Txt Island
Chris Gavin's experimental stop-motion film, Txt Island.
Chris Gavin's experimental stop-motion film, Txt Island.
Good design is always about the truth... I think our things should reflect that. There is a lot of illusion in design, a lot of surface and playing with reality. That’s why I like things that have a sense of humor. They just seem more true to life.
Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt [Kicking the Tires | NYTimes]
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Michael Cannell has a nicely illustrated post on Fast Company about recent discoveries on the neuroscience of architecture. Among other discoveries, it turns out that our brains are more receptive to rounded, cushy designs instead of hard edges:
A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects—sofas, watches, etc.—subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.
And as if in affirmation, Jonah Lehrer observes that the "padded leather womb" of his Eames Lounge Chair makes reading tedious articles a little more approachable; he calls the chair a rare intersection of comfort and modernist (read: characteristically geometric and angular) beauty. (By the way, Lehrer also recently wrote about neuroscience and a different form of art—jazz improv.)
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...and if you hate it, you probably don't know much about typography either, and you should get another hobby.
—Vincent Connare, designer of Comic Sans
Here's a short video project inspired by Gary Hustwit's Helvetica:
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Here's the lede for Wired magazine's article on Dell's snazzy new PC designs:
Dell has been long been the Ugly Betty of the PC industry–functional, smart but severely lacking in the looks department.
But over the last two years, the company’s consumer-targeted PCs have gotten a design makeover that would make Tyra Banks proud.
I understand the journalistic strategy of including cultural touchstones that will draw readers into an article, but comparing product design to fashion makeovers really underscores the point from Frog Design's Max Burton, quoted in the Wired piece:
"Dell needs to treat design as something that is not superficial," says Max Burton, executive creative director for Frog Design in San Francisco. "What they have right now is more of applique design — [it's] more about finishes than real change to the materials and process."
Buried further down in the write-up, Dell acknowledges that design happens beneath the surface, too: Ed Boyd, vice president of consumer products, points out that a Dell Studio hybrid desktop launched in the last year uses 70 percent less material and power than older desktop models.
The focus of the article encourages you to believe that it's only the cosmetic changes that garner attention, create desire, and produce results. The fashionistas that Wired mentions probably want a good-looking computer, true--but what about function? No one wants a beautiful plastic brick (at least, I'd hope not). For products to truly evolve, design needs to consider materials, manufacturing processes, new technologies and thoughtful interface design. And as any Ugly Betty fan knows, true beauty is on the inside, anyway.Comments [0]
Danish company Fritz Hansen is serious about counterfeit designs. The company, which is the official manufacturer of Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair, has posted a stunning slideshow of the destruction of the knock-offs they have confiscated.



Fritz Hansen also posted a brutal (though gratuitous) video of a tractor destroying a fake Egg Chair on their Facebook group for their "Be original, fight the copies" campaign.
Interestingly enough, though the company goes to extremes to protect their original designs, they also provide CAD drawings of many of their products. Fritz Hansen also takes furniture theft seriously; you can register your missing furniture on their website.
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Is there a mathematic equation for good design? A few articles from February tackle the relationship between beauty, math, science and design.
Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica | Wolfram blog"Design" as a noun is stretched in so many directions, the only way to grasp its meaning is by abstracting it to its most conceptual skeleton, its basic construct. Science can teach design how to find its own core.
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From the director of Helvetica, upcoming film Objectified is about "our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them":
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http://www.marksimonson.com/article/236/mad-men-mad-props
Early reviews of Mad Men seemed to uninformely praise the show’s recreation of 1960s New York, so I was surprised to see Lucida Handwriting—a font of the 1990s—sneak its way into the opening credits. Graphic designer Mark Simonson called out the show’s anachronistic typographic choices in this October article. [Mad Men, Mad Props]
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