Archive for April, 2010

Another lost shape

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 24, 2010
in Design history
. 1 Comment

I was visiting a print design firm and noticed a pile of freshly printed business cards that had the shape of a rectangle with one corner cut off diagonally. I was delighted: this must clearly be the card of some IT professional who wanted to play on the shape of the IBM punched card, right?

Punched Card

Wrong, of course. I asked the designer and he said this is just a nice shape for someone wishing to stand out from the usual rectangular cards, but he didn’t even recognize that this is the form factor of a punched card. In fact, he’d never even seen such a card, even though they were all too common in his parents’ youth – not only in mainframe computer installations but also in every home, since they were used for utility bills to facilitate later data processing (see here). No one who was even slightly literate in the sciences could have missed the similarity back then.

Yet another iconic shape going away into the mists of oblivion…

Little Big Biscuit

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 17, 2010
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

You need to speak Hebrew and French to detect the hilarity of this photo:

Petit Beurre package

Here’s the thing: the package contains a local make of  Petit Peurre cookies, a timeless biscuit design. However, someone decided to brand it as PTIBER GADOL – literally, “Large Petit Beurre“. Except that Petit, of course, means Little…

Oh, and incidentally, neither the package nor the biscuits deviate from the standard size we’ve had for ages. The only large thing about this product is the silliness of the branding.

Chimney sighting

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 11, 2010
in Odds and Ends
. 5 Comments

Here is a striking photo I snapped in Tubingen, in southern Germany, showing a building with a tile roof… bearing a weird pattern:

Building with chimney in Tubingen

Chimney in Tubingen
The cause of the red circle on the roof is unmistakable, the air flows around the chimney… but it is the opposite of what you’d expect, and the details are a bit unclear (considering the darker soot circle around the cleared out area). If you care to speculate, do it in the comments!

All staplers are not created equal!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 2, 2010
in Good design
. 3 Comments

Continuing the theme of using the right tool for the job, here’s my take on a tool that is everywhere: the trusty old stapler.

Most everyone uses the usual kind if stapler, either the small size 10 or the regular standard office model. The problem is, neither of these is any good for more than a few pages. Yet they are readily available and people use them, accepting the frequent frustration of misaligned, crooked or ineffective fastening for thicker jobs.

My recommendation: go and buy the two following units, which do a far better job on midsized print jobs. The first is a plier-stapler, a replacement for the standard office model. It uses the same staples, but its grip is far better, its alignment is perfect, and applying the required pressure for a perfect fastening is natural and effortless. No office or home should be without one of these.

Plier Stapler

The second may not be needed in every home, but if you create serious documents you should get one: a heavy duty stapler, one designed to grab – in the case of the one in the photo – 75 pages of paper with ease. Be sure to try before you buy, though – I’ve seen many poorly designed models that were almost useless. But a good make – I’m very happy with my Max model HD-3D, for one – will slice through those fat printouts and photocopy stacks like butter. That’s what you need!

Heavy duty stapler model Max HD-3D