Tony Zhou, creator of the incredibly insightful series of video essays about film “Every Frame a Painting,” takes a look at the subconscious instincts and conscious thought processes that drive effective film editing. Zhou is an editor, and he brings a wonderful frankness to the intangibility of his craft. In this age where technology claims to be able to measure nearly anything, it’s refreshing to be reminded that some art forms, like editing, are inherently ummeasurable.

A very intriguing experiment from the talented folks at Latinotype: until 25 May, you can buy all fourteen styles of their new typeface, called Branding, for any price that you like—so long as it’s least US$1. I hope the company will be forthcoming with the data, or at least the macro-trends, from this sale, as I will be very interested to hear how people value this opportunity. It helps too that Branding is friendly and attractive—a terrific design. Kudos to the team for this adventurous trial.

Learn more at latinotype.com.

I’ve been having tons of fun with this new pattern making feature in the latest release of Adobe Capture, an iOS app that lets you take photos of design inspirations in the world around you and turn them into usable assets like brushes, color palettes, vector shapes and more.

These are a few examples of the patterns I’ve created recently, with their source photos in the lower right hand corner (I blurred out a co-worker’s face in the last one). Each took literally seconds—not even minutes—to make. You just open up the app, switch to pattern mode and aim your phone’s camera at something interesting. As you move the camera around, the pattern you’re capturing shifts—when you see the design you like you hit the camera button and it’s saved. The pattern is then instantly added to your Creative Cloud library and available for immediate use in Photoshop. It’s pretty close to magical.

This new logo for DC Comics was “developed in partnership” with the world renowned design studio Pentagram, which probably means that the studio got paid a lot of money but that the company ultimately rejected their work in favor of work done in-house (to be clear: I’m totally guessing here). Whatever the actual process, the result seems inelegant and poorly balanced, and the odd serifs and unconventionally cut counters and bowls of the two letterforms seem less inspired than awkwardly unresolved.

The circular shape also explicitly references DC’s older logos, but not in a particularly thoughtful way. Mostly the mark looks like a sadly accurate reflection of the continued confusion from which DC Comics seems to be suffering. The company is perennially in second place after industry leader Marvel, both on newsstands and in movie theaters (though to be fair, DC is winning the race for bland TV shows that you’ll be no poorer for missing) and, absent any clear strategy for making its iconic characters relevant to contemporary audiences, it spends too much time dwelling on its history.

In situations like these, it’s almost unsurprising to see companies launch new logos. A refreshed brand can provide an opportunity to turn the page, refocus the mission, and communicate new approaches in emphatic terms. Of course, there’s also the “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” argument, which basically interprets strategies like these as distractions from the harder work of addressing a company’s true problems—fixing its products so that more customers want them.

For my part, I had actually become somewhat fond of the previous logo, in which a capital “D” peeled back to reveal a “C.” It was certainly an improvement over its short-lived predecessor, and none of them are as uniformly well executed, effective and timeless as Milton Glaser’s 1976 version.

Regardless of the actual aesthetic merits of these logos, though, this relatively rapid pace for rebranding is probably in and of itself the biggest sin. Launching a third logo in less than a dozen years is very poor brand management. It runs directly counter to what I’ve come to believe is the most important rule of branding: whatever your logo is, use it often and use it consistently. There’s simply too much noise out there for customers to learn what your logo is over and over again, and each time they have to do that, they get progressively less confident in the stability of your business.

“High-Rise,” the new black comedy from director Ben Wheatley based on a book by J.G. Ballard, is a totally bonkers story of an apartment building on the outskirts of London in the 1970s. As basic services start to degrade inside the tower, civil society collapses in on itself in apocalyptic fashion, and the movie follows along, not always coherently, as the building’s various social castes go to war with one another. Though I enjoyed it immensely I recognize that not everyone with good taste will like it—Wheatley is less interested in telling a moral tale than exploring how easily social strife can unleash depravity. Even if this is not your cup of tea, you might still be able to appreciate the image above, an alternative poster, that, in my opinion, is one of the most subtle and richly comic designs that I can remember seeing for a film in a long time. Instant classic.

“High Rise” is in limited release now but also available for rent via iTunes.

https://youtu.be/qYEawT-xw2A

Yesterday I was interviewed on the radio by host Josie Huang of KPCC’s Take Two program about the meaning and implications of Instagram’s new logo and app design. This follows an article at Gizmodo last week that looked at the apparent new trend of black and white app interfaces. If you’re interested, you can find the former at scpr.org and the latter at gizmodo.com, but mostly I just wanted to write this post so I could use this awesome headline, suggested to me by my wife.

Here’s a list of all the movies I watched in April. It was not a great month for seeing new movies. First, I wasn’t able to get out to theaters at all; partly that was because there was nothing good playing (I was tempted by “Batman v. Superman” but couldn’t bring myself to do it after reading all the bad reviews). The best stuff I watched was Steven Soderbergh’s “Che: Part One” and “Che: Part Two,” which, gulp, were eight years ago already.

April 2016

• “Comanche Station”
• “And Then There Were None”
• “Frank” Kinda hated this.
• “Ip Man”
• “Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance” Gorgeously deranged.
• “The Hidden Fortress” Finally!
• “Buchanan Rides Alone”
• “Che: Part One” Mesmerizing.
• “The Departed” Re-watched; superb.
• “Creed” Re-watched.
• “Che: Part Two” Heartbreaking.
• “Blood Simple” Magnificent.
• “The Duke of Burgundy” Well done but so weird.
• “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” Really holds up.
• “Mad Max: Fury Road” Re-watched.

If you’re interested, here’s my list from March and my list for January and February. And you can follow along with my film diary on Letterboxd, too.

https://youtu.be/wYB-NuW_SRo?t=7m41s

If you haven’t watched President Obama’s speech at the 2016 White House Correspondent’s Dinner last Saturday, it’s hilarious—and almost shockingly so in how consistently funny it is throughout. You can find a good roundup of some of the best zingers here, but watching it is worthwhile entertainment in itself. I particularly liked the joke about GOP chairman Reince Priebus that Obama makes at the 20:15 mark.