BAGDContext CSM

Here is a lovely enamel badge for the Hornby Railway Company. The front has a simplified and flat-colour steam loco. The slight curve of the track gives the design a kind of dynamic depth-of-field, in spite of the flat-colour enamel.

On the back. it’s got a crescent fitting to go through the buttonhole on the lapel of your jacket. These buttonholes have more-or-less disappeared from modern menswear…so this badge is slightly anachronistic…like albert, half-alberts and fobs.

I love these kinds of badges…lovely design, wonderful quality, and not expensive. That’s good for collecting. As you might expect, I have quite a few badges around the house, in little piles!

Every house should have a badge box. And a button box, and a family box of Christmas decorations passed down the generations…it’s part of proper family life.

Peter Blake was famous for having a denim jacket covered with badges…he pained himself wearing it in 1961…

Art and fashion combined in the 1960s to produce a new visual language for young people in Britain…

I’m a bit shocked that there are so few badges at UAL.

This badge is posted for my friend, Alan Baines. He’ll love it.

The great triangle of the US rail system is Chicago to New Orleans, to Los Angeles, and back to Chicago.

The Sunset Limited runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles via Houston, El Paso and Tucson and Yuma…each name redolent of the old west.

Here’s a retro-style luggage label from the Sunset leg of that journey. With Monument Valley in the background. Terrific.

Not just a logo, a whole new system of organisation and presentation…

It’s surprising how few railway company logos are any good…just take a look. The old BR was clear and simple…and looked good in any size – as a badge on a coat, or on the side of a building…

This one’s the same.

Here is a map of the main railway routes of Europe in 1862. But, the thicker the line; the more people and goods it carries…So, not just a railway map; but a diagram of trade relations, economy, and association, across the continent.

This idea in graphic and information design was developed by the French engineer, CJ Minard.

You can see, straight away, that the UK has a much more evenly developed network of routes and carries much more railway traffic.

Here is a terrific railway poster by the Californian artist, Maurice Logan…it’s rendered in the flat-colour modernist style of the mid 20C. There’s a nod to the famous Terra Nova poster by Ludwig Hohlwein too…

Logan was a contemporary of Edward McKnight Kauffer…you can see the stylistic similarity between them with Kauffer’s designs for cotton-bale labels and in his posters for London Transport.

These are just the right kinds of image for mission style interiors of the US arts-and-crafts movement.

Here are two lovely pictures by the great American woman photographer, Lee Miller. The pictures are from a fashion shoot from the 1940s. The clothes have that New Look, look; which combines tailoring, comfort, and style.

One of the staples of the fashion shoot is to create an unexpected visual contrast, or surprise, between the woman, clothes and her surroundings…A railway platform is not, these days, an unexpected place to see a woman. But, in a culture where nice girls were routinely chaparoned, unaccompanied travel was considered slightly racy.

In these pictures, there is a great contrast between the pristine clothes and the dirty and sooty steam locos.