It’s Only Natural
Planet Green, a new cable channel dedicated entirely to eco concerns, was launched in the US last week. We’ve certainly come a long way since the green movement’s origins some 38 years ago, back when the recycling logo was launched on the first ever ‘Earth Day’.
To coincide with Earth Day 1970 (initially intended as a one-off event), Container Corporation of America sponsored a student competition to design a recycling logo. CCA was one of those liberal-minded corporate behemoths that no longer exist; they believed in good design and even sponsored the International Design Conference in Aspen. The…
by Jennifer Kabat on 18/06/08 | No responses | Read More
Primary Colours
Maybe all the pollsters telling Hillary she’s toast needed to look no further than my tiny village for their prognostications. It recently got its first bit of graffiti and it was pro-Obama, no less. Looming from a retaining wall by the road into town was a stencil of Senator Obama looking a little like Che Guevara. Until a couple weeks ago, nary a spray-painted swear word polluted the pastoral surrounds of Margaretville, New York (pop. 600, if you’re lucky), an area that is far more red than blue. Most cars proudly display yellow support-our-troops stickers – not to mention ones…
by Jennifer Kabat on 27/05/08 | No responses | Read More
Different Thinking
Earlier this year, two academics from Duke University published a paper on the power of logos. During the course of their research they had subliminally flashed the Apple and IBM logos at students, and asked them to perform a ‘visual acuity test’ in which they had to list all of the possible uses for a brick beyond building a wall. While the students never knew they’d even seen a logo, the answers given after seeing the Apple were judged to be far more creative than those given after Paul Rand’s striped IBM logotype was flashed. Now that Apple really does…
by Jennifer Kabat on 07/05/08 | No responses | Read More
Manifest Destiny
In the US we like our cowboys, and the American West has always been part of our personal myth making. We like our spaces vast and our cowboys period. We elected two pretend ones as president (brush-clearing is not ranching, Dubya), and the number could easily extend to three if you count Teddy Roosevelt with his ‘walk tall and carry a big stick’ mentality. The West has always been our stick—or perhaps our carrot – and it’s been that way for more than a century now.
With their kitsch plays on national fantasies, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington…
by Jennifer Kabat on 09/04/08 | No responses | Read More
New Feeling
It took the Talking Heads half a year to find a company that could make Robert Rauschenberg’s Speaking in Tongues cover for them. Keyboard player Jerry Harrison finally turned to a firm that made Oscar Meyer hot dog packaging. Apparently it’s not that easy to find a company to vacu-form a clear vinyl record.
If you grew up in the US in my generation, Oscar Meyer is painfully Proustian thanks to their ad jingle – a whole group of American kids grew up thinking ‘baloney’ was spelled ‘O-S-C-A-R’. Also growing up in the US, I remember the very…
by Jennifer Kabat on 25/03/08 | No responses | Read More
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