While planning my visit to a special exhibit about Rembrandt at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I discovered the DIA had partnered with the Louvre on it — a French connection.
Since joining TheFrameworks, I’ve become more conscious of Detroit’s connection to France. One of our biggest clients is a French company, Dassault Systèmes. I even have the tremendous pleasure of working with two French colleagues here in the Detroit office.
Remembering some of my local history lessons, I hit Google to track down some more interesting connections:
- The city of Detroit was born from a French fort and missionary outpost called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, founded in 1701. The original settlement was named after Riviere D’etroit, which means “River of The Strait” in French.
- During the late nineteenth century, Detroit was nicknamed the Paris of the West because of its architecture and open public spaces.
- One quadrant of the flag of Detroit honors France with gold fleurs-de-lis on a white field.
- Major streets in Metro Detroit carry French names like Dequindre, Beaubien, Cadillac and Lafayette.
- According to the French-American Chamber of Commerce, operations for about 300 French companies are located in Michigan. Additionally, other French companies do business in Michigan in industries such as automotive, aerospace, retail, luxury goods, food and wine products, high technology and medical products.
- French-American architect Paul Philippe Cret designed the Detroit Institute of Arts. One of the most renowned and respected art museums in the world, the DIA’s collection contains famous works by many French artists, including Monet, Degas and Matisse. Currently, through a partnership with the Musée du Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” is appearing at the Detroit Institute of Arts through 12 February. It demonstrates that in posing an ethnographically correct model and using a human face to depict Jesus, Rembrandt overturned the entire history of Christian art.
These artistic, cultural and industry connections to France are only a portion of the significant ties metro Detroit holds to Europe, so it’s no surprise TheFrameworks saw the area as a great place to open its U.S. office.
This holiday season, as I gather together with friends and family, I’ll be enjoying great food and conversation while trying to explain that my new job involves branding, not advertising. So imagine my delight when I discovered a new board game designed to demonstrate how well branding has infiltrated the collective human consciousness.
My biggest challenge with board games is simply getting people to play with me, but the challenge in “Brand Memory” from BIS Publishers is to find matching pairs of a brand, based solely on their characteristic color/style elements and a short description of the brand. The game shows you can swap a company’s name or slogan with different text and people will still recognize a well-known brand, simply based on the design elements.
I could see this game inciting a good-natured “who’s more important” debate between the writing and design teams here at TheFrameworks. As a writer, I’ll lob a preemptive strike over the desk by mentioning the Comic Sans Project. Its contributors have taken Comic Sans — the font favored by creators of school projects and office posters — and recreated famous brands with it “because Helvetica is sooo 2011.” Do people still recognize McDonald’s when the golden arches are golden mountain peaks? Absolutely. So take that, designers. I fearfully await your retaliation.
Speaking of Helvetica, if you haven’t yet caught the wonderful documentary about the font, seek it out (I streamed it through Netflix). You’ll never look at your Word document the same way again. Because Arial is sooo 2001.
“Oh, no,” you say. “There couldn’t be anything less interesting than watching a documentary about a font.” Au contraire, mon ami. The same folks who bring you the “Brand Memory” game offer the “Typography Memory Game” in which players must find matching pairs of the letter A in one of 25 different fonts. Your friends and family will experience minutes of enjoyment as they slowly realize they can’t tell the difference between Akzidenz Grotesk and Garamond, nor can they comprehend why you thought playing this game was a good idea.
Better yet, make your holiday celebration a theme night, by combining the two games and a viewing of the film. I guarantee you’ll never be asked to host another family gathering. On the other hand, I’d have a fabulous time.
Excuse me … I’ve got to tell Santa to add these games to my wish list.
Our London HQ is to be found in a cozy little creative hub near Tower Bridge. We are neighbours with the Design Museum - who are just around the corner – and with Conran across the road. And we do occasionally see Sir Terrance as he pops into his office – or at least catch a lingering whiff of one of his impressively large cigars.
The Design Museum and Conran have always been linked – he was instrumental in establishing the museum in 1989. And now the museum is marking Sir Terrence’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain.
From creating the first flat-pack furniture in Britain, promotion of the duvet, the chicken brick (yes, really) and of course, Habitat, he has arguably done more than anyone to bring design into the mainstream.
You can visit the exhibition until 4 March next year. If you do decide to go along – why not pop in to say hello to us too!
Twenty life-sized gorilla statues – all individually decorated by British artists have landed right by our office next to Tower Bridge. The More London exhibition will run from 16-22 September, and a charity auction will take place at 7pm in the Victoria Rooms, Clifton, Bristol on 29 September to raise money for a number of charities.
Increasingly principals that have long been the bread and butter of print design are being applied to Web design.
For some time now fonts other than Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana have been able to be used on the Web thanks to technologies such as sIFR and cufón (which we use for the primary navigation and Twitter feed at the top of this site), and now grids are increasingly being used to help structure Web pages.
For centuries grids have been the bread and butter of graphic designers and typographers throughout the world:
“The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude in as much as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future… By arranging the surfaces and spaces in the form of a grid the designer is favourably placed to dispose his texts, photographs and diagrams in conformity with objective and functional criteria.”
— Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid systems in graphic design
It may be because more print designers are becoming or influencing web designers, or simply that web designers have finally had enough of unstructured content and ad-hoc design elements that are increasingly present throughout today’s Web.
An increasing amount of resourses are becoming available for Web designers keen to indulge in the practice of using grid systems. A great place to start is at The Grid System, a resource in grid systems from downloadable grid templates to inspirational sites. Another is 960 Grid System which advocates the use of the popular 960 grid system (which we base most of our web designs on, see image above). 960 Gridder (pictured above) is a JavaScript website overlay tool that helps designers and developers check if a website falls within the grid and is great for checking for any inconsistencies in page layouts.
From my own experience, designing Web pages to a structured 960 grid certainly helps in organising and presenting information clearly and consistently. It also aids accessibility which is becoming increasingly important amid the frenzy of new Web developments that are appearing. HTML5 promises to standardise much of this new technology and together with good design practices, the World Wide Web can continue to grow in an orderly and visually pleasing manner, something that Müller-Brockmann would be proud of.
