Dumpster art in Dunedin

In June 2004, my brother Daniel heard from a former design professor who was an art council member of some sort for the nearby city of Dunedin, FL. The city had an eyesore problem: the cozy downtown area, usually filled with on-foot tourists, featured three giant waste receptacles (i.e. dumpsters) right by a popular bike trail. They had to have them there for the myriad local restaurants to use, so they thought, hey, instead of fencing these ugly things off, let's decorate them with "art." The city posted a call for submissions and Daniel and I thought we'd give it a shot.

Two other artists were considered and we were all invited to present our ideas to the council. In all modesty, I think we did a good job of it. Daniel's designs were jovial, colorful, and interesting, and we did something I advise every designer to do when working on a piece that will be displayed in some large, public manner: we put together mock-ups of what the illustrations would look like on the actual dumpsters. It took five minutes to take some pictures and ten minutes of layer work in Photoshop, and it seemed to make all the difference - the council people kept praising the idea of showing the finished work. Apparently another artist had just brought in a bunch of photorealistic paintings without much consideration for how this would look on the side of a big, green, irregularly-shaped hunk of stinky metal.

We got the contract and were given keys to a giant city-owned garage downtown. They delivered the dumpsters and gave us a month to make them pretty. It was a fun month - we'd drive over before and after work, slap some paint on, and sweat to my iPod in a non-airconditioned tin box in June. We were done well before schedule and everyone seemed very pleased. You can see the process documented in photos in the set below. Good times.

Photoset at Flickr.

A perfect example of what happens when you don't have a designer

Adriano here, hijacking Neven's blog for a bit of a design-rant-cum-identity-review.

Recently, Cedae, the state-owned company that provides Rio de Janeiro with water and sewage services, introduced a new logo as part of a "major brand restructuring". Even though their previous logo was instantly recognised by anyone in the entire state and performed well on settings as diverse as cast iron manhole covers and sponsor placards at football stadiums, the company felt the need to get with the times and present a new, fresher image. Their process for doing this, however, is a perfect example of how not to do it. I've seen my fair share of botched redesigns (refer to Neven's July '06 post for perfect examples), but this takes the cake. Instead of taking the usual path of hiring a design firm and doing a full identity package, Cedae decided to completely do away with the overpaid turtleneck-clad, buzzword-preaching types and go straight to their own employees. That's right. For a while, Cedae employees could submit their own ideas for the company's new logo, the best of which would be selected by a group of managers (still no designers involved) to replace the 30-year-old workhorse.

Cedae's now defunct logo.

The result, as one would expect, was a complete trainwreck. The new logo, if it can even be considered as such, is a masterclass in conceptual frailty and complete disregard for real-world applications. It looks like something a 10-year-old would do for a school project. No, scratch that, I think my cat makes better-looking stuff in her litterbox.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Any manager with half a brain and an iota of aesthetic sense would stop this idea dead in its tracks, but that would be too good. This logo made its début in Rio last week and Cedae is now working with an advertising agency to create a style guide outlining the usage of the new brandmark.

It's interesting to point out, however, that the end result is merely the tip of the iceberg here. The people who submitted their ideas in the contest aren't to blame for the disaster that followed. It's all in the process. Why would the managers trust their employees, who are not designers, with redesigning the company's logo?

Rio's energy utilities company also went through a recent rebrand, but luckily they did it the right way. Instead of drastic change, they opted to keep the recognisable values of their old logo, while making it look fresher and more in line with the times. And they hired a design studio to take care of the whole process.

Light's old logo, introduced in 1966.

The new brand keeps the overall shape of the old logo, but with a fresher feel.

This post was inspired by Dr. Mauro Pinheiro's article in Portuguese on Feira Moderna. If you speak Portuguese, I strongly recommend you read his article for a far better and broader look at this whole imbroglio.

(Neven: It's quite an instructive disaster, actually. If your only guideline for creating a logo is not to do anything Cedae did - managerially - or anything their logo does - graphically - you're off to a good start. My favorite part of the, uh, design, is the attempt at conveying ripples of water. Now when I look at it, I envision turds swirling down a toilet bowl in Rio.)

