Thoughts - 28th March 2010

28th March 2010

Woke up once again with ideas for this project.

Intro ideas for the books: Ubiquitous - like air, like gravity. It's there we just don't know it. Developed in 1957 it was extremely popular in 60s and 70s,. Was usurped by grungy typefaces in the 80s by designers who were rebelling against their parents, Helvetica has enjoyed a comeback in the mid 90s and remains in use today despite typefaces being available at the click of a mouse.

The clear, neutral, modern typeface that guides us through out life and is commonly use on: Ambulances, Olympus, Fire Exit Signs, Kawasaki, Energiser batteries, Nestle, Evian, Post-its, BMW, Microsoft, Panasonic, Scotch, British Gas, Staples, North Face, Toyota, Caterpillar, Oral B, Harley Davidson.

We see more than 3,000 corporate messages a day, many of them are printed in Helvetica.

Ask Gary Love, MD, Reach Marketing if he would like to do the Preface - he loves helvetica and is an expert on typefaces.

Ideas: Does blackberry give GPS co-ordinates? Would that be a way of identifying where the photograph was taken? Rather than Market Street, Ashby perhaps 412 : 16'0.

Equipment: Use same camera body - Canon 5D and make sure I have Macro, wide angle and zoom lenses this will ensure I am equipped for all situations but not carrying masses of equipment and needing an assistant.

Use different techniques: abstract, multi-exposure, portraiture, long exposures, depth of field.

Use photoshop skills to avoid them all looking like snap shots. Avoid parallax on high up images.

Design: Have the image taken being visible through the shape of the letter. Otherwise it will just be photos of signs which might become very dull after 20 pages or so. As I need 80 pages for the softcover book to have a spine I will use:

lower case a-z = 26

upper case A-Z = 26

number 0-9 = 10

symbols = 8

Total pages = 70 then there are 10 pages for preface and intro.

Decided to set up a template to see if the idea would work. Took a while but sorted out how to create it.