Just what was it about Richard Hamilton?

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different,
so appealing?

Visiting the retrospective of Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern, I was struck by the way he constantly embraced new ideas in his art, and experimented with different drawing, painting, collage and printmaking methods and latterly digital techniques.

Hamilton took a very experimental approach to art, exploring the boundary between figurative and abstract images and the interface between organic and industrial forms.

In 1951, for his exhibition Growth and Form at the ICA, Hamilton used grid-based structures to look at form in nature and explore their influence on design trends in contemporary architecture and design.

In the seminal 1955 Man, Machine and Motion exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle and then at the ICA, Hamilton arranged around 200 images in a modular steel grid. The viewer was encouraged to explore the installation and see images around, above and below them.

His developing interest in popular culture led to the creation of the collage seen as the first Pop art work, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Hamilton listed the characteristics of Pop art;

• designed for a mass audience
• transient
• expendable
• low cost
• mass produced
• young
• witty
• sexy
• gimmicky
• glamorous
• big business

Effectively he was describing the next 50 years of modern advertising.

Heartbleed

It's a simple logo for a complex bug. But creating an identity to raise awareness is entirely the point.

You’ve probably never heard of CVE-2014-0160. But you probably have heard of the Heartbleed bug, the security hole in some implementations of the OpenSSL protocol that provides secure communication between servers.

The two are one and the same, except that CVE-2014-0160 is the name assigned under the Standard for Information Security Vulnerability Names protocol, wheras Heartbleed is a catchy, scary name with a catchy, scary logo depicting a red heart. Bleeding.

The power of the Heartbleed logo is in its sheer, bold literalness, and in that regard it’s perfect for its purpose.

Heartbleed was given its identity by the international security company Codenomicon, which independently discovered the CVE-2014-0160 OpenSSL exploit on the same day as Google researcher Neel Mehta.

Most security holes like CVE-2014-0160 would be posted on messageboards read only by the coding and hacking community, but in this case Heartbleed was so serious that everyone who uses OpenSSL in applications such as web, email and instant messaging was at potential risk of having their passwords compromised.

A Codenomicon engineer came up with the name Heartbleed, inspired by a tangentially related piece of software called Heartbeat, and in a brilliantly inspired piece of marketing, Codenomicon registered Heartbleed.com, designed an FAQ explaining the bug, and accompanied it with a logo by Codenomicon designer Leena Snidate.

The logo went viral and the Heartbleed brand was born.

Don’t be surprised if the next major bug also gets its own name and logo™ and probably a clothing range.