B-movie icons for my external hard drives

I'm not particularly creative when naming my computers, iPods, vehicles, and other cute objects. My external hard drives - one for media, one for backup - have so far been named "Seagate" and "Backula" (har har). Last night I decided to adopt a new naming strategy: B-movie monsters. So I present Gamera and Mothra, with shiny new icons.

Why there won't be a red Mac

Almost as soon as the new red iPod was announced, rumors started spreading of other possible product(red) products (in red). Here's why I'm willing to bet my hat that a red iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook will never happen:

AppleInsider MacBook RED poll, with a mock-up

And another one, found via Google.

That thing looks absolutely scary. Both the MacBook's plastic and the MacBook Pro's aluminum would just look very off in red. They're also simply far too big for all that saturated color; a 15" object won't look candybar no matter how you paint it.

Different sections of Apple's website

Describing how and why Apple Computer's design (and design philosophy) is fantastic would be a waste of keystrokes. Just take my word for it: they can put things together with elegance, originality, and consistency rarely seen elsewhere. This extends to Apple.com, which, while always a work in progress (like every website), has been particularly stunning lately.

Page after page, it's perhaps the best adaptation of glossy print design to the web; when I say best, I again mean the prettiest, most useful, and most skillfully coordinated. There are more impressive designs out there; there are technically more involved ones; there are much, much bigger computer companies. But compare, for instance, Apple's notebook portal page to Dell's. It's a fair comparison; both Apple and Dell would agree with that. Maybe I'm just too lazy to spell out what all makes the MacBook page incomparably better, but I really don't think it needs to be spelled out at all.

That said, some key sections of Apple.com are surprisingly unimpressive. I understand why Hot News is stuck in 1996; nobody cares about it anyway. But what about the seemingly very, very important Hardware section? No product images, no flowing, magazine-like layout? The partner section, Software, follows the same underachiever formula. These are key portals to Apple's goodies, and pretty much all other sections look better - including the store locator and Developer announcements (Lord knows most devs don't care what this looks like... but kudos to Apple for not bowing to that stereotype.)

It might be that few people browse the site in this way. The big (and usually excellent) front-page ad and its tiny children below point to what almost all visitors are looking for: the new iPod, the MacBook upgrade, the latest ad or Stevenote. Those looking for something else will go to the Store or the Support page.

So here are my suggestions to Apple (and I'm very aware of the pompousness of that statement):

• make your Hardware and Software pages lickable.


• Compress that scattered footer found on most of your pages; I appreciate the white space, but I cringe at the lack of grid, balance, and composition in it. Also, those default blue links have to go. The .Mac page is on the right track.


• Widen the Store page; it's still in 640 x 480 land, while most of your site has expanded way beyond it.


• Lose the menu pinstripe. I know, I know. They grow up so fast.


• RSS is orange - that's been decided. Drop the blue and ride with it. This applies to Safari and the rest of the desktop as well.


• Spice up the Retail pages; they're not bad, but they just don't make me want to visit and shop as much as pretty much everything else on the website does.

Ugliest DVD menu ever?

The Navigator is a genuinely original and entertaining movie coming to us from New Zealand. It's a time travel fantasy that wastes no time on paradoxes, philosophy, or cautionary messages - it uses its premise much like Stephen King did in his best days, as a springboard ex machina (King's worst moments are those in which he attempts to "tie it all together". The man is (was?) good at conveying and terrible at synthesis.)

So, given the choice between Netflixing this and making turtle soup, I recommend The Navigator wholeheartedly. Netflixing is probably the only way you'll ever get it, and when you do, do yourself a favor of clicking hastily through the menu. Or perhaps invite some friends over and have a good, bonding laugh.

Here it is:


Keep in mind, this is not some indie film student or Warhammer fan production. The DVD transfer is atrocious overall, but to create that menu took a lack of taste unmatched since the Commodore 64 couldn't do any better (if you were really lazy and could live with yourself after creating such a monstrosity).