Shop-fronts

I had to catch the bus home last night. It is quite dark when I leave the site now and as I had no book other than the Palm top, I spent the journey looking out of the window. (How do people manage on the tube when there is no view from the window other than a 150 year old brick wall?) It was quite comforting seeing all the shop-fronts whistle by in the near-dark. I find myself stepping outside of my own worries and inventing back-stories for the many tiny events I see. Of course nothing specific has stayed with me except the whole atmosphere. Channel 4 use vertical bars in many of their logos and occasionally they have the view from a vehicle as it drives along a busy road. This maybe good but nowhere near as good as the BBC2 logos which for the last 10 years have been the pinnacle of TV ident design. The BBC 2 logo is an adventurer, a real hero to be looked up to. The trouble is that his fee now has to be split with all the other twos who accompany him in his daredevil exploits. I especially like the one where the Sergeant Major Two blows his whistle to start the tumbling of a long line of Twos in the manner of dominoes, but the first in the line falls the wrong way and scuppers the whole thing. The Sergeant Major gesturing to the prostrate number is a very nice touch. It is quite amazing that an essentially fixed figure can be given character just by moving it in a certain way.

I had to browse a few TV sites to get the links above and all this reminded me of the short on BBC2 called "Look Around You" This is one of those 10 minute fillers that the BBC put on at 9:50 in the eveining just before the half-hour programme before Newsnight (All hail to the the great god Paxo) and is a spoof of many different schools programmes from the 1970s/80s. My schools never really used TV programmes so I only remember a few but Look Around You seems to have caught the style particularly well. The phrase 'write that down' is used a lot and I think it comes from a programme called 'Experiment' which had a very deliberate narration where everything was done just so. I suppose it was so schools which could not afford the full set of scientific equipment could still witness the results. I have just found the 'Look Around You' Periodic Table which looks pretty normal except for a few of the elements which have changed slightly from what I remember. It reminds me of Simon Patterson's Great Bear, a reworking of the London Tube Map (synchronicity hey?) which we have on our wall at home. The original Tube Map is a design classic in itself and Simon Patterson's version is a simple homage to it. What is it about something that makes its design memorable. The difference between good and bad can be so small. Too much design is bad. The best web-pages are the simplest and the most intuitive. As soon as you find yourself asking what would be nice on a page, you are considering too much.