Jane Pong & things from last week

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Check out these beautiful infographics by Jane Pong. She previously worked at the South China Morning Post. Jane Pong comes up with amazing ways to visualise information in an easy-to-digest format that works equally well in print and digital. More design related content here.

How the ideogram structure and smartphones are affecting Chinese literacy. Chinese people learn thousands of characters as part of their literacy in their own language. But unlike alphabets in languages like English or Russian; you can’t guess at a lot of words. This is especially problematic because of the tonal nature of the languages as well.

Electronic character input tries to get around this by suggesting characters based on pinyin or character auto-prediction. This means that if you haven’t written the character in a long time, due to auto suggestion in apps, they lose handwriting muscle memory.

Trendwatching on the future of retail. What’s coming through this is the importance of retail in terms of culture and experience as well as consumption.

Saul Bass on Why Man Creates via Jed Hallam’s newsletter. Bass made his reputation in developing branding design for US companies from the post war years, well into the 1980s. You might not know his name, but you will recognise his work.

Movie posters for:

  • Vertigo
  • Psycho

Movie title sequences for:

  • Broadcast News
  • Goodfellas
  • Cape Fear
  • Casino

His logo designs include:

  • AT&T
  • Quaker Oats
  • United Airlines
  • Warner Communications
  • General Foods

Saul Bass’ logo designs were seen as an unusually good investment for brands. The average life of a Saul Bass logo is more than 34 years. The logo was most often retired because the company was merged or disappeared. More here.

Ogilvy Consulting on buyer behaviour

What’s Next: Insights & Buyer Behavior from Ogilvy Consulting