Posts Tagged ‘words’
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
York Hall: terrible drawing, great venue
Taking time out from the everyday for mental refreshment is usually sound advice, as is “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. Conferences usually trade in comfortable & exotic locations and the promise of rest and revelation. Getting away from it all is supposed to help you get back into it all – an appealing (if often costly) idea. An alternative is to take Art & Science’s great lesson: Everything Is Interesting If You Look At It In The Right Way – and step in to the everyday.
This weekend (parted from a hard-earned tenner) I made my way to Bethnal Green’s York Hall, venue for the second Boring conference, founded/organised by James Ward, whose business card should surely read Chairman of the Bored had not Insurance Salesman James Osterberg got to that title first in 1979. This year’s expanded event was alluringly titled Boring 2011…
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Tags: Boring2011, communication, conferences, creativity, detail, inspiration, words
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Thursday, September 8th, 2011
An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…
A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.
Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.
John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.
There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.
What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, problem-solving, service design, words
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Monday, January 31st, 2011
Feather Times a Feather, 1987
Last month the musician/artist variously known as Don Vliet/Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart died after a long battle with MS. Much will have been written about his influence by now, but I doubt that his wilfully eccentric music, abstract poetry and visual works are too frequently cited as inspirational by many designers (over-rational control-freaks that we tend to be) but… they worked for me.
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Tags: communication, creativity, design, graphic design, innovation, inspiration, language, music, words
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.
For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.
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Tags: communication, creativity, decorative tradition, decorative type, graphic design, I Wonder, illustration, inspiration, Marian Bantjes, ornament, typography, visual culture, words
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Randomly chosen newspaper spread with stories grouped under two page headings. The wide field of vision allows many other connections/reasons-to-read
The Death of Print is a phrase regularly bandied about since the invention of TV (and probably radio before that), appearing with renewed vigour with the arrival of every new communications platform. The actual death of some newspapers and print publications lends urgency to the drama, but the reality is less apocalyptic. Jobs are lost, companies fail, the media landscape changes, but old formats (with the notable exception of the unloved videocassette) assume new roles rather than become extinct. The life and death struggle of old vs. new media is the easy narrative but old media has unique value which should ensure at least a modest survival.
New media platforms have given us massive advances in accessibility and empowerment – but they also come with a predisposition for targeted communication, ‘narrowcasting’ and self-selection. Old media, print especially, has one underappreciated benefit that is absent from the new stuff. It doesn’t decide quite so forcefully in advance what information will be of value to me, limiting what I might learn about the world.
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Tags: communication, design, graphic design, information design, iPad, legibility, media, newspapers, TV, typography, words
Posted in blog, distillation, information, typerbole, visualisation | No Comments »
Friday, June 25th, 2010
An illustrator, teacher and member of the editorial board of award-winning contemporary illustration magazine Varoom, Anna Steinberg creates beautifully drawn, witty and thoughtful images, some of which were recently selected for Images – Best of British Illustration and the London Transport Museum/AOI Cycling in London competitions. In this email interview she reveals the significance to her work of ingenuity, mountains, biscuits & old Bidies…
How do you work?
With professional commissions I usually problem-solve in words first and then develop through doodles into resolved pictures. With personal work I do visual experiments and it emerges more spontaneously.
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Tags: Anna Steinberg, communication, creativity, illustration, image-making, inspiration, language, visualisation, words
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
British Airways in a proposed merger with Iberia is to list on the London Stock Exchange as International Airlines Group. Boring! When I communicate with power utility E.on, the name always gives pause for thought (am I writing it/saying it correctly? what does it mean?). The two airline companies will continue to trade publicly under their existing well-established brands (volcanic ash permitting) and E.on is probably considered a ‘successful’ brand, but new brand names now seem to come in just two flavours: underwhelming or overwrought. When was the last time a big brand name was launched to anything other than universal derision? What’s up with brand names?
Naming strategies have evolved from simple ownership (Campbell’s), to acronym (BBC), description (Slimfast) and evocation (Breeze). Now ‘no-names’ like Muji (tr.:‘no-label’) and neologisms (or ‘stupid made up names’ as they are more commonly known) like Wii represent newer strategies that are a harder sell and demand a little more – sometimes too much – of the consumer.
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Tags: brand design, brand names, branding, communication, language, words
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
I put up a shed last weekend (yes, the designer lifestyle is that glamorous): two days of stressful toil lengthened in no small part by the appalling quality of the ‘instructions’ provided: 14 pages of verbal and visual redundancy, irrelevance and confusion. Well what did I expect for £99?
Most products arrive with scant, inaccurate or misleading information for assembly and use. Many well-designed consumer products neglect information as part of the product experience, leading to returns, safety issues, customer dissatisfaction and erosion of brand loyalty. This seems overwhelmingly the norm and we are accustomed to sucking up all the wasted time, the frustration and stress, and moving on with our lives. Why are ‘instructions’ such a design-free zone? (more…)
Tags: accessibility, communication, creativity, graphic design, information design, language, legibility, service design, typography, words
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
An explosion of communication and choice in recent decades has created the global climate of information overload that we are only now beginning to find ways to properly navigate. The rise of the iPhone app and the price comparison website shows the information economy at work and there is growing recognition of the value of designing access to information. But what took us so long?
In our personal areas of interest choice can seem miraculous: I can get my favourite version of my favourite song in less than 60 seconds; we can have customised trainers designed in-store; you can get your flat white-half-caff-soy-frappe-latte-cino just the way you like it in a coffee shop anywhere in the world (a distant time it was when coffee was purchased in only one of two states: black or white). But in general, relentless second-by-second decision-making is required to navigate a deep sea of visual noise. Negotiating our choices can lead to unprecedented fatigue, confusion, stress – and disinterest. As expectations rise, consumers are increasingly losing their patience. How do we solve this problem?
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Tags: accessibility, brand design, branding, communication, creativity, design, graphic design, information design, information economy, language, typography, words
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