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Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
The Designer as Chef
Khoi Vinh's site, Subtraction, has a nice post about the virtues of smaller-sized design studios. He argues that it's impossible to have 100% excellence/creativity/wonderfulness in a large design agency, since
This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish—a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist—maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.
My comment on his post is worthy of cross-posting here, since it's a metaphor that I use all the time with my clients:
I always give clients who are leery of working with a small studio (or a lone designer) a metaphor for the small shop/single designer experience:
A designer is a chef. The client is the diner.
Diner tells chef: make me a four-course meal.
Chef and diner then discuss what they'd like that meal to be, what the diner's tastes are, how it meshes with the chef's style and competence.
Chef goes to buy ingredients (sometimes the diner comes along, or has already brought the ingredients with them. Interesting restaurant, eh?)
Chef retreats to kitchen. Cooks.
Presents meal.
Diner eats.
If the chef and the diner have chosen each other well, then the diner should leave satisfied.
Perhaps a strained metaphor, but for me, the content are the ingredients, and the designer is the chef who puts it all together to make something palatable.
And we all know the old saw about too many cooks. If you want a (perhaps) more predictable meal, go to the Olive Garden. Or Burger King. You'll get served faster, but your meal will taste a lot like the one served at the next table. And it won't be made just for you.
photos by ericmcgregor and katayunLabels: design, small business, writing
posted at 8:35 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.21.2008
Ask the Design Director of nytimes.com a question
Designers: ever want to know why the New York Times' website looks or operates the way it does? What decisions go into the user interface and information architecture? Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, is answering questions from readers April 21-25. Questions may be sent to askthetimes@nytimes.com. from the Times article about Mr Vinh:As design director, Mr. Vinh leads a group of 11 visual designers, information architects and design technologists in continually improving and extending the user experience at NYTimes.com. Mr. Vinh also writes and lectures extensively about design and technology, and serves on the national board of directors for AIGA, the professional association for design.Labels: design, information graphics, interface, newspapers, web design
posted at 7:10 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.01.2008
What Makes a Great Designer?
Adrian Hanft over at Be a Design Group has a nice post on the Five Uncommon Attributes of Good Designers this morning. It rings true not just for the designer in me, but the brand communicator, the photographer, and the marketing consultant as well. Hanft concludes thusly:At the end of the day, designing a logo is relatively easy. Being a good person is the real challenge. I believe that it isn't enough for a good designer to just do good work. A good designer must also be a good person. What are some virtues that you believe help make a better designer?
Read the whole post. It's worth the time.Labels: advice, creativity, design, graphic design
posted at 8:36 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
3.28.2008
"Design is Dead", says Starck. Oh reeeeealllly?
Kottke turned me on to this little bit o' nonsense for the evening:"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact," Starck told Die Zeit weekly newspaper."Everything I designed was unnecessary."my favorite line is that "design is a dreadful form of expression." Yeah, you're totally right about that, o' design god/huckster. That's why, oh everything people ever made was designed, in one form or another. If you criticize design, you're criticizing a large chunk of civilization's accomplishments (large and, more importantly, small), and the people who made them.Seriously, though, I think the point he is trying to make is that there are things more important than a well-made chair (although don't knock a comfy chair). The AFP article closes with him saying that the thing he needs most is the "ability to love." I would posit that any well made thing, whether a product of a designer, writer, artist, or sunday casserole-maker's output, contains love. And if you don't put a little of that in everything you do, you aren't making it as good as it could be.Labels: creativity, design, soul
posted at 10:28 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.16.2008
More great street art, and another well-designed (unauthorized) campaign poster
Steven Heller has a nice roundup of unauthorized campaign posters from past years (mostly the late '60s and early '70s) over at the New York Times this morning, in response to the Shepard Fairey "Obama" poster sensation. While he has some nice examples in the piece, he glosses over the phenomenon of Obama street art that has cropped up in the last few months. All sorts of folks, not just graphic designers and poster gods, have been designing campaign posters, graffiti, and other forms of what we in the business call "outdoor display advertising" for the populist candidate of the moment, Barack Obama. You can see some great examples of the genre over at GoTellMama.org.
Here's another example of a great campaign poster design, thoroughly unauthorized, executed very well. It's by Ray Noland. It speaks not only to the fact that Obama is the change agent, it speaks to him being eager to be in there, making it happen. It also shows off the fact that he is an unreconstructed street basketball player from way back. All of Noland's and others' work was on view at the GoTellMama! Show in Chicago this past week. You can see samples of work featured in the show here. A cryptic message on the site mentions that they may be taking the show on the road as well, so stay tuned.
