From wallpaper to gravestones, children's bedrooms to the history of London, we round up the ten most popular stories on the Creative Review website this year
10, StreetMuseum iPhone app
Brothers and Sisters' app for the Museum of London cleverly brought the Museum's extensive art and photographic collections to the streets of the capital. It made use of geo tagging and Google Maps to guide users to various sites in London where, via the iPhone screen, various historical images of the city appear.
9, Gap to pull new logoThe US retailer's spectacular loss of nerve after a vehement online response to its new logo. Throughout the year, logo redesigns sparked more debate on this site than any other topic.
8, Record Sleeves of the Month
Gavin Lucas's round-up of recent record packaging is a regular feature on this site but the March edition proved particularly popular. Why? There was certainly some great work on show - even though several commenters dismissed it with the lofty disdain that has become all too familiar on here.
7, The Bible according to Google Earth
The story that just won't go away. If you wanted evidence of the Long Tail theory of web-based content look no further than this account of Glue Society's cleverly manipulated Biblical scenes, originally posted in DECEMBER 2007 but still bringing in the punters.
6, Penguin Classics team up with [RED] for typographic covers
Book cover stories are always popular on here, as this snappily titled post from March confirms.
5, MTV logo changes, stays same
Another logo story, this time about the minor widening and truncating of one of the most famous marks in the world. Much debate ensued, too much for one commenter – 'They've cropped it, that's all. It works. Get over it.'
4, The Helvetica Killer
Ah, don't you just love a good debate about Helvetica, especially one with a deliberately inflammatory headline and an outspoken protagonist determined to take on one very large sacred cow. Bruno Maag's attempt to question the vailidity of Helvetica as the world's favourite typeface, and his proposal of an alternative of his own devising, outraged and enraged with 134 comments.
3, Saville and Kelly's memorial to Tony Wilson
In death as in life: Peter Saville and Ben Kelly's memorial to their friend and collaborator Anthony H Wilson was three years late, but it was worth the wait. Another piece of Saville work attracted more comment (his England shirt) but this beautiful piece of black granite had more views, attracting links from mainstream media and a host of music-related sites.
2, Where Children Sleep
Photographer James Mollison's moving, insightful and revelatory project contrasting the sleeping quarters of children from differing backgrounds around the world won Best in Book in our Photography Annual this year and many admirers when a selection of images was posted here online. 'I hope this book will help children think about inequality, within and between societies around the world,' says Mollison in his introduction, 'and perhaps start to figure out how, in their own lives, they may respond.' Mollison is currently working on a project about playgrounds.
1, Carnovsky's RGB wallpaper
Our most popular story of the year and it's about, err, some wallpaper. Not just any wallpaper though, this is wallpaper that reveals different patterns according to the colour of light shone upon it.
Conclusions? This is a list of most-read stories and so is naturally skewed toward those that are more likely to be linked to by others, which perhaps favours stories of general interest or stories about well-known people or brands. It also, of course, favours the stories that have been up the longest as it is a survey of page views over 12 months and illustrates that many stories have a very long shelf-life.
There's also something else interesting about the list. We are sometimes lectured in the comments section about the need to publish only stories or work that readers would not have not seen elsewhere before. The inference is that, if a piece of work has appeared anywhere else on the web prior to us featuring it, then it cannot appear here. And yet, of these ten stories, almost half, including the number one story, feature work that had been posted elsewhere beforehand.
One other thing: during the course of this past year, the traffic to this website has increased by almost 50%. Thank you to all our readers for supporting us (even the ones who write obnoxious comments). Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at CR.