Category: design

Map of Birmingham— Inebriance Survey

Pub Map.pdf (1 page)

Map of Birmingham: Inebriance Survey 2011 PDF

Now that is what I call a map. Every pub in Birmingham as available from the Open Street Map XAPI (on 6/1/11), for use as a navigational aid.

Plotted as a mapless map with Maperitive, and text tided up in Illustrator, no data was added or removed (except for duplicate of ‘The Tennis Courts’ in Perry Barr, which is plotted twice on OSM).

Prints  available , although you’re free to open, download, and explore the PDF.

Data and icon from and © Open Street Map under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence and as such the PDF/image here is too.

Cat-eat crunch two – bargain edition

So, we’ve established that cats on the packets of cheap brands of cat food don’t look too happy. But can we prove the correlation by delving deaper into the bowels of cheapness. To that end I took a trip to a store that prides itself on nothing more that its low price — B&M Bargains.

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The expresion on this lovely ginger cat seems to say “enough, stop pushing this bowl at me”.

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I know this isn’t a great photo, but ‘Delight’ doesn’t seem the gaze this puss has.

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Posh Cat looks like the food is beneath him.

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‘Schmusy’, which must mean something nice in German.  On first glance the cat is having an ‘eyes closed’ moment with an owner’s rub at the side of the face — but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was long dead and the taxidermist isn’t holding his head in place ready for the glue.

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It’s quite hard to see if the ‘Rufus’ cat is happy or not, these being the smallest photos of a cat I’ve seen. They’re also heavily photoshopped, but the designer still decided to use the shot of him about to spray his ‘scent’ (for which read piss) all over you.

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‘Miau!’ might be a freindly noise in some foreign language version of animal phonetic spellings, but hin English it seems like a cry of terror or pain. The cat’s stare is fixed as he backs away from the packets bearing his picture. Would you fancy eating it?

Friends and sweary flash

Almost ten years ago, I was working at friends of ED — a web design book firm. The imprint is still going, but is owned by an American publisher rather than two brothers who set up shop in Acock’s Green. For a couple of years it rode the “creative” wave of flash design, which in effect gave us staff free reign to surf the web looking for weird shit — the thinking behind it being that the odder stuff was popular, the designers became “stars” of a sort and they’d sell more books. Which mean that a great deal of work time was spent colouring the office air blue with sweary flash toys — Britney’s Naked Cat-o-phone, Buffy’s sweary keyboard and so on (seriously, not at work — unless you work in Shoreditch).

That might have been why the company went under, that and the idea that books needed to be of a certain length (even tho’ they contained almost no useful information, except being filled with the names of people who’d played for Watford in the eighties as some sort of in-joke).

The master (and indeed New Master) of sweary-flash was Limmy, and his best was the xylophone (seriously sweary) — now years later Craig of Friends of the Stars, tells us Limmy now has his own TV show (in Scotland, he probably gets more web hits). It’s online, and it’s worth your time.

All toghether now, “You Are A …”