This blog has been a bit quiet recently for a number of reasons, but I really had to write about the fate of England’s World Cup bid a couple of weeks ago. I had great fun working on the bid, and was really hoping to become the first lethargic graphic designer to win the World Cup. Instead, I guess I made it to the finals and lost on penalties. My old PE teacher would never have predicted I would enjoy a brief career in international football.

The cover of the latest Private Eye caught my eye at the weekend. Take a good look at the banner above the rapidly balding head of Prince William on the left there. That’s possibly the last look we’ll get of my Supporter typeface at work, with the bid in tatters, the typeface is destined for retirement. It had a short but illustrious career, rubbing shoulders with royalty and being really very visible over the final few days.

The bid team did a fantastic job over the last two years, and on the day itself the English presentation was miles ahead of the others, but every expectant hope back home was about to be dashed. Still, at least they got a free T-shirt…

So alas, it was not to be, and whether the cause was bribery, politics, oligarchs or legacy, at least no-one is blaming the typography…?

Let’s cross our fingers for 2030.

I saw this picture in the paper at the weekend. It’s our new Prime Minister jogging at the G20 summit with the Spanish Prime Minister. Thing is, seeing as we are both rivals to host the 2018 World Cup, Mr Cameron has cheekily donned his England United, The World Invited T-shirt. The Spanish guy seems to be a bit annoyed. I was quite pleased.

Only just over two weeks left to make use of that slogan, as the decision will be announced on the 2nd December.

Fingers crossed…

This made me laugh. From The Independent’s Dave Brown.

Although, if Gordon Brown is toast, David Cameron is crackers.

(Maybe that makes Nick Clegg marmalade?)

International readers: If you don’t know what this is all about, it’s now known as ‘Bigotgate’

As those who know me will attest, I’m a glass half empty kind of guy, although I like to label it realism rather than pessimism. Anyway, it means that I have a soft spot for self deprecating humour, you know that very English under the radar sort of stuff.

I saw this on the tube the other day…

…and it made me think that negativity is underused in advertising. Ads always focus on positivity, sometimes to the point of arrogance or desperation, so it’s nice when they go the other way. Somehow it seems more sincere, even though it’s more contrived than ever. Maybe it’s a sign of the times. Bleak austerity Britain has had enough of Barry Scott shouting at them about how clean his pennies are.

Let’s think a little bit about Dixons for a minute. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything there, as everyone who knows their stuff buys the things they sell online instead. If you were the bosses of Dixons you must have been getting pretty worried recently as the whole retail experience moves into the ether, people flock to electricalbargainzRus.com and your stores sit there ironically eating up their own electricity.

I love the fact that someone really got under the skin of how people perceive stores like Dixons now and subverted it into a nice little well judged piece of despair.

And let’s not forget the past masters of the art, Marmite, who deserve some sort of advertising valour medal pinned to their chest for displaying adverts of someone actually vomiting their product.

Maybe it’s because I involuntarily dislike being sold to, or because I move in marketing circles, I can hear the squeal of the truth being stretched a mile off, but it feels like this sort of attitude gets through my defences much less opposed. I might not buy my next TV from Dixons but they made me smile. Perhaps I’ll buy a memory card or some blank CDs…

This is St John Street in Farringdon, London. The building on the left is where I work, and the building on the right is, well, where other people work.

These other people were getting pretty carried away last week with Post-it notes. It looked like they were having the mother of all meetings which had spilled from the wall, all over the windows. Either that or they were trying to solve a murder. When we noticed this in our studio, we felt similarly inspired and thought we should say hello…

…and bit by bit we managed to have an entire conversation in stickie notes from either side of the street. I expect productivity took a bit of a hit.

Then the knock knock jokes started…

…but misfired once we realised we were being led down the old ‘Doctor Who’ road. Nice try.

It even started getting a little bit amorous at one stage…

…before moving the relationship online. (ooer)

And getting a bit more creative.

By Friday afternoon it was decided meeting up for a beer in the pub would be a good idea. Bit of a no brainer really.

The dress code was wear a Post-it and everybody got along just fine.

Thanks to everyone involved, most of whom had the presence of mind to take pictures which I’ve shamelessly reused here. Ryan, Mike, Leisa, Laura, Stuart and others. There’s a Flickr group here and one of those new fangled Twitter hastag things too.

So, there you go, it’s easy to make friends. Expect to see this crop up in a mobile phone advertising campaign near you soon. Orange/O2/T-mobile/Vodafone, if you’re reading this, we’ll split it 60/40 but it really needs to be shot in California with a bland and inoffensive acoustic guitar soundtrack.

I went a long to the private view of Wallpaper magazine’s Type Tart exhibition last night to see if my contribution had made the cut among some of the more well-known contributors.

The idea was to create a tart card – those things in London phoneboxes advertising *ahem* ‘personal services’ but dedicated to a typeface or letter of the alphabet. Lots of great *ahem* ‘entries’ there were too. I think the one below was my favourite…

Now I know I’m getting old as some were definitely a bit *ahem* ‘graphic’…

Click here to see all the pictures I took on the night.

You can also see all the entries and contributors on the Wallpaper website. There’s still a few days left to catch the show at KK Outlet, and it’s all in aid of the St Bride Library.

Oh, and yes, my design was in the show, even if nobody noticed it due to bad Feng Shui. That’s my excuse anyway…

What is it with Twitter? Or more specifically, why don’t people understand it? Or, even more specifically, why are those people still so fascinated by it? Are they mystified? Outraged? If they don’t like it, perhaps they’re the ones who should turn the computer off and go outside…

That wasn’t a very well constructed opening paragraph, but at least it contained fully formed words RTHR THN TXT SPK, that’s a big bug bear of Twitter-haters.

