Good Thangs. It’s like Martha Stewart. But different.
Good Thangs. It’s like Martha Stewart. But different.
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kottke.org posts about design
Scott King: How I’d Sink American Vogue.
Scott King: How I’d Sink American Vogue. His approach would include stories like “How To Dress Angry”, “635 Poor People Upside Down!”, and “Karl Lagerfeld Discusses Various Cancers”, as well as a 14-page advertisement-free issue.
Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some
Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some graphic design and designed a typeface for Pixar’s Ratatouille. I enjoyed her response when asked about “one thing everybody should do today”:
Something backwards or something analog you’d normally computerize.
You can find out more about Susan on her site. (via waxy)
Design and the Elastic Mind
On view at MoMA through May 12, 2008: Design and the Elastic Mind.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show’s ideas and objects I’d seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn’t the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Michiko Nitta’s Animal Messaging System (AMS), part of a larger project she did called Extreme Green Guerillas. The basic idea of the AMS is to use the radio ID tags worn by migratory animals to send messages from place to place. Nice map.
Molecubes are self-replicating repairing robots. Video here.
And I’ve been looking for Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project for several months now…most recently I wanted to include his work in my time merge media post.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
For more, check out the online exhibition (designed by Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd, the folks behind FFFFOUND!). Thanks (and congratulations!) to Stamen for hosting a tour of the exhibition.
Paula Scher argues that the design of
Paula Scher argues that the design of advertising has gotten a lot better in recent years but that the graphic design community isn’t paying too much attention.
I’m not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to this. I don’t see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don’t read about it on design blogs, and I’m not seeing books published about it. I’m not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has an annual designer award category for Communication Design and I’ve never seen an advertising person nominated since the award’s inception.
(via quipsologies)
Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund.
Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund. I will read any interview in which the subject replies “I still don’t know” when asked how they got their job. I really like what I’ve seen of Mendelsund’s work (sorry…his site resizes the browser window…no, wait, I’m not sorry, *he* should apologize for that); his cover for War and Peace is lovely.
Nice design of a lens cleaning tissue
Nice design of a lens cleaning tissue packet.
Firstly, there’s a thumbprint placed at the bottom where they want you to put your thumb so that the tissues don’t fly away in the wind when you open it up. The thumbprint is in blue, as if it had been manually printed in finger-print ink directly onto the card.
Some really nice looking stamps done in
Some really nice looking stamps done in the style of Otl Aicher.
Slideshow of lobby cards from a collection
Slideshow of lobby cards from a collection assembled by late screenwriter Leonard Schrader. Here’s a companion article about the collection’s discovery.
Screenwriter Leonard Schrader’s secret collection consisted of lobby cards, which were used to promote films in movie theaters from the silent era through the 1960s. Typically issued as a set of eight sequential 11”-by-14” mini-posters depicting scenes from a film, they pre-dated trailers as a promotional device. They were low tech even by 20s standards, but in a black-and-white era, they made up for it with their flashy graphics, riotous colors, and over-the-top salesmanship.
The winners of this year’s DWR’s Champagne
The winners of this year’s DWR’s Champagne Chair Contest have been announced. The winning chairs are more professionally designed as the years go on.
Which actors would play the designers in
Which actors would play the designers in Graphic Design: The Movie? Maybe Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Michael Bierut, Massimo Vignelli played by Sean Connery (Connery won’t do the Italian accent though), and Julie Christie as Paula Scher.
The New Yorker’s Eustace Tilley Contest just
The New Yorker’s Eustace Tilley Contest just ended. Contestants were asked to design their own version of the New Yorker’s monocled mascot; here are all the entries. The winner will be announced on Feb 4. (via waxy)
Build your own Apple Store. Oobject tracked
Build your own Apple Store. Oobject tracked down the materials, furniture, fixtures, and finishes used in the Apple Stores, giving anyone enough information to turn their living room into one.
A video and accompanying text from Edward
A video and accompanying text from Edward Tufte on Interface Design and the iPhone.
Update: Christopher Fahey posted a thoughtful critique of Tufte’s iPhone thoughts.
I feel like this happens to a
I feel like this happens to a lot of authors…the covers of their books end up being the opposite of what they should be.
Emigre is posting some essays from the
Emigre is posting some essays from the back issues of its dearly departed magazine.
If you’re curious as to what designers
If you’re curious as to what designers mean when they talk about design, check out Paola Antonelli’s talk from last year’s TED conference. (BTW, TED has made publicly available a great number of talks from their conferences…like 40-50 hours of material.)
Grading the world’s flags. Gambia is a
Grading the world’s flags. Gambia is a surprise #1. (via marginal revolution)
An apt visual metaphor from the world
An apt visual metaphor from the world of sports for the client/designer relationship.
A taxonomy of animals that are mascots
A taxonomy of animals that are mascots or logos of companies.
Video interview with Michael Bierut about typography
Video interview with Michael Bierut about typography and design. (via typographica)
Clever shower design; the water pipe also
Clever shower design; the water pipe also holds the curtain up.
A collection of rap, hip hop, and
A collection of rap, hip hop, and roller-disco flyers from the 70s and 80s.
The stories of three exemplary information graphics.
The stories of three exemplary information graphics. If you’re up on your Tufte, they’ll be known to you already but always worth a look.
Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias
Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias Wong by Rob Walker.
That question hits an important point in my work (and pet peeve), because many people are always interested in how I get work out there, financially. And it’s quite simple. If there’s something I really believe in, I just find a way to make it happen. No daily Starbucks (US$4) or cigs ($8) or dining out ($20), and before you know it you’ve got the money to do something.
Sean Ohlencamp works at Chiat Day and
Sean Ohlencamp works at Chiat Day and recorded his computer desktop once a day for the past year. (via le monoscope)
Advice from a photo editor at a
Advice from a photo editor at a national magazine on how to talk about photography, particularly to those who know little about it.
I have a sweet technique I use for finding the great images from a shoot that really tends to piss-off the editors: I edit the film without reading the story. This helps me tune into which images have the most impact on me and which ones transcend subject matter and become forces in their own right.
His description of defending good photography applies to design as well.
John Maeda is leaving his position at
John Maeda is leaving his position at The MIT Media Lab for the Presidency of RISD. Good luck, John.
Update: Here’s a video of Maeda introducing himself as president.
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