Archive for the ‘design’ Category
Peter Merholz: When you start with the idea of making a thing, you’re artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar’s forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don’t design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.
08.05.05 / design
Philippe Starck: I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. Design, structurally seen, is absolutely void of usefulness. A useful profession would be to be an astronomer, a biologist or something of that kind. Design really is nothing. I have tried to install my designs with a sense of meaning and energy, and even when I tried to give my best it was still in vain…. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant…
08.04.08 / design
The Ultimate Book of Band Logos
Band ID: From the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lips trademark to the Grateful Dead’s lightning bolt skull to Prince’s glyph, logos embody an identity and experience shared between musicians and their fans, who proudly display these graphics on T-shirts, posters, pins, stickers—even tattoos. Collecting more than 1,000 rock, hip hop, metal, pop, reggae, and country music logos from the 1960s to today, this catchy design survey captures the coolest and most powerful examples of music made visual. Including interviews with key logo artists and presenting the graphics large and over extended gatefolds, BAND ID will wow music fans and designers alike.
International Design Magazine: It’s no secret that we lust after handsome, well-designed stuff, but the often astronomical price tags make us wonder: Is the old adage you get what you pay for an essential truth? We decided to test it by pitting four posh and pricey products against their budget-friendly counterparts, comparing aesthetics and performance. No battle was without its hardships: razor burn, bossy robots, and sore feet among them. But we emerged appreciably wiser—and even maybe a bit richer—for them.
08.03.11 / design
Iconeye: Dieter Rams and his team at Braun did more than anyone else to popularise functional, modern mass-produced design. Most designers before him tried to make domestic appliances look like furniture or craft objects, covering up their crude circuitry with varnished woods, veneers, fabrics and decorative plastic mouldings.
Rams rejected all of this. Building on the form-follows-function methodology of the pre-war Bauhaus and the pioneering modernists, he created products that were simple to use, honest in their use of materials and stripped of all visual clutter. His products did for industrial design what the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Berthold Lubetkin and Oscar Niemeyer did for architecture.
08.01.14 / design
The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance
Design Council: The study has charted the performance of companies grouped together for their consistent showing in design award schemes. It has discovered that a Design Index of 63 companies and a further Emerging Index have held their lead over the stock market as a whole during bull and bear markets as well as during the recovery period which began in 2003. Since then, the Design Index has grown by 43 per cent and the Emerging Index has risen by 74.3 per cent, compared to 26.2 per cent growth for the FTSE 100 Index.
Bokardo: The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be…
Web design is anything but boring. Look at what is happening with Facebook right now. They are exploring a new paradigm of social design. Can we build recommendation systems that inform us while not pissing us off? What part of social interaction can we model next? Are there social relationships we can’t model? Shouldn’t model?
07.11.20 / design
Most online stores are built for searching, not browsing. Yet we love the experience of casually perusing products, seeing what will catch our eye. Browse Goods was designed to support this type of undirected search. It allows you to scan hundreds of products at a time via an interface that mimics Google Map. Products are subdivided into different categories such as brands or style and placed on a large map.
07.08.04 / design
An article about artist, Jonathan Harris in Metropolis: If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the largest number of people possible,” he says…
Jessica Hagy’s Indexed is everything simplified into hand drawn charts and graphs on index cards.
