Speaking of Apple, here's a profile of Jerry Manock, who worked for Apple from 1977 to 1984 and designed the case for the Apple II and helped design the Macintosh. Manock was Jobs' first Jony Ive.
The whole basis of the class I've taught at UVM for 21 years is ... integrated product development, which means concurrently looking at all of these things: the aesthetics, the engineering, the marketing ... which is what we were doing at Apple. Not necessarily purposefully, but everybody was just thrown together... I would walk through the software place and look around and see what people were doing ... walk through the marketing area. I had my drawings all on the walls, so anybody could come up. There was a red pencil hanging there. I'd say, "If you see something you don't like, or is a problem -- I don't care whether it's a janitor or Steve -- write the correction, circle it, put your phone there and I'll call you and we'll talk about it."
If recent movies like The Hangover, Drive, Inception, and Rushmore had been made in an earlier era, who would have starred in and directed these premakes? How about Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, and Jerry Lewis in The Hangover?
"During our initial meeting with Malcolm, he referred to the three books as 'intellectual adventure stories,'" Sahre tells Co.Design. "Brian and I really responded to that, as it suggested a specific and interesting way to think about how the books could be designed. We wanted the books to feel like first editions of Moby-Dick or Treasure Island or The Wizard of Oz."
The tasteful gray cloth binding and foil stamping of the set and its "extremely conventional" design, as Sahre puts it ("maybe 'comfortable' would be a better way to describe it," he adds) makes me think of famous children's literature collections, like The Chronicles of Narnia. "This 'traditional/comfortable' design allowed for the drawings Brian was doing to venture off into the abstract and unconventional place they ended up," Sahre continues. "More importantly, the quiet design allowed the text and the drawings room to interact and to breathe. I hope the reader doesn't notice the design of the book at all."
This map of the US was made by David Imus -- he worked seven days a week for two years on it -- and it won the Best of Show award at the Cartography and Geographic Information Society competition for 2010. Here's why.
According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied-by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line-the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced-sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus-a 35-year veteran of cartography who's designed every kind of map for every kind of client-did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It's the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they're marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it's not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, mechanically, and culturally appropriate to the web. This is an exploration of this side of web fonts, and a discussion of where the needs of designers meet the needs of readers.
I love Typekit, but I am very much looking forward to switching Stellar over to Whitney or somesuch when H&FJ's webfonts are released (if the price and performance are right).
Steve Silberman has a nice piece on Susan Kare, the woman who designed the original icons for the Macintosh, including a never-before-seen look at her initial sketches for some of them.
Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac's GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn't been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing - each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.
My dad had a bunch of different cars when I was growing up and I remember staring at this particular speedometer for hours...I loved the way the numbers scrunched together in the middle. (via ★vuokko)
Remember the kerning game? The same folks have built a letter shaping game where you can play at being a type designer. I found this to be a bit more difficult than kerning.
[Apple's] devices have become increasingly simple and pared down, even as the power contained in them has increased. There is very little, if anything, extraneous on the Magic Trackpad or the MacBook Air. And of course the iPhones 4 and 4S are radically simple, yet well-constructed masterpieces of industrial design.
Yet, when it comes to stuff that isn't hardware:
But no one laughs when Apple delivers a calendar application for the iPad that tries its hardest to look like a real-word desktop calendar pad, complete with fake leather and "torn" pages.
Still fewer have a chuckle when they see the new Address Book app on Mac OS X Lion, or the even more recent Find My Friends iPhone app.
These apps, and many more besides, all stem from a completely different, and I would say opposite aesthetic sensibility than the plain devices they run on.
They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera's brilliant definition, kitsch is "the absolute denial of shit". These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
This isn't a recent thing either...look at the cheeseball themes and transitions in Keynote (many of them used by Jobs in his keynotes), some of the default system fonts, the emphasis in past keynotes on things like Mail.app themes, etc. Without too much effort, you could pull together many design examples from their currently shipping software that make it appear as though Apple doesn't have a good aesthetic sense of design at all. But then you look at the general aesthetics of OSX and iOS...I don't know, it's really confusing how the same company, especially one that had such strong design leadership, could produce something as beautifully spare as iOS and something as cheesy as the Game Center app. (via ★thefoxisblack)
After years of inactivity, K10k, the venerable design portal, has finally been permanently shuttered. Sad to see it go...K10k was one of a handfull of sites that most influenced my design/online efforts in the 90s.
This evening and daylong program features presentations, conversations, interviews, and performances on the subjects of design and script writing, cognitive science, gaming, augmented reality, and communication.
Dieter Rams' 40 year stint at Braun until 1995 redefined the world of product design, taking pure modernism to the world of gadgets. He is the direct inspiration for much of Apple's product design after Steve Jobs returned and in many aspects his work is more rigorous and more coherent than Apple's.
The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.
A couple years ago, I pointed to a 10-minute clip of a longer documentary called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on YouTube:
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
Sanborn's fire insurance enterprise produced not only excellent and detailed urban maps, but they also maintained an elegant aesthetic in the headings and legends on the maps themselves, and in the title pages of the (larger) city volumes. The ornamental flair is diverse -- I don't think any of the examples above repeat type styles -- and lends an air of individuality and refinement to each of the towns surveyed.
Although this sort of artistic embellishment was unlikely to have increased map sales on its own, it's a charming addition which will have perhaps made the purchasers feel a sense of pride and a little more secure about their own unique town. And it's certainly in keeping with the cartographic tradition of decorative trimmings.
Chris Ware must have a stack of these babies near his drawing table from which to crib.
There's been a lot written about Steve Jobs in the past week, a lot of it worthy of reading, but one piece you probably didn't see is David Galbraith's piece on Jobs' similarity to architect Norman Foster. The essay is a bit all over the place, which replicates the experience of talking to David in person, but it's littered with insight and goodness (ditto).
