Can good design save the newspaper?

What would you tell me if after a redesign, your  old-classy-boring newspaper got an award as The World’s Best Designed Newspaper ?

Would you read it more often? would it increase their sales? well, you can find those answers in this short talk [only 6 minutes!] by designer Jacek Utko, an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%.

Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers

If you have trouble viewing the video try viewing it here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html

Olympic Pictograms Through Time

Olympic icons
An Animated appraisal

Found this article a week ago in the New York Times, about graphic designer Steven Heller who traces the evolution of the tiny symbols for each Olympic sport since their appearance in 1936; the good ones, the messy ones, the artsy and such.

Watch the clip here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/24/sports/olympics/pictograms-interactive.html

enjoy!

[0WND] Logo gone bad

Back in 1973, life was simplier and we all were a little more innocent than today. In that year designer Gerry Kano was commissioned by the Archdiocesan Youth Commission to do their logo  and it even eventually won an award from the Art Directors Club of Los Angeles, and later an AIGA award in 1975.

But that was then and this is now 2009 and looking back at it with all the media fuzz around Catholic Church gave it a whole new meaning.

“designed three decades before the sex abuse scandal broke out in the Catholic Church. The unfortunate pictorial relationship between the priest and the child, given our collective awareness in 2009, suggests a much too ironic interpretation. It’s a challenge to see what this positive/negative image once suggested, a guardian protecting the innocent, since the benevolence of its subject matter is no longer black and white. When a good design signifies bad deeds, the result is, well, a really unfortunate logo.”

-Steven Heller

[L0G0] 50 Circular Logos

Circular logos have been around, you see them everywhere and not just because is a popular trend, maybe it’s because a circle is timeless, simple and memorable

These logos make use of the circle in many creative ways, sometimes containing typefaces, symbols and images as seen in the examples below.

NASA

Indra

Lucky Strike