Tag: design

Tropon

This was designed in 1898 by Henri Van De Velde, the Beligan painter, architect, teacher, theorist and all-around design polymath. It was – and this simply amazes me – the only poster he ever created in his career:

troponnouveau

Confronted with the task of developing a creative design for Tropon, a food concentrate company, he somehow abstracted the whole idea of concentrate food into these amazing egg-yoke-meets-venus flytrap-meets-totally-abstract-shape-meets-art noveau-meets-sci-fi things. And then, the beautiful hand type, all wrapped up in a little maze of lines. It actually makes me embarrassed for my post about the boring tax project, given how much the artist accomplishes here with so little to work from.

When design isn't sexy

One thing about design is that it’s a lot easier to make a logo for a film production company, an architecture firm or some cool record label than it is for an insurance group, a box manufacturer, or Hypercompuglobalmegamart. As a result, we’re always showcasing work we’ve done for more interesting clients, whereas the work we’ve done in the trenches- to salvage something visually interesting out of something conceptually barren- is generally glossed over, even when it often involves more creativity and persistence.

This is one of my favorite things I’ve done for a boring project. It was a proposed logo for a tax training program run by one of the major international accounting firms (I won’t say which one because I’d rather that the client not accidently Google this post, but I think you can guess who it is if you have any familiarity with the brand). What could be less promising than that?

tax_academy6

The New Moscow Philosophy

Here’s the other book cover I’ve made for Twisted Spoon in the past year (first one is here): Vyachelsav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy. This one should be going to print some time over the summer.

New Moscow Philosophy

A bunch of Moscovites live crammed together in a flat originally intended for a single family during more prosperous times. When one elderly tenant mysteriously disappears, the residents start jockeying over her living space. The apartment itself is presented as the the dominant character of the story in a sense (the author introduces you to it before any of the characters, and its crowded conditions define the experience of most of the characters), so it seemed to make sense to feature it on the cover as the ‘protagonist’. The disappearance of the elderly tenant, moreover, is turned into a kind of meta-absurdist whodunnit, with conscious literary references to Crime and Punishment. So, hence, the ‘Colonel Mustard did it in the study with the revolver’ aspect of the design.

I’ve always had a fetish of sorts for floorplans, so it was fun to do a design around one. I only hope that I got the layout of the flat more or less correct– it was difficult to figure out on paper, nonwithstanding the author’s meticulous descriptions of which room is where.

Stuffed Animal Lamps

An old friend of mine has a new art project —  stuffed animal lamps.

alison

Simple concept, elegant execution.  A grafitti artist friend adds some decoration.  There are a ton of them displayed here; I had trouble picking out my favorite one (I also like the sleeping camo guy, and the spiderman).

I like the marriage of functional and frivolous.  I’m also reminded of a case I worked on as a law clerk for a judge, about whether it is legal to copyright a Halloween costume.  The law in this area turned out to be completely incoherent, based on something called the “conceptual severability” test — the idea was that you could not copyright “functional” things, but if you could “conceptually sever” the design from the functional aspect of the object, you could copyright the design.  Of course this test posed an issue for costumes — what’s the function?  The law, of course, had an answer: masquerading!  Anyway the details were absurd — for example, some aspects of the test had to do with the “plushness” of the object, and whether it could stand on its own (hat) or needed to be on something to assume its shape (glove). 

Somewhat of a digression, but these lamps got me thinking about that — is the function just lighting, or also cuteness?

Steiff bear diagram

This graphic was introduced to me by a student, who did a really good presentation of the visual evolution of the teddy bear for an assignment called the Artefact Assignment. It’s a great sort of Rorschach test, in the sense that any given interpretation probably reveals more about the viewer than the object itself:

steiff

In fact, what this graphic diagrams is the change in design over time of the Steiff bear. The Steiff bear was introduced in 1903 by the German company Steiff, who became involved in a decades-long arms race (furry arms, to be sure) with the Mitchom company, who had released a ‘Teddy’ Bear in the United States around the same time (named after TDR, who allegedly refused to shoot a defenseless bear). 

Please feel free to submit any alternate possible interpretations (psychosexual or otherwise) via the comments box.

List of company name etymologies

Fascinating list here. This is a really great resource if you were wondering where companies had realised their names and trademarks.

Some very interesting ones:

  1. A&M Records – named after founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss (Actually, I believed it had to do with sound)
  2. Coleco – began as the Connecticut Leather Company. (who knew that!)
  3. Starbucks – named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (NOT Battlestar Galactic)

Selective focus

Last week, I had a talented fellow named Ryan Cole do a guest lecture for my Ideas Generation class at Prague College. He talked about the difference between vertical thinking (hierarchical, problem-solving, precludes creative thinking) versus horizontal thinking (associative, lateral, creative but unable to accomplish anything on its own). This is basically something that designers like to talk about a lot, just phrased in nice concise terms.

Two days earlier, I was reading a New Yorker article about the neuro-enhancer revolution- i.e. the fact that lots of people take drugs like Ritalin simply to make themselves function at a higher cognitive level, not because they need it for any corrective reason. One of the concerns about this ‘revolution’  in the medical community (in addition to more obvious worries about health and so on) is the question about what part of people exactly is being made smarter by neuro-enhancers. Is there only one kind of intelligence, or are there some that are made smarter at the expense of others? Studies have shown that concentration (which is enhanced by drugs like Ritalin) actually works to the detriment of creative thinking. One researcher expressed the idea that we might be raising a generation of super-skilled accountants through over-prescription of neuro-enhancers.

Armed with these ideas, it occurred to me that perhaps the primary skill that graphic designers seek to cultivate cant best be described as selective focus: learning to expand and contract the locus of attention, rather than aiming for any kind of ‘genius thinking’ per se. I think this term can also be used to explain the intent of the writing on this blog and its peculiar idiom.


Popova

One designer/artist I never hear an awful lot about is Lyubov Popova, in spite of her work and pedigree (student of Malevich, collaborated with Rodchenko and Stepanova, etc). 

This is a textile design she made in gouache and pencil in 1924.

popova-large