Monthly Archives: June 2012

Graphic Design and Startups

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http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com// 

Website devoted to the idea that graphic design plays a big role in startups.

Includes Dieter Rams’s “Good Design Is…” list.

Includes list of designers who are also startup owners:
__AirBnB, the rent-out-your-room startup that’s sweeping the nation, whose founder, Joe Gebbia, is a graphic designer.
RISD alum, double major in graphic and ID design. Airbnb is “the ebay of space”.

__Dave Morin, Path, a “smart journal that helps you share your life with the ones you love”
__Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square, an app that turns your iPad or mobile device into a cash register that accepts credit card payments
__Mike Matas, Push Pop Press, a digital publisher that produced Our Choice,  the first full length interactive book, w/Al Gore, and now has been bought out by Facebook.
__Jeffrey Veen, Typekit, a subscription font service for the web
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” We should “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Typekit was acquired by Adobe in 2011.

Peter Buchanan Smith: Best Made

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If a graphic designer makes an axe, is that graphic design? I think so.

This outdoors company was founded in 2010 (?) by NYC designer Peter Buchanan Smith. The started with axes and now makes a few other things. Very manly, very primal. But I think it’s interdisciplinary because here’s a graphic designer following his other passion (male outdoorsy stuff) and mixing it up.

http://www.bestmadeco.com/pages/our-story

Meredith Davis — Article

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Article Title: Design’s Inherent Interdisciplinarity

Link to pdf: Davis_interdisciplinary

  • Design can increase problem solving and cognitive ability
  • High-skill jobs require “knowing how to learn,” a skill that traverses boundaries
  • Students need to communicate in verbal, visual and computational languages (1)
  • Attempts toward integration in grade schools are usually shallow and do not take “visual thinking” as a tool, but rather as a “gift” that cannot be taught. Usually, artistic “process” is equated with technique, not thought.
  • In such cases, collaboration is limited to subject matter, skill or vehicle for presentation, and excludes utilizing “visual thinking”.
  • Students who are discipline-schooled usually need to be “retrained” by their employers to consider multiple angles of the professional problem and become resourceful in an interdisciplinary kind of way.
  • The goal is to focus on cognitive skill, and not on fact-learning.

Why is design (so well suited to) interdisciplinary (study)?

  • Design problems are “situated”; they have clear contexts that can be used as springboards for research.
  • Design problems relate to the “real-world”. They’re not totally artificial.
  • Design problems are not just about the problem at hand. They are also about “ways of knowing”.
  • Design mockups are very close to the real thing, and can be easily tested.
  • Design is analytical and synthetical
  • Architect Christopher Alexander says: Design is the goodness of fit between form and context.
  • Design is systems-based; It needs to exist in a relationship of users and stakeholders. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
  • Design often requires interdisciplinary teams, and as such teaches us  about planning and collaborating and building a common vision.
  • Gives example of elementary students (Hawthorne Elementary) improving a piece of land by engaging all kinds of disciplines in a multi-year process. Interdisciplinary approach allows students to model real-world problem solving in a respectful and productive way.
  • Design experiences as tools for integration
  • Art teachers need to be educated about design more, while still in school. That way they can use it as a cross-disciplinary tool.

Build: Lego and Google collaboration

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Infinite building possibilities from Lego and Google collaboration

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/build accessed 6/26/12 by Zvez
Posted by James Cartwright, 
Back in the good old days of yore children whiled away their afternoons in idol play, lost in their imaginations with nothing but bed sheets, twigs and a muddy pit at the back of the house as props for their elaborate role-playing. Kings waged wars, empires fell and everyone had to get cleaned up before tea. Then came Lego and the shape of play changed forever, so much so that those little coloured blocks and weekend afternoons will be linked in my mind forever.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and Lego’s gone digital, offering fans the opportunity to rebuild the world (well, Australia for the time being) in its own blocky image. Build, a collaborative project between Lego Australia and Google Chrome, fuses WebGL, the very latest in in-browser graphics, and Google Maps to allow users the chance to build, share and even renovate their very own digital Lego structures on a global platform. Complete structures can then be shown off to friends and family via email or Google+.

This may not be the tactile experience we’ve come to expect from Lego but their commitment to pursuing projects on digital platforms is impressive for a product so naturally grounded in the physical world. The online Build experience also encourages the more social aspects of Lego play that long-time fans hold dear. Best of all however is the staggeringly awesome possibility of INFINITE BLOCKS, a literal impossibility in the physical world.

Eat that bed sheets and sticks.

Sara De Bondt

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Sara De Bondt (Belgian designer based in London) designed the inside of Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. She would be good to interview a.) for the sculptural work with Foer, and b.) for her high-theory publishing house, and c.) because she’s a woman.

Sara De Bondt is a London-based Belgian graphic designer who has been running her studio since 2003. Before that she worked for Foundation 33 and studied graphic design at Sint-Lukas, Brussels (BE), Universidad de Bellas Artes, Granada (ES) and Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (NL). She has given workshops/talks at Beckmans college Stockholm, Ecole des Beaux Arts Lyon, Ecole de Recherche Graphique Brussels, deSingel Antwerp, Jan van Eyck Akademie Maastricht and Laus Symposium Barcelona.

She teaches at The Royal College of Art and co-curated the The Form of the Book conference at St Bride Library in January 2009. In 2008 she started Occasional Papers with Antony Hudek.

She also designed bookends out of recycled printed matter by screwing through blocks of paper:

2wice

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The pages of 2wice, the performing arts publication designed by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller, have always provided a unique and innovative venue for dance. Now Miller has designed “Fifth Wall,” an interactive app for 2wice that transforms the iPad tablet into a new kind of performance space. Created in collaboration with the choreographer Jonah Bokaer and 2wice publisher Patsy Tarr, the app takes advantage of the unique spatial and physical parameters of the iPad.

http://new.pentagram.com/2012/06/new-work-2wice-fifth-wall-app/

Peter Bil’ak: Dance Writer

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The renowned typographer Peter Bil’ak (History, Greta) collaborates with Slovak dancer/choreographer Lukás Timulak. Together they created Dance Writer, an program where you can type in some letters and watch a dancer “perform” them by describing the letters with her body in space. This is a true merging of dance and typography into something new and unique.

Dance Writer 2, 2006
http://www.typotheque.com/dancewriter 

http://dancewriter-app.com/ 

Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes

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This book was a designer’s hit when it came out…2010? Because Foer made it into an art object by having words cut out of pages and the reader interacting with the sculptural build up of the holes as well as the actual content. Designers on the project are Sara De Bondt and Jonathan Gray. Foer, like Dave Eggers before him, is an example of a writer deeply concerned with typography and design. These guys are interdisciplinary

An article about the making of the book is here:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662680/inside-jonathan-safran-foers-unmakeable-interactive-book

 

“The book is actually a kind of interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.”

 

Rob Giampietro

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Rob Giampietro, Tense Relations, Dot Dot Dot Issue 12, pp. 62–66.

Rob Giampietro, designer and writer, partner in Project Projects, writes in Dot Dot Dot magazine about what designers do. Here he’s commenting on a book called Dutch Resource: Collaborative Exercises in Graphic Design, and quotes the back cover copy from that book:

“Today’s graphic designer, a specialist and jack-of-all-trades in on”—a hybrid of hybrids!—”who is not only meant to be a good designer but often works as a writer, researcher, editor, curator, critic and photographer as well.” (66)

“The best collaborations assume a diversity of their participants’ gifts” (66)