Christmas treat

Bettys Tea Rooms, the North’s finest, opened their first café in Harrogate in 1919. It seems from their website that we nearly got Bettys in the South...but Frederick Belmont (a man who knew how to wear a moustache!) apparently found the North more to his taste and stayed there to make Fat Rascals for an appreciative audience. The cafés are still really popular if the number of images on Flickr is anything to go by.

The Bettys I know best is Bettys Café Tea Room in York. My mother used to tell me how Bettys in York was the place to be taken by servicemen after the Second World War. Surely it is still the place to be taken? Proper linen tablecloths, solid china, trolleys of cakes, waitresses in crisp uniforms. Yes, there is often a queue. But that is for a good reason.

When I received the splendid ginger polar bear - pictured here in his Margaret Howell-esque red spotted scarf – as a gift, he came in a rather elegant ribbon-tied box in a proper brown paper carrier bag with string handles. After being momentarily posed for a photograph he was scoffed up with a cup of English Breakfast tea. Very nice he was too.

Beautifully crafted

I have blogged Pentagram before, but only once, so this hasn’t - yet - become some mad fan blog. Two nice things come together on this one – the (literally) shiny new Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York and their new logo by Michael Bierut at Pentagram.

I visited the old MAD just before it closed and saw a great Droog exhibition. But that building had little impact at street level. The new one looks impressive, a re-clad block of 1964 origin. From where I sit it looks all the better for its facelift. The new skin of iridescent tiles has been cut about with striking lines of fenestration, making the building in to a ‘piece’ to echo the craft it will house. Of course, the project upset conservationists but the original building was a pretty dour, dated looking thing.

So. The logo. Its development is described in detail on the tasty Pentagram blog and I can't better that. What I really really love about this logo is the way the design accepts varied, textured imagery; paper, wood, basketry...so nice for a museum dealing with craft. And the way the logo is rather difficult to read actually dilutes the somewhat unfortunate acronym of MAD and makes a design – and a success - of it.

The rolled out alphabet of the MAD face is full of jolly fat letters, extending the visual metaphor. It looks great too, working with colours and images. It has almost become pure pattern. Although it has only been used on marketing where legibility could be subsumed in the name of recognisablity; there is a more classic face for the real printed output.

It’s quite hard to make anything 'craft' sexy, I think. But this does it for me.