You’ll have to sit through the credits to get to the side-by-side stuff, or you can just skip to 1.55 in the timeline.

Here’s the Creative Review piece on the initiative.

I actually found it on the Bigger Picture blog, as found via this post of a SpringWise article Tumbl’d by Creative Inspiration.