As the sold out D&AD president lecture by the influentual graphic designer Peter Saville edges ever nearer, I thought I would sneak in a quick post dedicated to the man himself.

Saville is initially remembered for his work for Factory Records during the early stages of his career as a designer, notably the record covers for Joy Division and New Order. In 1979 Saville moved to London to become Art Director for DinDisc, while in London he founded Peter Saville Associates which he eventually closed in 1990 to join the partner-owned Pentagram.

On leaving Pentagram due to insufficient turnover and project sales Saville left London for Los Angeles in 1993 to join Frankfurt Balkind. After a short period he came back to London and founded The Apartment for German advertising agency Meiré & Meiré from his Mayfair apartment.

At his peak of his creative and commercial career he worked with clients such as EMI, Selfridges and Pringle. Other clients later came from the world of fashion including Jil Sander, Martine Sitbon, Christian Dior and Stella McCartney.

My Daytum activation email has finally come through today. If you are not entirely sure what it is all about, Daytum is a website for individuals to collect their own personal statistics and track anything the desire from films watched to how much sleep they get over the weekend then show the results immediately in a number of well presented data graphics.

Following on from the much rated Felton information design and annual reports, Daytum has been created by Ryan Case who specialises in user-interface and visualization design and currently the Director of Interactive Design for Sling Media along with data happy graphic designer Nicholas Felton from Megafone.

You can find my Daytum page here. (Still in the early stages!)

New Visa television advert starring Bill Shannon, brought to us by Saatchi & Saatchi. Music by Don Thomas published by Valentine Music.

Mark Zador and Attila Horvath are the two young enthusiastic graphic designers from Hungary that devised the wonderful cyber shop known as Official Classics. Not only do they have a vast array of work to show, they are also selling well crafted vector eps work ranging from game console pads to lighters. I’m thinking there is much more to come from these very talented creatives.

Well, I finally went to go about upgrading my wordpress to 2.7.1. I took the leap of faith with the automatic plugin and everything seemed to run very smoothly. Until I checked my projects pages, if you haven’t noticed they have decided to turn into thumbnails and below par picture quality.

Unfortunately this shall be updated over the course of the evening, a bit later than I would like to leave it.

Keep the faith!

Image via

If you don’t know already as pretty much nearly every design blogger has made this news a post I thought I may as well participate too! Safari 4 beta is available from Apple here.

But as I try to create this post about the new Safari pros I had a bit of trouble with some simple wordpress activities, but surely this will be resolved when the final product becomes available. Other than that little snag I felt I needed to get off my chest just then it has, if you haven’t noticed already, a brand new page and method of viewing your favourties sites, bookmarks and history. Immediatley I was eager to explore into this and as a regular Firefox user I am now tied between the two. As I am sure many other users will be asking themselves the same question, stick with trusty Firefox or venture off to the glitz and glamour of Apple’s Safari?

It’s a tough one, I’ll get back to you on that one!

Came across this great animation by Jonathan Jarvis not only trying to simply explain the current credit crisis but visualise it. Jarvis follows up from his research of the situation in his own words -

‘It is also an argument for how designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible.’ – Jonathan Jarvis

As the climate of the credit crunch gets worse fellow creatives are even more aware of how it is affecting each pitch, project brief, budget and even job security (RIP DR). Jarvis finishes by motivating people who are interested in the piece to use it as a springboard and accumulate their own research to bring visuals and simplicity to a grey and cloudy condition. View the animation in full via Vimeo.

It’s has been over a month now since the death of much loved artist and television presenter Tony Hart. As I was too young to be in the generation of original viewers I still managed to catch repeats and later series of the program at an early age and along with many others found it an inspiration to use any arts and craft like skills that I thought I may have! (This ended up finding my skills at creating a mess!)

Over the past week or so, I came across a really good collection of ‘Morph‘ clips. I still believe this to be the most memorable animation from my childhood.

These videos have been created by Aardman Animation.

If you are a fan of Channel 4’s Peep Show and also a frequent user of the internet mini blog application ‘Twitter’ then this should be right up your street. As part of an experiment the people that bring you the hilarious and freakishly realistic lives of ‘Mark Corrigan’ and ‘Jez Osbourne’ have created Twitter profiles for each main character from the much loved show.

You can catch all the tweets of each character and follow their conversations as part of a clever, well executed campaign. The chats come across very well as the fictional characters and could be part of a build for a new series.

To learn more about the experiment you can follow the Peep Show Twitter, or alternatively jump straight into the fun and start following all the characters (works best follwing all of them). Mark, Jez, SuperHans, Sophie, Johnson, Nancy, Big Suze and Dobby.

A good few photo collections have been cropping up lately such as the National Magazine Cover Archive and Old Cassette Designs on Flickr. More times than not these collections can be a great source of inspiration for any creative so I thought I would list a few that are of interest to myself. If you think I have missed any good links, give me a shout.

Tape Cassette Inserts
-
Matchboxes
-
London Underground Posters
-
NMCA
-
Wim Crouwel
-
Daily Drawings
-
Typewriter & Badges