The answer is what might be called the sand pile model and it operated at Apple and Fosters, the boss sits independently from the structural hierarchy, to some extent, and can descend at random on a specific element at will. The boss maintains control of the overall house style by cleaning up the edges at the same time as having a vision for the whole, like trying to maintain a sand pile by scooping up the bits that fall off as it erodes in the wind. This is the hidden secret of design firms or prolific artists, the ones where journalists or historians agonize whether a change in design means some new direction when it just means that there was a slip up in maintaining the sand pile.
And I love this paragraph, which integrates Foster, Jobs, the Soviet Union, Porsche, Andy Warhol, Lady Gaga, and even an unspoken Coca-Cola into an extended analogy:
Perfecting the model of selling design that is compatible with big business, Foster simultaneously grew one of the largest architecture practices in the world while still winning awards for design excellence. The secret was to design buildings like the limited edition, invite only Porsches that Foster drove and fellow Porsche drivers would commission them. Jobs went further, however, he managed to create products that were designed like Porsches and made them available to everyone, via High Tech that transcended stylistic elements. An Apple product really was high technology and its form followed function, it went beyond the Porsche analogy by being truly fit for purpose in a way that a Porsche couldn't, being a car designed for a speed that you weren't allowed to drive. Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.
Berg and its peers use design in the traditional way as a tool in the translation process, but they have also developed new means of enabling people to engage with technology, and to feel confident about using it. Mostly Berg does so by making complex technologies seem playful and humorous.
The origin of the mark goes like this: Knight wanted to differentiate BRS's custom product from the ones they were importing from Onituska in Japan: "...so Knight turned to a graphic design student he met at Portland State University two years earlier." One day in 1969, the student, Carolyn Davidson, was approached by Knight and offered $2 per hour "to make charts and graphics" for his business. For the next two years Davidson managed the design work on BRS. "Then one day Phil asked me if I wanted to work on a shoe stripe," Davidson recalled. The only advice she received was to "Make the stripe supportive of the shoe." Davidson came up with half a dozen options. None of the options "captivated anyone" so it came down to "which was the least awful."
Two other factors often undervalued (and often ignored) in the workplace? Family and time. Architect Iris Regn and artist Rebecca Niederlander have been working to bring these into the conversation by exploring the intersection between creativity and family life in an ongoing collaborative effort they call Broodwork.
Don't be put off by the awkward name. Broodwork suggests that, far from being the hindrance it's often presented as, incorporating family into work can have overwhelmingly positive effects. Regn is trained as an architect but is open enough in her thinking to understand that in the scheme of things, the adjustability of her desk isn't going to have an impact on her creative process nearly as much as what her daughter might say tonight at the dinner table.
"The first impetus [of Broodwork] was to get people to acknowledge interweaving of creative practice and family life," she told me. "Not to have to hide [your family] when you have to go pick up your kid while at a meeting, for example. That raised eyebrow is going away. Yes, you're juggling. That's just part of the deal. When you talk to other parents, everyone knows the deal so why is it that in a professional setting that can't be brought to the table?
After applying many bad-clip-art tattoos on my daughter Ella, I decided to stop complaining and take matters into my own hands. I was ready to put designy, cool, typographic tattoos on my daughter, or myself for that matter. The idea for Tattly was born.
Charlie Park takes a look at a type of chart that Edward Tufte developed for his 1983 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Unlike sparklines, another Tufte invention/coinage, slopegraphs didn't really take off.
It's curious that it hasn't become more popular, as the chart type is quite elegant and aligns with all of Tufte's best practices for data visualization, and was created by the master of information design. Why haven't these charts (christened "slopegraphs" by Tufte about a month ago) taken off the way sparklines did? In this post, we're going to look at slopegraphs -- what they are, how they're made, why they haven't seen a massive uptake so far, and why I think they're about to become much more popular in the near future.
Can't remember who tipped me off to this (Cederholm? Hoefler? Pieratt?), but Colossal is a top-notch visual art/design blog. There are a dozen things on the first two pages that could slide right into kottke.org quite easily. He's on Stellar too!
A rare sighting, the A-Hole label is usually more than a label. Often, the whole bottle is some unique shape. Look! I'm a wine bottle in the shape of a shampoo bottle! Deal with it! Whatever. What to Expect: I wouldn't know, for I do not condone this sort of behavior. And neither should you.
3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.
There are lots of ways to show these interactions...the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)
Olmsted believed the goal wasn't to make viewers see his work. It was to make them unaware of it. To him, the art was to conceal art. And the way to do this was to remove distractions and demands on the conscious mind. Viewers weren't supposed to examine or analyze parts of the scene. They were supposed to be unaware of everything that was working.
The page fails on a fundamental level -- it's supposed to be where you find out what's happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.
The page isn't just outdated, it's actively hurting Flickr, as members' social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don't come back.
Many of my friends have switched their photo activities to Instagram and, more recently, Mlkshk. And Flickr's broken "what's new from your friends" page is to blame. Both of those sites use a plain old one-page reverse-chronological view of your friends' photos...just scroll back through to see what's going on. The primary advantage of that view is that it tells a story. Ok, it's a backwards story like Memento, but that kind of backwards story is one we're increasingly adept at understanding. The Flickr recent uploads page doesn't tell any stories.
As long as we're talking about what's wrong with Flickr -- and the stories thing comes in here too -- the site is attempting to occupy this weird middle ground in terms of how people use it. When Flickr first started, it was a social game around publishing photos. You uploaded photos to Flickr specifically to share them with friends and get a reaction out of them. As the service grew, Flickr became less of a place to do that and more of a place to put every single one of your photos, not just the ones you wanted friends to see. Flickr has become a shoebox under the bed instead of the door of the refrigerator or workplace bulletin board. And shoeboxes under beds aren't so good for telling stories. A straight-up reverse-chron view of your friends' recent photos probably wouldn't even work on Flickr at this point...you don't want all 150 photos from your aunt's trip to Kansas City clogging up the works. Instagram and Mlkshk don't have this problem as much, if at all. (via @buzz)
After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, "to be indifferent to culture or history or time." He became increasingly consumed with what he calls "forever knowledge," or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too. "I purposely don't write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation," he told me.