Labels: branding, design, graphic design, politics
posted at 6:35 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.11.2008
Easier voting through graphic design
A nod in this run up to the November elections towards the importance of good graphic design in everyday things. Like ballots, for example. We all remember the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 general election, right? As Alice Rawsthorn writes in her article appearing in the International Herald Tribune,
One glance at the [Palm Beach County] punch card explains why they did so: the layout is hopelessly confusing, as is the blizzard of text. Those ballots are such a (booby) prize example of lousy information design that it's a mystery how anyone managed to vote correctly.
Indeed.
Even before the 2000 election, the AIGA had begun an effort to make voting easier for voters and provide more accurate results at the same time. The crux of the problem lies in how to present a large amount of content in the small space of a ballot--be it paper or on-screen. AIGA Design for Democracy advisor, former AIGA board member and AIGA Chicago president Marcia Lausen wrote a book, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design which outlines best practices for accurate, meaningful, and understandable graphic design of ballots.
The AIGA also created, with the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), Ballot and Polling Place Guidelines which can be immediately implemented for state and federal elections. By making ballots more easily understandable, good design best practices can help the will of the people be accurately and clearly heard.Labels: aiga, design, graphic design, politics, visual information
posted at 8:45 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.09.2008
Best. 404. EVAR.
A lot of other designers have talked about how kickass the Barack Obama branding is, especially regarding how their site pulls it all together. But in case you head on over there on a day where their servers aren't overwhelmed by donors and news-seekers, this is what their 404 page looks like:"Thanks to your overwhelming support,
our servers are a bit overwhelmed right now...."What's great about this is that for one thing, it's not just a generic 404 page (which any smart company will already have replaced with a custom one). For another, the language speaks to the essential brand identity of Obama, that is to say: "hey, we are the underdog candidate, right? We're happily surprised that our server is being hammered right now. Isn't it cool?"
That subtext, reinforced by the subtle silhouette of the masses of people above the text, makes this one of the best 404/error pages I've seen.Labels: design, illustration, interface, web design
posted at 9:21 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.06.2008
memo to clients providing art for your campaign: 72dpi images DO NOT PRINT WELL.
That is all.Labels: design, humor, printing
posted at 4:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
done, and done.
Here you go, mateys.
Via:
Be a Design Group
But now what I really want to know is:
[cat photo from dark_mephi. Used under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license.]Labels: design, humor, typography
posted at 12:12 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.04.2008
What Party are Creatives Supporting for President?
The Huffington Post has a fundraising exploration tool that uses Google's API to visually map donations to political candidates, and it provided me with a whole evening of fun (which explains why it's a good thing I'm married and not out trying to pick up a future mate). After virtually stalking my neighbors to see who was giving to Mitt Romney and who was giving to Barack Obama, I noticed that I could search donations by occupation. I entered in a few occupations in the creative field: "graphic designer", "creative director", "web developer", and so on. It was very illuminating. More importantly, this query provided me with a nice little dataset to make infographics out of. And now you can enjoy them too. (Click on any graphic to enlarge to about 1280 pixels wide)
The first chart takes the raw amounts of cash donated to Democrat and Republican candidates for president, grouped first by party donated to, and segmented within those groups by occupation. You can see that creatives are donating overwhelmingly to the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. In raw dollar amounts, it's about two to one. And look at those photographers! Man, they (meaning, in part, me) must be getting paid way too much to be giving all that dough out (actually, it's due to the larger number of photographers that donate, relative to other occupations).
So, now we know that creatives seem to support Dems over the GOP. But that brought me to a finer point: if you are, say, an art director, are you more likely to give to a Democrat or to a Republican? Remember, the first chart simply shows the total amount given. Within each party's breakdown, you get a feel for total amounts given by production artists versus ad execs, for example, but remember, there might be just one or two P.A.'s giving money, and a whole lot of ad-men donating, skewing the relative data. That's what brings me to the next set of graphics:
The second and third graphics show the relative amounts given by each occupation to Democrats and Republicans. The numbers are standardized to the largest pool of donors (those profligate photographers)at a 1:1 ratio between Dem-donating shooters and GOP-loving imagemakers. Now we can use the data to estimate if you are more likely to give to Clinton or to McCain, if you are an illustrator:
The third graphic overlays the data blobs for each occupation's Democrat and Republican donors, to help visually compare relative giving preferences. Which do you think works better?
