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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
1.04.2008
Philip Pullman and working in a shed
Rodcorp has a nice little snippet about how the author Philip Pullman goes about his day, and the role working in a shed (we here in the states might call it a "detached home office") has in his daily routine. I post it here in the hopes that Alex over at Shedworking sees it and links to it (or at least reads it) over at Rodcorp and, if he finds it useful, posts it over there for his audience (and why not just message Alex? Well, blog reading is a nice passive leisure activity, and I don't want to bother him with some sort of seemingly purposeful info in case he's either already read the Pullman piece, or doesn't really find it relevant).
In any case, it is of interest to me because we are planning on moving the office out of the basement of the current location, and into a purpose-built structure out back. Lots of advantages, but Pullman raises the issue of it "...being down at the end of the garden, especially on rainy days." Well, no real issue for me, in Colorado, where a graphic designer looks forward to about 300 days of sunshine a year. But if I were about 1 percent lazier, I could see the point, even here.
How about you? Do you work (even part of the time) in a detached home office? What are the benefits? The issues?Labels: architecture, work, writing
posted at 10:25 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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