Sippey posted a brief item on pagination navigation on "river of news" type sites, comparing the opposite approaches of Stellar and Mlkshk. I thought a lot about where to put those buttons and what to label them. There's no good correct answer. For example, "older" usually points the way to stuff further back in the timeline that you haven't read, i.e. it's new to you but old compared to the first page of stuff...are you confused yet? I focused on two things in choosing a nav scheme:
1. The Western left-to-right reading pattern. If you're in the middle of reading a book, the material to your left is a) chronologically older and b) has already been read and the material to your right is a) chronologically newer and b) unread. From a strict data perspective, a) is the correct way to present information but websites/blogs don't work like books. b) is how people actually how people use blogs...when a user gets to the bottom of the page, they want to see more unread material and that's naturally to the right.
2. Consistency. Once you add page numbers into the mix -- e.g. "< newer 1 2 3 4 older >" -- it's a no-brainer which label goes where. I don't think I've ever seen the reverse: "< older 4 3 2 1 newer >".
We put "Older" on the right, but did away with "Newer" altogether in favor of a link back to page 1. If they want to go back to the previous pages, people can use their back button.
Or maybe put "newer" at the top of the page? Still a waste of screen real estate? Anyway, once I figure out how I want to do infinite scrolling on Stellar, those problematic older/newer buttons will go away. Huzzah!
The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented "arm." With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song. The sewing needle travels the length of the song and produces the sound. Its vibrations are amplified by the thin, snappy paper to which it is adhered. To keep the needle down on the record, we reinforced the back of the "tent" with a spray-mounted half page of heavier cardstock. To reduce friction between the acetate flexidisc and the backing cover, we had the inside of the booklet laminated to be slick and conducive to hand-spinning.
Move all settings out of the app. For iOS at least, you can move settings out of the app and into the general settings window. Please do this because toddlers are drawn to your little setting icons, and they a) destroy the flow of the app and b) the toddler will change all of them and put the app into an annoying state, e.g. in another language, too hard for them, etc.
As it turned out, it was too distracting and sad for me to read while I was designing it. Wallace's tiny, pointy notes were all over the manuscript copy, mostly name changes and corrections and small additions. One character, Elise Prout, used to be a "G3," and a phrase that said "been squashed like a cartoon character" was changed to "worn the brown helmet." His notes reminded me of the post-it notes that would come back to me on galley pages of the essay "Host" from Consider the Lobster -- notes that said things like "Totally bitchingly great" -- and I remembered that I no longer lived in a world where David Foster Wallace was alive.
Designers are clearly thinking about the way two facing pages work together, whether the stories are related or not. This creates a flow that encourages reading without interruption.
i is composed like a beautiful piece of music. It has the discipline to play only the high notes that matter most. For example, it uses its full bleed capability sparingly. It creates strong impact, even with small things. The surprise of occasional whimsy makes the content inviting.
Chartwell is a type family you can use to build all kinds of graphs and charts. Stringing letters and numbers together into ligatures, you can make things like this:
Not quite sure how these are done -- it looks like each vertical slice is representative of the colors in a given frame from the film -- but these moviebarcodes provide a good sense of a movie's tone and color. This one is...any guesses?
The Daily Mail has a profile of Apple's lead designer, Jony Ive...some bits in there that I hadn't read before, including this strange anecdote about a bad meeting that may have led to Ive's departure to Apple:
'We lost a great talent,' says Grinyer. 'We virtually created our own consultancy, Tangerine, just so that we could employ Jony (as Ive prefers to be called). And if I had to put my finger on why and where we lost him it would have to have been one day at Ideal Standard in Hull.
'Tangerine had a consultancy contract with the bathroom-fittings company to design a toilet. I was there when Jony made an excellent presentation to this guy who was wearing a red nose because it was Comic Relief day. This clown then decided to throw his weight around and pulled apart Jony's design. It was ridiculous. Britain lost Jony Ive then and there.'
This is the text of a note that was stuck on the cans when the reels of film for "The Man With the Golden Arm" arrived at US movie theatres in 1955. Until then the credits were referred to as 'popcorn time.' Audiences resented them and projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they'd finished. Saul Bass' powerful title sequence for "The Man With the Golden Arm" changed the way directors and designers would treat the opening titles.
I cobbled together this set up out of the desire to properly archive my design work. Next thing I knew I started getting paid for it, and it became an integral part of my work. I am simply listing my equipment and a little bit about what I know to get some designers started in figuring out the best way to shoot their own work.
Redesigns are always interesting, and non more so than when a title as significant and influential as the NYT makes changes. Duplessis has worked with new editor Hugo Lindgren (ex-Bloomberg Business Week and New York magazine) to provide a new vision for the title, researching the magazine's archive and becoming fascinated by its 60s and 70s incarnations.
For some reason, it reminds me of Monocle, even though it probably shouldn't? (thx, @nedward)
For the past five years, Michael Bierut has taught a class for aspiring designers where students have to record the results of "a design operation that [they] are capable of repeating every day" for 100 straight days. Here are some of the results.
Zak Klauck: "Over the course of 100 days, I made a poster each day in one minute. The posters were based on one word or short phrase collected from 100 different people. Anyone and everyone was invited to contribute." The perfect exercise for a graphic designer.
Well worth a listen: Dan Benjamin interviews Mike Monteiro on The Pipeline podcast about his design work and Twitter infamy. The last 10 minutes or so, where Mike calls out designers who don't talk to clients, is gold. One of the reasons I got out of design is that I was never very good at that part of the job and as Mike says, you have to be able to not only accept but embrace selling your designs to truly succeed.
While we're being all nostalgic, here's what Gizmodo looked like when it launched:
The site, which launched several months before Gawker, was designed & developed by Ben and Mena Trott with the couple's relatively new blogging software, Movable Type.
