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Pre-Conference Day @ HOW Design Conference in ATL

2007-06-11T11:58:00.000-04:00

Arriving in Atlanta on Saturday, I quickly took care of getting my registration materials for the HOW design conference, before checking out Atlanta. Dinner at the infamous Cowtippers Restaurant, I just had to have a burger (veggie, of course) and fries. Needless to say, I was definitively feeling the southern hospitality, and it was wonderful to have some “real” food as opposed to airport lounge packaged food.

On a side note, flying Delta down to ATL, I was lucky enough to have a flight with one of their newly redesigned interiors including their new inflight entertainment systems (it was coming in from Dubai). Delta’s vision and brand has clearly been refreshed, as it is undoubtedly visually realized all over the terminal at JFK, the new uniforms for all employees, the advertisements in media, in the terminal, and inflight.

Day 1 of pre-conference events on Sunday at the HOW design conference was jam-packed with sessions including an in-house design workshop by the lovely, outspoken, and down-to-earth Jeni Herberger of Design Matters, who really got down to the issues facing in-house designers and provides the tools and methods to break down obstacles to obtain real tangible results

An afternoon workshop with the color expert, Leatrice Eiseman, of the Eiseman color institute and also a Pantone Color Consultant, revealed an extremely interesting and historical approach to color usage in advertising, graphic design, fashion, housewares, and other visual materials.

Leatrice kindly shared the Pantone View Color Planner Forecast Highlights for 2008-2009, with her wonderful insight and passion for color. Pantone has marked Summer 2008 as “Letting go” with hues inspired by sky, water, light, atmosphere, and of course the earth. Note, these are not traditional earth tones, but rather hues that, although derived from the earth, are from not your typical sources. “Letting go” is broken down into two subsets; Escape (a longing for clean air and a crystal clear atmosphere — pure blue skies, reflections in glass, mirrors, crystals, and snowy whites) and Rest (relaxing regeneration of quiet, closely related hues largely within the muted yellows to green family, extracted from the color of liquids, tonics, herbs, plants, and other natural resources).

The conference opening reception featured Bryn Mooth, editor of How Magazine, sharing that the Atlanta City Council has designated June 8-15^th “Design Week” in the City of Atlanta. Atlanta salutes the 17,000+ designers who work in Georgia, congratulated AIGA Atlanta, and F+W Publications (the organizer of the HOW Design Conference) and the importance and impact their work has on not only the city, but society at large.

The one and only — Karen Salmansohn, of notsalmon.com, gave a keynote speech called “Ballsy: Ways to Score Extreme Business Success” sharing her tips and secrets to achieving success that she’s learned along the way of her busy career, beginning with a short stint working her way up to being an SVP/Creative Director at an Ad Agency in NYC, before leaving to write and publish 27 books in 5 years, and additional 2 in the following year, as well as launching a fragrance and several TV deals. Currently, she has a morning radio show on Sirius satellite radio. Her “BALLYSY” tips were funny, insightful, and although at times could seem a little obvious, sometimes it takes that third party to say it to really get you going and motivate you to take action.

At the end of day 1, I met wonderful designers from around the world, working at companies including: Russel Stover, ICW Group Insurance Services, CashNetUSA.com, the Cartoon Network & Boomerang Latin America, Texas Instruments, Seagate, Halliburton/KBR Energy & Chemicals, and Signum Forma Grafik Design in Austria.

2007-05-17T13:42:00.001-04:00

It should come as no surprise that the brilliant work of Jonathan Ive over at Apple, Inc. has earned him the top honor of Product Designer of the year from the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in their annual National Design Awards for 2007. Specifically, Ive's work on the iPod nano, iPhone, Apple TB, and the Macbook were selected as exceptional and exemplary work in the design of consumer goods, and technology.

A little background on Jonathan Ive:

Jonathan Ive is the senior vice president of industrial design at Apple Inc., where since 1996 he has led a product design team widely regarded as one of the industry’s best. Ive’s streamlined design aesthetic, combined with a strong knowledge of the engineering process, has brought design into the public consciousness in an unprecedented way. Creating some of the most innovative products of the past decade, ranging from the whimsical, candy-colored iMac to the spare iBook to the now iconic iPod, Ive has not only made complex technological devices user-friendly, he has designed sculptural, desirable objects. He was named Designer of the Year (2003) by the Design Museum of London, awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, and was included as a finalist in this category in 2006. Apple was featured in the 2000 and 2006 National Design Triennials and won the 2000 Corporate Achievement Award.

