Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
“The logo and typographic branding of the modern Olympics have been striking, sometimes iconic, and always a representation of the design ethic of the time,” says Monotype Imaging’s Allan Haley. Haley wrote a fascinating blog post about Olympic typography and logo changes from the first image and type logo of the 1952 Helsinki games to the custom (and contentious) typeface “2012 Headline” that was created for the London 2012 games. With each, the common goal is achieve a unique effect through a careful choice of font and design.
We were all interested in a recent blog post by naming expert and author Andris Pone, who wrote about Steve Jobs having the humility to trust his creative team and go ahead with a name that he thought was terrible – iMac. Giving over creative control to those who have good ideas can be hard, but, by swallowing his pride, Jobs was able to create the most successful series of brand names in corporate history.
It doesn’t take a web design snob to figure out that lingscars.com is not a great website — and we’re not afraid to say it could possibly the ugliest website in the world. The animated gifs, garish colours, and complete lack of white space made us remember how far the Internet has come since the early days of web design. Website aside, however, the company behind the website has won several awards for its core business, meaning that perhaps we shouldn’t always judge a business based on its site.
Usually adept at seeing through hoaxes, Daveed was surprised to have been baffled by the Ames Window – an optical illusion. In this illusion, a drawing of a window frame rotates but, to the mind’s eye, it seems like the window is spinning in one direction and then going back the other way. The mCuriosity show illustrated this illusion which is still astounding despite the show being taped in 1988.