With all the buzz around the new Gawker design, I figured I'd dig out the first design I ever showed Nick for the site back in October of 2002:
Nick didn't like it too much. Background too dark, masthead text not logo-y enough. Two weeks later, I sent him this, with a half-assed technicolor logo that I'd dashed off in Photoshop in like 30 minutes:
To my shock, he loved it -- so much so that they're still using the damn thing! -- and that design was very close to how the site looked when it launched.
Steven Heller had heard rumors of a Nazi graphics standards manual for years and finally tracked one down.
Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book "over-explains the obvious" and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.
Nicholas Felton has been doing personal annual reports since 2005. But for 2010, he did a report of his late father's life utilizing various documents (birth certificates, notebooks, slides, etc.).
This is a marvelous document. Here's a photo of some of the source materials.
A long photo essay on the hallways and corridors of science fiction movies and television.
Alien started the kind of corridor-fetishism in screen sci-fi that Kubrick had failed to start with 2001: A Space Oddyssey, since the latter film was so visionary and expensive that practically no-one could even attempt to imitate it.
Instead Roger Christian got inventive with his lower budget and strip-mined an aircraft graveyard, strewing Alien's Nostromo with sections and detailing from WWII bombers. This usage of full-sized 'nurnies' followed the long-established visual effects practice of cannibalising parts from model kits (most especially WWII tanks and destroyers) in order to provide ready-made detailing without resort to custom-crafting and vacuum-forming every last valve and pipe. By the time the 1980s set in, Alien's strip-mined tech was practically de rigeur for screen sci-fi...
Soap bars are more efficient than liquid soap dispensers but are also a messy pain in the ass. Enter design student Nathalie Stämpfli's Soap Flakes. It works like a pump dispenser and grates a small amount of soap into your hand when you pump the handle.
Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap instead is more concentrated and therefore has some ecological benefits: You don't transport unnecessary water around. In place of plastic bottles you can simply use paper for packaging. The solid blocks can easily be piled and allow a greater space efficiency in a truck.
But what about the usage of soap bars? I don't like the weird slippery feeling when I use them. It gives me goose bumps. And under the shower, it always slides out of your fingers. Hand soap also often gets dirty and accumulates bacteria when more than one person is using it.
"It's not about being retro," explained Alex Storch, the Editor-in-Chief. "It's about pushing forward. People want quality things they can hold and touch, not pseudo-journalism and themed template design on their computers. We're excited for people that have only seen David's books and a heavily worn copy of Ray Gun to experience his mastery of the form. We'd also like them to read some inspiring articles as well."
Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you're fine. If you neither trust them, nor can they defend their choices it's time to get a new design team.
This should be printed out and nailed into the forehead of every designer and their clients a la Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, you know, for easy reference.
Among the items he included are a gravestone, a wallet, soap, a table, a perfume bottle, a cooking pot, a television set, a cart, an accordion, a Sudoko cube, a fireplace, a laptop, a Chanel handbag, a gas tank, a bible and Prince's "Black Album," from 1987. "How is it that so many different things made in so many different ways end being black rectangles?" Mr. Grcic asked. "They can be extremely elegant and sophisticated, or very basic, but they are such strong and powerful parts of our lives that it is impossible to imagine a world without them."
It's funny...in the column of photos accompanying the Times article, Grcic looks a bit like a black rectangle himself.
Today's competitors have cooked up a little something different for you today; they have suggested that we go Iron Chef style for this match. So, I have chosen a "secret ingredient" for today's match in the form of a design element that will need to be used in each volley.
If either of the competitors wants to know the ingredient before match-time tomorrow, it'll cost you $500...or $1200 for exclusive knowledge. Personal checks accepted.
Favorite Tumblr of the week: Fake Criterions, featuring mockups of Criterion films that would never get made. For example:
Note: a surprising non-fake Criterion is Michael Bay's Armageddon. Well, it does feature Steve Buscemi and Oscar winners Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. (thx, george)
A really nice analysis of the readability of maps from the three big online mapping companies: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. As you might expect, Google is the clear winner; they pay more attention to the little details than the other two services.
It turns out that Google uses a variety of techniques and visual tricks to help make its city labels much more readable than those of its competitors. From the use of different shadings to decluttering areas outside of major metro areas, it sure seems like Google has put a lot of thought into how it displays the labels appearing on its maps. I have no doubt that little touches like these are among the many reasons why Google remains the web's most popular mapping site.
It was slightly later that a woman named Margaret Knight, working for another company, the Columbia Paper Bag Company of Springfield, MA, designed a machine that could produce flat/square-bottomed paper bags, a great improvement on the earlier, structurally weaker envelope-style bag design. As a result, it is Knight who is more widely recognized as the inventor of the paper bag in the general form of the one shown in Counter Space. She's also believed to be the first woman to achieve a U.S. patent.
"Ordering Disorder" is an overview of all of my thoughts on using the typographic grid in the practice of Web design. The first part of the book covers the theories behind grid design, the historical underpinnings of the grid, how they're relevant (and occasionally irrelevant) to the work of Web designers -- and a bit of my personal experience coming to grips with grids as a tool.
The second part of the book, which makes up its bulk, walks readers through the design of a full Web site from scratch, over the course of four projects.
Vinh did the art direction for the book himself, so it's bound to be purty (and grid-y). The perfect early holiday gift for the web designer in your life.
The Paris vs New York blog presents a series of illustrated comparisons between the two cities: macaroons vs. cupcakes, baguette vs bagel, and espresso vs American coffee:
The ventilation stripes used on Apple products from 1984 to 1990 were part of a design language developed by Frog Design called Snow White.
The Snow White design language was an industrial design language developed by Frog Design, founded by Hartmut Esslinger. It was used by Apple Computer from 1984 to 1990. It is characterised by vertical and horizontal stripes acting as decoration and occasionally ventilation, as well as creating the illusion of the computer enclosure being smaller than it actually is.
