Herewith, a couple of engaging graphic arts encountered in my traversing of the web. First, Design Facts, a collection of brief, fascinating snapshots of design history.
Designer Michael Bierut of Design Observer takes on (and defends) the much maligned new logo for the The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Which, like him, I rather like.)
From his piece,
There are lots and lots of reasons that this is, if not a great logo, then certainly a better logo than the one it’s replacing. The old symbol, that beloved (albeit to my eyes kind of generic and clip-artsy) Pacioli M, needed to be captioned with the full name of the institution: five words, ten syllables, twenty-six letters, all in poor old Trajan. This was cumbersome in every sense, particularly as the institution prepares to open in the former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue (to be renamed The Met Breuer after its architect). That new site, along with the less-visited but utterly lovely Cloisters, makes the Met a citywide complex that demands not a monolithic identity, but a way to connect up all the pieces. The new logo, a self-reading wordmark that acknowledges the institution’s two-syllable colloquial name, will serve effectively as the hinge for the whole system.
Change=hard.
A Few Reasonable Words 