Links / Design
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Architectural Digest visited the workshop and private wood collection of George Nakashima Woodworkers. In its barns, they’ve stored types of wood that are near-impossible to source today: East Indian rosewood, Persian walnut, and many more.
Beautiful to see the care and respect they have for the trees they fell and craft into furniture or art pieces.
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Via It’s Nice That I’ve written about Temper before; they’re a sports brand for tennis objects and experiences, and their visual language stood out to me from the start. Strong typography, eye-catching photography. It’s Nice That featured their one-off collaboration with Hono, who designed flipbook-like labels for their cider that represent a rally between Federer and Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008 (are you still with me?).
Each of the 60 hand-numbered bottles carries one frame of the final four seconds, and the ball is punched out of the label. They were printed by a Risograph studio in Munich and finished by hand. Lovely attention to detail.
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In Defense of the Detour
№ 147
Illustration by Giorgia Lupi Giorgia Lupi, whose 1,374 Days I shared last year, is back in The New York Times with a visual essay on craft and AI. AI is useful when the problem is well-defined, but design and art are about getting lost along the way.
You immerse yourself in the world of the people you’re designing for, look for visual metaphors, stumble onto something unexpected, and push things around until they break, or until they make sense.
Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving. No shortcut gets you there: the process leaves a trace.
She doesn’t dismiss the tools; her team uses AI too, but only once the design is done, to help carry it out at scale. The design is in the detour.
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Images courtesy of Marek Minor I’ve worked with Marek for years, on projects for IKEA and AutoStore among others, and have always admired his system-level thinking, his craft, and his attention to detail. This project for Cursor is the perfect showcase for all of those abilities. The case study is lengthy, but anything shorter wouldn’t do the work justice.
At 1px the icons felt too thin next to text. It’s hard to say exactly why – they just didn’t hold their own. At 1.5px they felt too heavy. At 1.25px a 16px icon sits beside 16px Cursor Gothic, their custom typeface, and looks just right. You follow your eye on decisions like this. At some point the number is a record of a decision the eye already made.
The icons set inline with Cursor Gothic The icons sit perfectly next to Cursor Gothic, and I love seeing this level of craft get prioritised in a product and company like theirs.
Marek walks through the explorations, the dead ends and the reasoning behind every decision, and with this case study he’s created a generous resource for anyone learning the craft.
The icons in one of Cursor’s context menus -
Image courtesy of Little Plains Little Plains makes the case for Agentic Brand Systems: kits of visual rules, voice guidelines and working code that guide people and agents alike, so a brand doesn’t drift as it spreads across more tools and teams.
Give the same assignment to an agent and it guesses at a much higher rate. The result may look completely competent. However, each unsupported choice moves the work a little closer to what a generic product would do. It’s not slop, it’s just…mid.
Interesting times for brand studios, and for those commissioning them. Scaling a (re)brand is becoming (unavoidably) more agentic. Rolling out and levelling up a company’s brand expression is technically easier than ever, but the surface area you need to cover has grown quite a bit. We’re going to need to grow a few extra pairs of eyes.
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McLaren revealed an evolved identity this month, the road cars and the racing team now sharing the same voice.
The Speedmark stays, and so does the Papaya colour. What’s new is the wordmark, sourced from the service station that Bruce McLaren’s parents, Les and Ruth, ran in Remuera, Auckland. That’s where Bruce McLaren built the car that won him his first race.
The service station in Remuera, and the new McLaren Racing lockup, images courtesy of McLaren I’m not sure how I feel about the new McLaren Racing lockup—the previous logo, still featured in the navigation bar on the McLaren Racing website, felt more… race-y? The production quality of the film itself, though, is extraordinary. The storytelling is very well done. Restrained, but crackling.
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Apple opened a 600-capacity venue inside Battersea Power Station yesterday. The room borrows from the power station it sits in—heritage brickwork, fluted arches, bronze balconies. In an age where concert venues are usually not much more than a black box with a logo over its door, this looks beautifully done.
Apple Music Hall and the new Apple Music Radio studios, images courtesy of Apple There are two mix studios, a 48-speaker spatial system around the audience, and sixteen-odd hardwired cameras feeding a broadcast control room. An artist can play one intimate show and leave with a finished Spatial Audio recording, a broadcast mix and multicamera video.
Very clever, and a very expensive way of funneling listeners to an Apple Music subscription. (I guess this explains the push notification I received for a new two-month trial.)
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Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography—reader-supported, ad-free, and still one of the most useful things to read on typography I know. Published on the web since 2013.
Start with “Typography in ten minutes”, five rules that will, as he puts it, make you “a better typographer than nearly every writer—and even most graphic designers”.
My personal favourites to nerd out on: straight and curly quotes, ampersands, paragraph and section marks.
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A 26-minute documentary by NYT Cooking on what makes a good restaurant sign, and what they mean to a business. They look at New York City’s iconic lettering with the artists behind Noble Signs, who hand-painted signs all over the city. Wonderful work.
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Arun Venkatesan outlines how Japan’s railway companies all carry one logo across thousands of vehicles, maintaining a distinct, shared visual identity for what is actually eight different organisations.
[...] the new corporate identity was commissioned as a single system that would apply across all the companies. In just 124 days — beginning with the passing of railway reform bills — the new JR companies launched across Japan, with new branding applied to every vehicle. The brief was minimal. The designers were given full control, told only that the group had to be called either “Japan Railways” or “Nippon Railways”. It was up to them to find a solution that worked aesthetically and within the constraints.
Workers applying the JR branding. Image courtesy of NDC Great story for a great brand identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its design process is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s, in that an older man struggled to delegate the design work to a younger team, and pulled all-nighters to deliver it.