Frankfurt, (West) Germany

Fifty years ago I was growing up as a third culture kid in Germany. This pic which recently surfaced is of my Kindergarten class in front of our Frankfurt home on Stettenstrasse (I’m the blond kid second from the left wearing the natty bow-tie and jacket) under the über-watchful eye of Tante Henne. It must have been a special day, as we each have a token mascot or doll along (manky Teddy-bear for me) and none of us boys are wearing the habitual Lederhosen as we usually did…

Auckland, New Zealand

Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who (together with Sherpa Tensing Norgay) was the first to successfully climb Mount Everest, passed on yesterday. Though he considered himself a simple man (“Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself,” he stated in a 1975 interview) he was known for his unbounded enthusiasm for life and adventure, his decades-long campaign to develop schools and health clinics in Nepal, and his role as an ardent conservationist. Revered by Kiwis, Prime Minister Helen Clark had this to say: “Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus… an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest, but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity… this legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived.”

Climb on, Sir Edmund…

Hillary and Tensing Norgay summited Mount Everest, the highest point on earth, on 29 May 1953. He remains the only non-political person outside of Britain to have ever been honoured as a member of Britain’s Order of the Garter (bestowed by the Queen on just 24 knights and ladies living worldwide at any time) and was the first foreign national to ever be conferred with honourary citizenship by Nepal. Hillary has also appeared on the New Zealand $5 banknote since 1992—the only living Kiwi to ever do so.

Source: The Economist

“A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies…” read the opening lines of a feature piece in the December 19th edition of The Economist. Cited by author Edward Tufte as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn,” the chart above also tells the story of a war: Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. “It was drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, a French civil engineer who worked on dams, canals and bridges. He was 80 years old and long retired when, in 1861, he called on the innovative techniques he had invented for the purpose of displaying flows of people, in order to tell the tragic tale in a single image.”

“Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.”

“The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression “C’est la Bérézina” to describe a total disaster.”

“In 1871, the year after Minard died, his obituarist cited particularly his graphical innovations: ‘For the dry and complicated columns of statistical data, of which the analysis and the discussion always require a great sustained mental effort, he had substituted images mathematically proportioned, that the first glance takes in and knows without fatigue, and which manifest immediately the natural consequences or the comparisons unforeseen.’ The chart shown here is singled out for special mention: it “inspires bitter reflections on the cost to humanity of the madnesses of conquerors and the merciless thirst of military glory.”

Read the full The Economist piece online here. Download a high resolution JPG of the Minard Map (568 KB) here.

My parents were married 62 years ago today, on my mother’s 19th birthday. Retroactive congratulations are in order…

Winnipeg, Canada

Saturday was an interesting day back here in the ‘Peg, and I once again gave my “Design 101” talk at FITC’s “Design & Technology” event… though I must admit I felt like somewhat of a dinosaur presenting alongside high-energy Flash aficionados such as Hoss Gifford, Joshua Davis, and Eric Natzke. While my “design primer”presentation dealt with important (read boring?) fundamentals such as the basics of form, composition, typography (e.g. legibility), colour theory, and visual Gestalt principles, theirs exhibited the cutting edge of motion graphics…

Manitoba, Canada

I have just acquired a butter-coloured 1981 VW Westfalia camper van. Powered (?!) by a 2 L air-cooled engine, she is fully equipped with all the necessities of a nomadic base camp—a pop-top, fold-out beds, 3-way refrigerator, running water, two-burner propane stove, and loads of storage room. Christened “Bettie” (ask me about that some time), she’s already proving very convenient for weekend outings to the granite cliffs of NW Ontario…

Menlo Park, California

The May/June 2006 (#344) issue of Communication Arts magazine features an in-depth article entitled “Cuba Si! Life and design on the embargoed archipelago” written by Circle’s founder and principal, Robert L. Peters. The piece explores Cuba’s cultural and political realities in relation to visual communication, and is accompanied by a selection of graphic design spanning the 47-year span since the Cuban Revolution (many works never before seen outside of Cuba).

Peters has visited Cuba several times in recent years (as co-organizer and chair of the 2001 Havana Design Week held in the Che Guevara Memorial Hall [in conjunction with his board role with the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda)], and several subsequent visits re: design advocacy and preparation for the Icograda World Design Congress to be held in October 2007). In this regard he worked closely with professional Cuban colleagues from the PROGRÁFICA Committee in preparing the feature article, drawing on numerous studio visits as well as one-on-one interviews with designers working both within state organizations and independently.

Peters has been contributing articles to Communication Arts magazine since 1995 and has previously written for CA on design and design events in Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, and China. Copies of CA issue #344 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

Read or download a PDF-version of the “Cuba Si!” feature article here (3.6 MB).

Brighton, UK

Robert L. Peters, President of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) and Sir David Watson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton, today signed a formal agreement regarding the location, classification, cataloguing, maintenance and further development of the Icograda Archive in conjunction with the Design History Research Centre Archives at the University of Brighton. The Icograda Archive adds to the University of Brighton’s development of a major bank of twentieth century design archives. In past months, Icograda has been compiling its various collections of records, documents, samples and publications gathered since Icograda’s inception in 1963. The holdings already in Brighton include Icograda’s historically and aesthetically significant poster archive.

Comprising more than 1,070 posters from 33 countries dating from the early 1960s through to the late 1980s, the poster collection affords the opportunity to study aspects of the visual history of countries whose output has been largely overlooked in mainstream histories of design. The Icograda Archive joins the FHK Henrion Archive (FHK Henrion was Icograda’s third president), the James Gardner Archive and the extensive Design Council Archive and Photographic Library, thereby contributing to a major bank of twentieth century design archives, both physical and virtual, already housed and managed by the University of Brighton.

(From an Icograda feature story).