DesigNYC connects non-profits with designers; they've just announced their second call for project submissions and designers:
We're proud to announce the second call for submissions for project ideas and design collaborators. DesigNYC will select the most compelling projects and match them with design leaders across the fields of architectural, landscape, interior, lighting, and communication design.
Our projects focus on the themes of well-being and sustainable communities -- creating solutions that address a range of social and environmental issues impacting the city, including affordable housing, sustainable development, social justice, human health, green space, urban farming, local food systems, youth leadership, and more.
In the middle of Gotham, our family of 66 sans serifs, there is a hushed but surprising moment: a fraction whose numerator has a serif. So important was this detail that we decided to offer it as an option for all the other fractions, a decision that ultimately required more than 400 new drawings. Why?
As you'll read below, it's something that we added because we felt it mattered. Even if it helped only a small number of designers solve a subtle and esoteric problem, we couldn't rest knowing that an unsettling typographic moment might otherwise lie in wait. We've always believed that a good typeface is the product of thousands of decisions like these, so we invite you to join us on a behind-the-scenes look at some of the invisible details that go into every font from H&FJ.
We talked to experts Alice Twemlow, Eric Abrahamson, Massimo Vignelli, David Miller, Kurt Andersen, Soren Kjaer, Alfred Stadler, Jennifer Lai, and Ben Bajorek and creates an historical and relevant film about the relationship between the worker and the desk and how this reflects on personality and habits.
Dark Patterns are UI techniques designed to trick users into doing things they otherwise wouldn't have done.
Normally when you think of "bad design", you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different -- they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user's interests in mind.
For instance, Privacy Zuckering is a dark pattern implemented by Facebook to get users to share more about themselves than they would like to. (thx, @tnorthcutt)
Want to see the state of the art in web design using web fonts and Typekit? Check out Lost World's Fairs. It's all good, but Frank Chimero really knocked it out of the park with the 1962 Atlantis World's Fair. With HTML5 and web fonts, experimentation with web design seems open and fun again; reminds me of the 90s a bit.
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.
The note imagery relates to the value of each note:
$1 - The first African American president $5 - The five biggest native American tribes $10 - The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution $20 - 20th Century America $50 - The 50 States of America $100 - The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Needs more guilloche but other than that: fire up the presses.
Nick Gleis shoots the interiors of corporate jets owned by African dictators and other heads of state. I couldn't decide which jet interior was the gaudiest, but this one is definitely a contender because of the classy naked ladies on the wall of the bedroom.
Who knew that African dictators were so nostalgic for the set design of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
National Geographic's front cover is a great example of how well simple branding can be tied to a product or message. In this case, the slightly warm yellow has become a symbol of wonderful photography, intriguing articles and serves as a doorway into places worlds away.
...From the past. It doesn't take much to look at this book and imagine the pitch meeting at how Sterling Cooper Draper Price would pitch this.
In 1964 United States Steel called upon the nation's electric utility companies to reconsider the current look of our power stations and transmission towers to be both functional and beautiful. Two years later, Henry Dreyfuss and Associates were commissioned to investigate possible design alternatives, and I believe they were documented in a book entitled "Power Styling" which was produced by United States Steel in the mid-to-late 1960s.
The next film in Gary Hustwit's design trilogy (after Helvetica and Objectified) is Urbanized, an investigation of urban design.
Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren't created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized will frame a global discussion on the future of cities.
The Brand New Conference is a one-day event organized by UnderConsideration, focusing on the practice of corporate and brand identity -- a direct extension of the popular blog, Brand New. The conference consists of eight sessions offering a broad range of points of view with speakers from around the world practicing in different environments, from global consultancies, to in-house groups, to small firms.
Speakers include boldface names Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, and Erik Spiekermann. Surprisingly, tickets are still available.
[I would] grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70's, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.
You know how iPhone and iPad have "airplane mode", which turns off all connectivity? Right under that, I want "Toddler Mode". When switched on, you'll get a dialog letting you know you are entering Toddler Mode, and an explanation of how to get out. Unlike Airplane Mode, you can't get out of Toddler Mode through settings, because there's no way Toddler Mode should allow access to the settings panel. I haven't figured out the best way out of Toddler Mode, but I'm thinking a quick triple-click on the home button, followed by a swipe, should work.
The problem with toddler mode is that the capabilities of kids change very quickly at that age. For instance, the home button is only a problem for a short time. My almost-3-yo son Ollie pretty quickly figured out that if he wanted to keep doing what he was doing, he had to lay off the home button. Now he knows exactly what it does: gets him back to the screen where he can pick a new activity. He also has no problem finding his apps...he knows exactly which of those icons mean fun and which do not.
(BTW, if you're an interface/interaction designer and you haven't watched a preschooler using a touchscreen device, you really should. It's fascinating how quickly they learn some things and just can't get the hang of other things. It's a really eye-opening experience.)
If you've ever wanted to live in a rolling house that doesn't take up much space and even has space on the outside for advertising, get thee to the U of Karlsruhe (non-German link here).
This cyclindrical design is a modular protype that provides flexible space within a minimum housing unit. Three different sections are dedicated to different functional needs: there's a bed and table in section, an exercise cylinder, and a kitchen with a sink.
The theme and title of the piece was 'Learn your A-B-Sea' and took the format of an alphabet chart illustrated with fish and sea creatures that could be found in the local stretch of water, the Arabian Gulf.
Phil Gyford's spot-on critique of the number and quality of infographics currently choking the web. As Phil notes, far too many infographics decorate and don't communicate.
The Selby has some shots of Cindy Gallop's apartment, which has to be one of most personality-drenched living spaces I've seen since Martha Stewart's house. (Not that I've seen Martha Stewart's house. But I can imagine.) Here is, for example, Gallop's Gucci chainsaw:
She had a specific vision for her new home. "I was looking for something dramatic," she says. So she told her designer, Stefan Boublil of the Apartment, a creative agency in Soho, "When night falls, I want to feel like I'm in a bar in Shanghai."
