National Maritime Museum

Ships' badges, figureheads, and models from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Unpacking Art

A couple of vintage Wy pieces. There's still lots of art to unpack and hang.

Radical Contextualism Mug

Radical Contextualism, in mug form, featuring Wyeth's Didont/Visage typeface.

Nose Art & Design

At the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace.

Chevron Floors

Just moved into a place that has chevron-patterned floors.

Young Guns

Wyeth & Ryan (Labour) won an ADC Young Guns award.

Moonraker Athletic Center: Men's Locker Room

The men's locker room at the Moonraker Athletic Center at The Sea Ranch is decorated with fantastically bold graphics.

National Building Museum

National Building Museum, originally uploaded by Nat Hansen.

For the last three weeks, the National Building Museum has been showing movies that conspicuously feature elements of mid-centurury design and architecture: The Moon is Blue, The Best of Everything, and In Like Flint. The sound was pretty awful, since the interior of the museum is cavernous. But they did allow you to bring food in.

Didont

The dissertation title, in Wyeth's Didont typeface.

Wyeth says: "This face is almost totally context-dependent, as individual letters become unrecognizable on their own".

Life Long Action Adventure

Wyeth's painting, Life Long Action Adventure.

Zed took the picture.

Thoughtless Arrangement of Appliances

Over the past few weeks, Melody looked at something like half a dozen apartments in DC and Northern Virginia. Many suffered from thoughtless arrangement of appliances. Here are two examples (photos by Melody):


The refrigerator blocks half of the kitchen window.


Melody said that she couldn't reach the washer wedged behind the dryer. Maybe you're supposed to climb on top of the dryer to put your clothes in the washing machine?

Illustration

Wyeth illustrated and animated the new Rapture video, "Whoo! Alright-Yeah... Uh Huh", now up on his website.

Mid-Century, Middlebrow

The London Design Museum. The main exhibit was a multiroom display of Formula 1 racecars and short videos about the history of Formula 1. The cars were cool, especially the early ones. The exhibit conveyed the formidable complexity of the car's design. And I learned that the exhaust pipes of the cars have to be made out of something like titanium because they glow red hot when they're being used.

The permanent exhibition on the top floor was more of what I expected--lots of mid century chairs in lucite display cases, copies of The Face, old Man Ray posters for the Underground, a TV playing a loop of classic British TV opening sequences (can't get the Dr. Who music out of my head), a Morris Minor and Mini, and some strange orange colored 3-wheeled car.

This is the kind of museum that doesn't demand too much of you.

MOVE

More high-concept whimsy from Wyeth et al, for the AIGA Move conference.

How to make use of the telephone

According to the black diagram, it appears that to make use of the telephone I should pull a 10 cent coin out of a slot, take the receiver off a clothes hook, have the receiver spray me with strips of bacon, rest my hand on top of the wheel as it spins around, a little man vomits onto the phone, I ring the doorbell, breath into a tube, and viola, the phone is back where it started.

In red it seems that if I ask a question the phone lays an egg.

(Diagram from Otto Neurath's International Picture Language, 1936.)

The Man Machine

From Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertising Character.

How to Do Things With Cover Art, Part II

A more recent version of the HTDTWW cover. I think the older version (shown below) is superior.

How to Do Things With Cover Art

(Thanks to Wyeth for the scan of the cover.)

The 1976 Oxford University Press edition of How to Do Things. It has a kind of Schoolhouse Rock quality.

It is far better than the boring Harvard University Press edition that everyone has.

Cognitive Pseudo-Science

From my bro's Free Library show.

Identify this font

Can you identify this font? My brother, an expert judge of this kind of thing, was unable to.