ideas + images

curated by sierra gonzalez 
Filed under

design

 

Txt Island

Chris Gavin's experimental stop-motion film, Txt Island.

Filed under  //   animation   design   typography  

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Good design is always about the truth

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]

Filed under  //   design   good design   humor   truth   whimsy  

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Words create worlds

Kaspen's promotional images for Prague bookstore Anagram Bookshop.

Filed under  //   advertising   book   design  

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This is your brain on architecture

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.)

Filed under  //   architecture   design   design trend   modernism   music   science  

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If you love it, you don't know much about typography

...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:

Filed under  //   comic sans   design   typography  

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Extreme makeover: Dell edition

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.

Filed under  //   computer   design   design writing   technology  

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Fritz Hansen: Be original, fight the copies

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.

[via the excellent BAGnewsnotes, where Robert Hariman posted an interesting interpretation of the photos]

Filed under  //   authenticity   design   furniture  

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Formulas for good design

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
The developers of Mathematica, a modeling and computational software, riffed on a few corporate logos in a recent blog post. While it's hard to understand their process without experience using Mathematica, it's certainly fun to view the transformations; the Mercedes Benz exercise is even animated on their demo site (you can view a web preview without downloading their software). It seems like a compelling way to quickly view variations on a geometric design—but only if you've got the formula to create it first.

Unlocking the secret of beautiful design with mathematics | Boston Globe

Collector Horace "Woody" Brock has good design down to a science: he believes there is an optimal and measurable amount of symmetry that determines aesthetic satisfaction. Brock explained his ideas to a skeptical Boston Globe reporter covering an exhibit of Brock's decorative arts collection on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the exhibit catalog actually includes an appendix of equations and graphs to illustrate Brock's theory.

My problem with Brock's theory might simply be one of semantics: I think "beauty" is subjective, but it's clear that there are mathematical patterns found in nature (and in the built world) classically considered pleasing and "natural." (I don't think beauty is necessarily naturally pleasing—take Stravinsky, for example.) Brock acknowledges that what he considers "good design" is intuitive—"You just sense it," he says, "that's how it's supposed to be"—so perhaps he means classically pleasing rather than beautiful.

Bonus: to see how Brock applies his ideas to both design and music, read his review of Roger Scruton's The Aesthetic of Music (and Scruton's rebuttal, too).

Core Principles: How science can inform a theory of design | Seed
What is MoMA curator Paola Antonelli doing writing a design column for science mag Seed? Antonelli uses her first column to explore what it means to "design" and to link the practice with scientific discovery, both activities being reflections of culture and necessities for progress.

"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.

Filed under  //   beauty   collectors   design   logo   math   science  

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Objectified trailer

From the director of Helvetica, upcoming film Objectified is about "our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them":

Filed under  //   design   film   material culture   movie  

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Mad Men, Mad Props

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]

Filed under  //   1960s   design   television  

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