Dribbble (that's 3 'b's...triple letters are the new omit the vowels) is a show and tell site for designers to display their works-in-progress. The color tags are a fine idea; ex: red. Launched, I believe, just today after a lengthy closed beta.
What amazes me is that you don't feel like you're using a website, or even that you're using an e-reader on a new tablet device -- which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you're reading a magazine.
It's nice to see the original concept come to life so quickly and completely. Get it in the App Store.
Now this is interesting...Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month (which should be subtitled "If You Make Software As Part of a Team You Should Read This Book Immediately Like Now What Are You Waiting For Dummy?") has a new book out called The Design of Design.
Effective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.
These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns likely to lead to excellence. Drawing on conversations with dozens of exceptional designers, as well as his own experiences in several design domains, Brooks observes that bold design decisions lead to better outcomes.
The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples-case studies ranging from home costruction to IBM's Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.
What we did here was quite different than what most homeless people would do. We focused on a different angle. We already have the "I'm homeless, help me" stigma attached to people that are sitting on the side of the street with a cup, so we don't necessary need to make that a prominent part of our banner. The next big difference is that we changed colors and went from cardboard to white to spark the interest of people walking by instead of automatically having negative associations that they have with cardboard and homeless people.
The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that "cannot be had" -- because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747's, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @ -- as art objects befitting MoMA's collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA's collection also apply to these entities.
He tells how the job came about: "I was a well-known advertising agency guy, and the former editor of Esquire, Harold Hayes, he called me up. We met at The Four Seasons, and he said, 'Could you help me try to do better covers?' I got this Bronx accent, and he had this southern drawl, and it must have been a funny discussion. 'You have to go outside and find a designer, a guy who's talented at graphic design, but understands politics, culture, and movies,' I told him, and he said, 'Do me a favor, could you do me just one cover?' I said, 'Okay, I'll do you one.'"
Here's one I'd never seen before, featuring Chief John Big Tree, the supposed model for the Indian Head nickel.
Slice and chop 2 medium onions into small pieces. Put a medium sized pan on a medium heat with a few glugs of olive oil. Add the onions to the pan, and a pinch of salt and pepper.
Magazine publishers Bonnier and BERG, a London design consultancy, have collaborated on a digital magazine prototype called Mag+. The conceptual device is impressive in its restraint and its truth to form and function.
We find that the graphical page-turning metaphors that you see quite frequently in web-based e-magazine readers are not terribly believable, and they don't feel very honest to the form of the screen. [...] Scrolling systems are more appropriate to what we're dealing with.
Sing it, brother! Also of note is the way that the video takes the conventional "let me talk over some graphics" screencast and presents it in a much more compelling way.
"We continue to make subtle changes" Ashworth admits, "but we're very wary about doing too much and are always happy to roll back changes if they end up not feeling 'right.'
"The most recent major change was to the numbers 1 and 4 earlier this year. Not a lot of people noticed until a poster appeared advertising engineering work on the 14th of February -- then I got A LOT of emails."
Sometimes a book cover is so bad that it keeps you from reading the words within, even if those words are some of the best Twain ever wrote.
The cover of the Signet Classic [version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buck teeth prominent, clutching an apple, with a perky little newsboy tam cocked at a saucy Depression-era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to both Jerry Mathers of "Leave It to Beaver" and Britney Spears. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.
What the world needs is a great flag, a flag of pure bliss. Here's one of the intermediate steps to the finished product; it's an average of all the world's countries' flags weighted by population.
Greg Allen finally finished his version of Enzo Mari's 1974 Autoprogettazione dining table made from wood from Ikea's Ivar shelving system. An example of the Mari's original table went at auction a few years ago for $14,000; Allen paid $120 for his Ikea raw materials.
Among the weakest designs are the Washington Redskins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose visually complicated logos become a graphic mess when televised and, I imagine, even if you're sitting on the fifty-yard line. At the very the bottom of the list are the New England Patriots. The Patriots' helmet is plastered with their logo, which comes dangerously close to looking like a wind-swept John Kerry dressed up like a Minute Man.
In addition to being a painter of some repute, Peter Paul Rubens was also a diplomat:
In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster tells the story of Rubens's life and brilliantly re-creates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of his time. Commissions to paint military and political leaders drew Rubens from his Antwerp home to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome. The Spanish crown, recognizing the value of his easy access to figures of power, enlisted him into diplomatic service. His uncommon intelligence, preternatural charm, and ability to navigate through ever-shifting political winds allowed him to negotiate a long-sought peace treaty between England and Spain even as Europe's shrewdest statesmen plotted against him.
Moretus was Rubens's most frequent design client. To save his friend money, Rubens generally did his work for Plantin on holidays, so he would not have to charge Moretus his rather exorbitant day rate (Rubens was notorious for his high prices), and even then he agreed to be paid in books.
This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.
Hiding at the very end of the listing is a pasta shape called Marille, which is unusual in that a) it's a recent shape, b) its designer is known, and c) it is no longer available. Marille's designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, previously had designed some of the most distinctive cars in the world and in 1999 was named Car Designer of the Century. (via @nicolatwilley)
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.
One of the finalists in the Roca's bathroom-related design contest, Jump the gap, was Spanish design studio Yonoh's "box." It's a self-contained, customizable modular bathroom that features enough room for a toilet, wash-basin, shower, seat, two shelves, a towel rack, and a section for extra space and storage. All of the faucets are electronic, with displays indicating the temperature and the amount of water consumed. This "box" requires hookups for water and electricity, and after water is used by the sink or the shower, it's stored in a conservation-friendly water tank where it supplies the toilet. It remains to be seen if the eco-friendly "box" will compete with other cubic commodes. Regardless, it's quite a leap from the Port-a-Potty.
Yu Hun Kim's reading tray prevents coffee stains and crumb-filled spines. Part of a series called "Aids for Multi-Tasking," the transparent, acrylic tray covers your magazine or book and features an indentation for your coffee mug. Imagine covering the surface in food and gradually eating your way through an article. But how do you turn a page?
