And I’ve just picked up the keys to my new office, photos to come later!

Some examples are below:

Prints available from www.shoottheglass.bigcartel.com.

It seems obviously targeted at people learning German as the whole book is in dual languages but the way they’ve done it is quite cool. Text will be written on the page in one language, and then there are semi-opaque overlays with the corresponding translation on top, so you can test yourself on it. For a freebie, its really nicely made, and I can’t believe that dual layer process is that cheap to do. It’s definitely something I’ll hang on to.

Gaming is now a major part of the entertainment industry, I can remember GTA IV not just being the best selling game of all time, but the best selling entertainment product too. Gamers are aging and maturing, people in their thirties and forties are still actively playing, people with careers and families. We’re not all pubescent teenagers any more so why do hardware manufacturers think we are? I don’t want to have to go into a shop to buy a piece of computer equipment and feel embarrassed when I reach the checkout holding a box with some scantily-clad dragon-lady on the front. They seem to believe that on the shop shelf, the box with the most metallic space hippos is the one customers will go for. In fact most of them are probably sold online now, unless you feel like paying PC World tax.

For me, I’d always be attracted to a more simple functional design. It’s one front that I think Apple has got so right it hurts. Although they brand themselves as more of a separate boutique style computing experience, the increasing popularity and increasing 3D capability of Macs means they are taking more of a slice of the gaming market, so they’re not entirely dissimilar. Their packaging design however is always drop-dead gorgeous. Admittedly the asthetics of Apple hardware play a large part in it, and I admit that as a PC user, no fanboyism here. Few other manufacturers can claim as many packaging and unboxing photos on Flickr as Apple does.

Anyway, here’s some particularly sadly average horrid packaging designs I’ve found all too easily:

An indian angel woman poking an exploding skeleton in the back.

An angry dragon man.

Generic knight monster thing.

Robot Space Frog.

Robot boobs.

You the man now dog!

Jesus wept.

The fact they they still look amazingly futuristic today gives some idea how they must have seemed when they first appeared in the 1950s. To many people at the time, this was the iconic image of what a bomber looked like:

Now imagine how people must have felt when this came screaming over their heads:

At that time they were painted in bright white too, to reflect some of the heat from a nuclear detonation, with the familiar red white and blue roundels lightened to pink and baby blue to stop roundel shaped holes being burnt into the aircraft.

I think mindset of the men who flew these white behemoths is fascinating. Set on alert, awaiting the order for a counter-strike, knowing they probably didn’t have a great chance of survival, and even if they lived, who knew the horrors that awaited them back home. Sitting in their huge planes, looking out of tiny windows, carrying a nuclear missile so big it had to be strapped to the outside.

Anyway enough of the history lesson, there were some designy things that inspired me to write this. I came across the Flight Global archive which has scans of their old issues throughout the century, including adverts. I’m not sure entirely who they were aimed at, but I love combination of early British modernist graphic design and modernist aircraft design, plus the whole idea of branding a nuclear delivery system designed to kill millions of people. Here’s a few of my favourites: