With the dust settling from thursdays elections here in Scotland, it looks like the Scottish National Party have won by the narrowest of margins. Leaving aside the closeness of the result, the many spoilt ballot papers and the machinations to follow about forming a coallition, the result is still significant for a couple of reasons. Firstly it is a result for a ‘big’ idea – a party who actually stood on a distinct mandate – a referendum on independance – and perhaps we might just be starting to move away from the stultifying politics of least resistance (doing as little as possible to upset as few as possible, consensus focussed) to politics of debate and direction. Ask what the SNP were standing for, I can tell you exactly and concisely what they are in favour of, regardless of whether I agree with it. Ask the same question about Labour or the Lib Dems and I’d struggle to tell you what they were actually in favour of… Secondly, regardless of direction, at least we may be moving into a period of change, and nothing saps a healthy democracy like the inertia we’ve seen recently.
On the subject of consensus, Martin Raymond of the The Future Laboratory makes a good point that while we might talk about the poilitcs of recent years being consensus driven, consensus actually “drives nothing”. “Whilst sitting on the fence may be a pleasurable experience, it does nothing for progress”…
We’ll have to wait and see how this all pans out, but in the meantime, I’m still trying to work out what the SNP’s futuristic/european/contemporary new typeface is. Any ideas?
The “It’s time” part of the logo looks like Cholla Sans by Emigre (I’ve got a few bad memories of a time when I was obliged to use it in a previous life).
http://www.myfonts.com has a handy section called “What the font?”, were you can upload a file and the site does all the running around and identifies the font for you. Easy peasy.
It’s quite a wierd font, but distinct from the other parties for that reason, not sure what I think of it but it sounds like you had a bad experience with it Ilyas…
I haven’t quite made my mind about the typeface yet either, but using it for large amounts of body copy at small point sizes doesn’t mix, believe me.
But like all fonts, used appropriately and with care, you can still get some interesting results, but like the elections, it will take a while getting to that stage.