05049 was an actual pig, raised and slaughtered on a commercial farm in the Netherlands. Rotterdam designer Christien Meindertsma was shocked to discover that she could document 185 products contributed to by the animal.
Meindertsma's design includes the publication of her book, PIG 05049, which charts and pictures each of the products supported by the animal. The surprise is in the fact that elements of production contributed to by pig farming include not only predictable foodstuffs -- pork chops and bacon -- but far less expected non-food items: ammunition, train brakes, automobile paint, soap and washing powder, bone china, cigarettes.
The caption on the page reads:
Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.
Crayons smell like pig bone fat. I don't think I'll use crayons ever again without thinking of that little factoid.
See also I, Pencil. Nobody knows how to make a pencil and nobody knows where all the parts of a pig go either. (via design observer)
A gold-plated wind turbine powers an interactively-lit dance floor and speaker system. Michael Jackson's music plays day and night for the fans that congregate in these remote sand flats.
When the food arrives, does your client salt and pepper the food before he or she tastes it? If so, this is a clear sign that your client is potentially closed-minded, not open to new ideas, or set in his or her ways. If your client first tastes the food, and then adds salt or pepper, tremendous. This suggests your client has opinions, and is not afraid to exercise them-but only after the voice of the "creator" (in this case the chef) has been fairly given a chance first.
Like all con games, this one is based on the illusion that the sucker has the advantage. In this case, it's the conviction that this kind of client always has that it's your job to do as they say. Little do they realize that your final allegiance is not to them, but to the quality of the work, something that you cannot in good conscience permit them to jeopardize with their lack of taste.
The lighting-designer version of this is to tell the director that yes, you can make the lights brighter, but you'll need to turn off the power for a few minutes while you change some of the wiring. Turn everything off, wait fifteen minutes while the director's eyes adjust to the dark, then turn everything back on. It sure does look brighter now, doesn't it?
The influential design magazine Emigre stopped publishing issues back in 2005, but now they're releasing issue No. 70, which is actually a hardcover book celebrating the best of Emigre from the past 25 years.
This book, designed and edited by Emigre co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints, using original digital files, tracing Emigre's development from its early bitmap design days in the late 1980s through to the experimental layouts that defined the so called "Legibility Wars" of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s.
You know that image that's been going around that shows several revisions to the Pepsi logo while the Coca-Cola logo is the same as it's been since 1885? It tells a compelling story...Pepsi shifting its brand every few years in an attempt to catch up to steady market leader Coca-Cola. But of course it's bullshit...Armin Vit constructs a more accurate brand timeline that shows many Coca-Cola logos over the years.
Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what's right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
Making the phrase more direct and personal by adding the words "you should" increased the clickthrough rate by 38% to 10.09%.
Curtis started out with "I'm on twitter" and eventually increased the clickthrough rate by more than double by changing the wording to "You should follow me on Twitter here." (And Jesus, gorgeous site design too.)
The Typography Manual has several useful features and resources for designers, including a visual type anatomy glossary, a font size ruler, an em calculator, and a enough content to fill a 60 page book. It has the all the essentials of a desk reference in a regularly updated pocket resource.
One thing that's very interesting to us that is using this rapidly-produced thing then becomes a 'social object': creating conversations, collecting scribbles, instigating adventures - which then get collected and redistributed.
In some places, participants are creating the first freely-available maps by GPS survey. In other places, such as the United States, basic roads exist, but lack local detail: locations of traffic signals, ATMs, caf'es, schools, parks, and shops. What such partially-mapped places need is not more GPS traces, but additional knowledge about what exists on and around the street. Walking Papers is made to help you easily create printed maps, mark them with things you know, and then share that knowledge with OpenStreetMap.
Design has many rules that claim to be big truths and full of wisdom. Designers all go by rules that work for them. However, their rules may not work for someone else, or for a particular piece of design work. When a rule is forced upon you, it stops working and becomes a joke, like "Never use a PC," or "Leave it until the last minute," or the most famous of them all, "Less is more." The problem is that every rule related to, or governing, design is ultimately ridiculous. In this book we have collected the most talked-about rules and the viewpoints of designers and thought leaders who live by them or hate them.
This afternoon at 3pm ET, I will offering the commentary in a first round match of the 2009 Layer Tennis playoffs. The match features Aaron Draplin vs. Sam Potts and promises to be awesome. Come by and heckle. BTW, the morning match between Chris Glass and Greg Hubacek with commentary by Rosecrans Baldwin has already begun.
Wallace's idea was to have leaders and labels, like a diagram. He wanted something that looked like hypertext rollovers that were immediate and at hand. I thought this whole thing might be a bit much for me to design. It seemed like it might be a full-time job. I sent it off to one of my favorite designers, who shot me an email back saying something along the lines of "There is not enough money in the world to make me do this."
Thanks to digital technology, designers can squeeze so many functions into such tiny containers that there is more computing power in a basic cellphone (not a fancy model, like a BlackBerry or iPhone, just a cheap one) than at NASA's headquarters when it began in 1958. That is why the appearance of most digital products bears no relation to what they do.
I've heard this idea expressed before, specifically about the iPhone, but I can't remember where. Maybe it was Rawsthorn herself in Objectified?
The deadline for entering the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism is nearing. Get your entries in by June 1.
The Writing Award of $10,000 is open to writers, critics, scholars, historians, journalists and designers and given for a body of work. The Education Award of $1,000 is open to students (high school, undergraduate or graduate) whose use of writing in a single essay demonstrates originality and promise.
"Sanda created each cover using A4 paper, with all the typography printed and placed on the structure by hand," Jones continues. "We then photographed each paper structure and, upon seeing the original black and white images, we didn't feel that any tweaking or further alterations were needed."
It may be subtle, but it's the kind of thing that reduces the overall apparent quality of your work, the stuff that marks out your work as being standard (read: mediocre) or exceptional. If you feel you shouldn't get precious about such things, perhaps graphic design isn't your thing.