It’s generated a lot of interest in the press as it goes mainstream, but what is Twitter exactly? The image above is from a recent article in The Sunday Times, which I would have expected to have more of a clue really.

They’re calling it a micro-blogging service, but it isn’t really something that’s easily classified because it’s not a new type of anything, it’s the first of something else. People have come to understand blogs, but they’re hard work, you have to write proper sentences and everything, you have to have a point of view and a (yawn) purpose. You don’t need any of these things with Twitter, you just write up to 140 characters about whatever you like, what you’re eating or thinking, what you’ve just read, or just restate someone else’s comment which you found interesting (the fabled ReTweet). It’s all very confusing, except that it’s not, it really isn’t. You write stuff when you feel like it and read other people’s stuff when you don’t. That’s it. Really.

If anything, it’s too simple. People expecting a hugely complex technological and sociological phenomenon are often left baffled by the straightforwardness of it all with a feeling that they must have misunderstood something. It’s just people typing. Any criticism of Twitter’s content is only really a criticism of real people’s preoccupations. So, the the question shouldn’t be ‘What is Twitter?’ but ‘What’s the point?’

The service itself is simple, and the point is – well that’s the hardest part for the Daily Mail to grasp. For some, the point is to get hits on their website, for others, it’s to tell the world about their marathon training, business trip or what music they’re listening to. One guy is trying to travel for a month purely through the benevolent help of fellow Twitter users. It’s good for asking advice. (see crowdsourcing) Celebrities often want to plug their newest TV show/podcast/gig and celebrity fans want to get a word from their idol. Brands are all being told they need a Twitter channel to throw out messaging like there’s no tomorrow. The spam has started, the PR people are stirring, anyone can use it to prove they ‘get it’…

Photo by Andrew Grill

All this noise is like birdsong, you only need to pick out the bits which prick your ears, you’re not supposed to interpret it all or even value everything. It’s the web equivalent of when CB radios were the thing years ago, listen in or contribute, but understand that a lot of it will be other people’s banality. It’s social soup, and swimming in it teaches you a little bit about other people’s experiences and opinions by osmosis. But I guess newspapers aren’t interested in other people’s opinions are they? Unless it’s Simon Cowell’s considered policy on tap dancing dogs.

Photo by whatleydude

Most of the newspapers here in the UK give the impression of not liking Twitter much. Maybe it’s just the phenomenon of celebrity Twittering they don’t like, which is strange because surely it does a little bit of their work for them like copying their latest essay from Google. Twitter certainly feeds the cult of celebrity, which is newspaper oxygen. The 3am girls can have an early night now and just subscribe to @cheryl_ann_cole‘s Twitter feed. At one point @stephenfry was the second most followed person on Twitter, just ‘behind’ @BarackObama, enthusiastically raving about the Apple iPhone, quoting Oscar Wilde and proclaiming fellow celebrities ‘poppets’. That’s Stephen of course, not Barack. These people are now using Twitter to set their own media agenda, and the papers had got used to doing that for them. In the Daily Mail’s case, perhaps the hate stems from the imposter who for several months went by the username ‘DailyMail’ before the newspaper realised Twitter even existed and moved in to stop the parody. Newspapers don’t like rival broadcasters and we’re all broadcasters now.

Even Time Magazine couldn’t see the funny side of Peter Serafinowicz’s tweet:

“Went to the gym this morning. As I left, everyone said I was the best!”

Peter’s response to their subsequent enquiry resulted in a catastrophic sense of humour failure by people desperate to read meaning into delightful randomness.

The inevitable Twitter backlash will only be fueled by other envious channels, frantically grasping for a handhold on the media agenda. And it won’t work, because Twitter will be the best place to read all about it.

And they love it really. After all, it’s column inches isn’t it, and those headlines – they write themselves. It’s something quaint old newspapers can use to inhabit the cutting edge, they get to actually introduce Twitter to the less web savvy in the nation like they found it first. It’s print looking down on pixel. The problem is, with the zeitgeist seized, and the double page spread booked in, they don’t all actually know what to say. The journalistic autopilot engages and charts a course for familiar territory. Reading some journalists’ appraisals of Twitter is a little bit like your dad turning up at the school disco to teach you to dance.

Of course, at the same time, they’re all using it. Papers aren’t selling so well these days you see…

Alternative titles for this post included Abbey Slowed, The Long and Grinding Road, Stop My Car, All Things Must Pass, Dumb Together…

London saw the biggest snowfall in 18 years today, and the whole transport infrastructure rolled over and died.

This meant I worked from home (although with no less to get done) and Justine and I made a snowman in my ‘lunchbreak’.

He keeps looking at me.

When my girlfriend and I were in New York last year we found a great Diner where we went back a couple of times for breakfast or coffee. Well, I just heard via some incoming searches to this site, that it’s closing down. We found the Cheyenne Diner as it was opposite the world’s largest photographic store, B&H, and so heavily laden with new lenses etc we staggered in for some pancakes.

It had been there for 19 years, but now the commercial pressure for development is forcing it to close its doors. Even so, the landlord says “I don’t want to knock it down. I want to save the building,” so perhaps it will become a trendy trainer shop (sorry – sneaker store) or something. At least we got some great shots of it while we were there. Click the images here to see more on Flickr…

Last year we also had to come to terms with the closure of the New Piccadilly Café in London, another place we had just started visiting before the owners were priced out of the area. That had been there for half a century and has just been lying derelict ever since it shut down.

Well, if you’re looking for the few remaining places to enjoy an affordable no fuss bite to eat and nice retro cup of tea, there are lots of sites around which can point you to somewhere a little more imaginative than Starbucks. Remember to support your local independent shops and cafés, otherwise pretty soon it will have to be Lattés and Ciabattas all round…

…got a suggestion? Post it here…