One analysis suggests that art directors and photographers tend to be the most split groups, with nearly equal likelihood that you would give cash to either party. It also shows that we need to pay illustrators and production artists a hell of a lot more money before they give some of it away to candidates (or they are just really smart and spend the cash on more important things, like beer and espresso).
One thing this proportional representation doesn't factor in are the total number of donors for republicans versus democrats. Obviously, if there was just one Republican donor for each occupation (and they gave a lot of money), the relative charts above wouldn't work. But in general terms, I think it's a nice representation (this is why I am an information presenter and not a pure statistician...if you can give me figures adjusted for total number of donors, send it to me and I'll make new graphics!)
So, that's my two cents before Super Tuesday. Now: no matter who you support, go and make your voice heard and GO VOTE!Labels: design, illustration, information graphics, politics, visual information, whitespace
posted at 5:12 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
1.08.2008
Xerox's new brand: something original, or just a copy?
The New York Times has a summary of today's most interesting branding news: Xerox has changed its look. Long gone are the days where Xerox called itself "The Document Company" (it ended that tagline in 2004); now it's young, plucky, chunky lowercase "xerox"! With a playful little 3-D red "x" ball next to it (to represent the connection of "customers, partners, industry and innovation", according to the article).
Xerox (or is it now "xerox"?) hopes to distance itself from its roots as a document duplication company, even though they still create hardware that is essentially document duplication (printers, imagers, hi-speed publishing devices, etc.) and focus more on this synergistic approach that the X-ball --oops, I mean "x-ball"-- embodies.
I will reserve judgement (mostly) for now, on the new look. An all lowercase name does have some benefits (more approachable, more casual), but it is somewhat of a trend, and don't know if xerox does itself any favors by moving with the pack. The 3-D x-ball is a little too internety, and reminds me of the AT&T death star ball that company just rolled out (designed, by the way, by the same company that just created the new xerox logo). Of course you can expect to see it animated online, and in commercials, too. Which is fine, up to a point. I worry that one can take logo animation too far, and overuse it to the point that it competes for attention when used in practice, taking away from the power of the other information and marketing elements that the brand image will share the stage with.
So what do you think? Is this a good idea for Xerox? Or just good money thrown after bad? And if that's the case, what should they have done instead?Labels: branding, design, typography
posted at 9:04 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
11.21.2007
Color
If you ever need some color inspiration, check out ColourLovers.com, an online community devoted to sharing ideas about color, color palettes, and trends. It's a great place for getting some inspiration, and if nothing else, an idea of what other designers out there are using.
Here's a particularly nice, cool, bold palette from deus that caught my eye this morning as I was searching for some inspiration.Labels: advice, color, creativity, design, web design
posted at 10:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
11.20.2007
iterative
Have you taken your design at least one step past where you feel comfortable with it today?
Iteration: it works.Labels: advice, creativity, design, productivity
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9.14.2007
PMS 187 Runs Thru My Veins
Be an O.D.G, dogg:
posted at 4:36 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
7.03.2007
Happy Fourth
Happy Fourth of July, from the wonderful graphic designers of the Works Progress Administration:
Found on Shorpy, the lazy man's way to see the past.Labels: design, holiday, illustration, wpa
posted at 5:12 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
12.06.2006
To the Publisher!
My co-authors and I are about to send our baby off to the publisher. We did an inter-continental conference call (gotta love Skype) this morning (evening for them) and ironed out the stuff that needed to be completed. I spent most of this afternoon completing a few stray graphics, collecting everything into nice, tidy packages, and checking all the items off of my to-do list, one by one.
And now it's off to Alana and Margie for one last glance, then off to California to the publisher, where it will be copyedited, typeset, proofread, and then published. More info on the book as it comes closer to being a reality. In the meantime, here are a couple of the illustrations I contributed to the book.Labels: alana, book, design, illustration, margie
posted at 7:27 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
12.05.2006
finished
Just wrapped up a nice holiday card for a new client...Printed it at Wandel Press, where I have the good fortune to work with Dave Biondi, a print rep par excellence, and a good friend to boot.
Now it just needs to be trimmed right, scored and folded correctly, boxed cleanly, and delivered to the right address. For people who thing geting something "printed" is easy-peasy, remember there are about 40 steps involved, any one of which can completely screw up your job. Eeek. Fortunately, I haven't had that happen...too often; at least no more often than any other designer. But each time something goes to press, you cross your fingers, knock on wood, and avoid walking under ladders for a while, until the client gets the finished product.Labels: clients, design, printing
posted at 10:38 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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