There's very little information about this online, but here's what I've scraped together. Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight is a documentary on the legendary designer and it will be released in theaters sometime near the end of May. You know, one of those huge summer blockbusters.
I posted about Glaser's Ten Things I Have Learnedseveral years ago, mostly for point #5's rejoinder to "less is more": "Just enough is more". Rereading it now, I'm much more interested in some of the other points, particularly 1-3.
And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn't matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
Jackson has brought together an incredible range of styles for the bible, from rich, lush, gold-encrusted illuminations reminiscent of Eastern Orthodoxy to crisp and spare compositions more like the modern style of the Church of England (to my mind at least).
Recently a number of efforts have been made at re-imagining the packaging for movies, books, video games, and other media, mostly mashups and in the illustration style of typical of Saul Bass' movie posters or Penguin Classics book covers. I've collected several examples below.
In his I Can Read Movies series, spacesick imagines Penguin-like book covers for movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Sixteen Candles, and Back to the Future.
On one level design is horribly inarticulate word - it has no real meaning nor way of encompassing all the things that are classed as "design". This weakness however means that the discipline is kind of without boundaries. I think design allows you to engage with the contemporary world and engage in shaping the world: we're living in a golden age of products/services as technology matures and people integrate it into their lives.
You may have picked up on this by reading kottke.org over the years, but I think that designers, architects, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, writers, scientists, et al. are all engaged in doing the same kind of thing, more or less, and that working "without boundaries" and borrowing the best aspects of many disciplines is one of the keys to maximizing your creative potential. (thx matt)
Earlier this year, Bryony and I made the decision to close Speak Up. Seeing weeks and weeks go by where we have only two or three posts (and one of them being the Quipsologies round-up) has become too painful for us. It's also like watching Ozzy Ozbourne today, still holding on to that rock glory but he can't really rock no more, not like he used to.
If the glass Heinz ketchup bottle were introduced today, it would likely be disparaged because it doesn't work very well as a ketchup dispenser. But since it's been around so long, people love it.
Like the Apple iPod, a Rawlings baseball and 3M's Post-it Notes, Heinz Ketchup is a rare example of a best-selling brand that is also generally considered to be best in class. It would seem silly to splash out on a more expensive alternative, especially as the glass bottle affirms its stellar status.
That is why Heinz Tomato Ketchup is one of the very few branded products you see in its original packaging in expensive restaurants. "Sometimes we have to accept that we can't better something that already exists," said Jeremy King, who co-owns The Wolseley in London and is now re-opening The Monkey Bar in New York. "When a customer asks for ketchup they generally want Heinz. The iconic glass bottle reassures them that they are getting it." Quite a coup for something that does not really do its job properly.
- Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for the NY Times Magazine, was my favorite person in the movie. I particularly liked his idea for a million-dollar marketing campaign for the stuff we already own. Paraphrasing from memory: "You already own all these wonderful things. Enjoy them today."
- The best comment during the Q&A after the film was from a man who said that the film made him feel physically sick. Not that the movie was bad but that it was powerful. The man was a product designer and the film raised a lot of issues for him with regard to the waste -- both physical trash and human energy, if I was catching his drift correctly -- produced during the course of making these billions of mass produced items, most of which end up in landfills in pretty short order. He seemed to be asking himself and the audience: how can we, as designers, in good conscience, keep doing this to ourselves?
- The film addressed that question a bit at the end as did the panelists during the Q&A. Dan Formosa of Smart Design, echoing Walker's marketing idea, said that some designers in the future will shift from designing new products and start to design experiences for people to make better decisions about the objects they introduce into their lives or to better utilize the products they already have. The sales and support process at many many product companies are ripe for a designer's guiding hand. It's mind-boggling to me that companies spend billions and billions of dollars designing and building products and then leave the selling of those products to sales people who are largely untrained and unmotivated and the support to a call center in Bangalore. Zappos, Apple, Amazon, and similar companies have realized this with spectacular results.
- What didn't work for me: 1) The IDEO stuff. They had 12 people brainstorming about how to build a better toothbrush that people won't throw away and in addition to all of the time they're spending talking about it, they went through dozens of Post-It notes, and had purchased what looked like hundreds of toothbrushes for research purposes that were likely to get thrown away as well. The whole thing seemed super wasteful (and maybe that was the point of showing it). 2) Karim Rashid. He said a lot of things that sounded good but when you look at his work, I don't know that he actually believes any of it. 3) Marc Newson. What the hell was he on about?
Two competitors will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a "volley" and then we post it to the site live. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. A match lasts for ten volleys.
In a 1989 interview for Dutch television, Pixies frontman Frank Black talks about his songwriting process as creating a "poetic structure" with the melody and letting the lyrics flow from there. The Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset took inspiration from Black's approach.
When we get an assignment (which usually comes in the form of a question, a theme, a problem or a riddle), we feel as if the solution is already enclosed in the assignment itself. The design is already there; it just has to be released. Like the fist from Frank Black's shirt.
Tropicana had certainly sought to create excitement around the Pure Premium rebrand, announcing Jan. 8 a "historic integrated-marketing and advertising campaign ... designed to reinforce the brand and product attributes, rejuvenate the category and help consumers rediscover the health benefits they get from drinking America's iconic orange-juice brand."
Who knows what the proper conclusions are to draw from all this. Did sales drop because glancing shoppers couldn't tell Tropicana from a generic store brand? Does this underscore the importance of good design? Or should we beware of what seems like good design but turns out to be a bunch of metaphorical subterfuge? Did PepsiCo do this on purpose, a la the New Coke conspiracy? Are people stupid because they focus more on orange juice packaging than the actual juice when making buying decisions? (via df)
I'm a classy roustabout, but I'm not sure I'd want to accessorize my computer with the pink-accented Swarovski Crystal mouse.
By manipulating the design of an item used everyday into a sensual, feminine form, we have created a personal gesture for the urban lifestyle of the working woman.
Kind of the opposite of the more organic, but equally impractical Mouse Mouse.