(All photos courtesy of Apple, Inc.)

WSJ on the BlackBerry outage

2007-04-18T17:37:00.000-04:00

I normally don't get too excited over The Evening Wrap, but tonight it's just a riot!

___________________________________
THE EVENING WRAP

April 18, 2007 -- 5:04 p.m. EDT

___________________________________

All around the country this morning, people talked with their spouses and kids, looked straight ahead while walking down the street, and even paid attention in meetings. What happened? A BlackBerry service wipeout.

Helvetica in the morning, Bodoni in the evening (—Massimo Vignelli)

2007-04-11T14:57:00.001-04:00

The Swiss typeface Helvetica turns 50 this year, and as the source of such debate, spurring a love/hate relationship among designers and the world at large, Swiss Dots in association with Veer have produced a full length independent documentary surrounding one of the influential and used typefaces in the world.

I was fortunate enough to score a seat at the sold-out NY premiere screening that AIGA/NY held at Parsons The New School for Design. On hand for a discussion after the screening were Gary Hustwit, Massimo Vignelli, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, and Jakob Trollbäck.

Parsons The New School for Design, Tischman Auditorium (helveticafilm.com)

While it should come as no surprise how easy it was for Gary Hustwit to gather enough footage to cut together a full length film on one of the world's most controversial typefaces, Pentagram's Michael Bierut was the show stealer with his candid and to-the-point monologue on the typeface. (Sorry, I won't reveal the details, you'll have to check out a screening or the DVD when it is released this summer).

Michael Bierut, New York (film still, helveticafilm.com)

For nondesigners, you may be asking why in the world would anyone create a film on a typeface, fear not, this is not simply another dull design film, but a fully realized discussion of the social and political implications and function of design in our lives. After all, Helvetica is the ubiquitous and pervasive modern sans-serif typeface— you can't roam the streets of any urban city without seeing Helvetica, and it has a funny way of popping up in even the most unpredictable places.

The panel discussion was fantastic, with Massimo Vignelli not only declaring "Helvetica in the morning, Bodoni at night" in response to a panelist asking what his favorite typeface is, but the most brilliant response was Vignelli's "In the States" when asked what was the worst use of Helvetica he had ever seen!

For more information, please visit www.helveticafilm.com.

WPPI / Canon EOS-1D Mark III

2007-04-05T02:00:00.000-04:00

Checking out the WPPI expo at Ballys/Paris in Las Vegas last week, Canon's new EOS-1D Mark III digital SLR was definitely a show stopper. Aside from impressive specs including an entirely new 10.1 Megapixel CMOS Sensor (with an integrated cleaning system), it's the world's fastest digital SLR* (capable of shooting up to 10 fps, with a burst rate of 110 full-res jpegs or 30 RAW images), other important enhancements have been made to the overall body design, image processing, auto-focusing system, and an extra-large 3.0-inch LCD monitoring (sporting the new Live View function).

Best of all, once any photographer holds this camera in their hands, it's almost impossible not to fall instantly in love. Now be careful not to get your hopes up too high as this new bad-boy to hit the digital imaging block will not hit store shelves until "Spring 2007".

* As of February 2007.

The new corporate logo: Dynamic and changeable are all the rage

2007-02-12T18:06:00.000-05:00

The new corporate logo: Dynamic and changeable are all the rage
By Alice Rawsthorn
Sunday, February 11, 2007

LONDON
When millions of Googlers log on to the search engine this Wednesday, they'll discover that its familiar red, blue, yellow and green logo has been transformed into a Valentine's Day extravaganza of red hearts and romantic paraphernalia.

Like Halloween, St. Patrick's Day and the site's own birthday, Valentine's Day is one of the annual events that Google celebrates with a specially created "holiday logo." Other ad hoc events have been marked in similar style: from the 100th anniversary of flight, various Olympic Games and World Cup soccer tournaments, to the one-off birthdays of cultural heroes like Michelangelo, Frank Lloyd Wright, Piet Mondrian and Alfred Hitchcock.

The ritual began shortly after Google's launch in 1998, when its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set off for the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Rather than post an "out of office" message on the home page, they drew images of the indie arts festival on the logo. Google's "holiday logos," created by a design team led by Dennis Hwang at its Mountain View, California, headquarters, have been part of the company's culture ever since.

Why does Google do it? "Because Larry and Sergey thought it would be fun," is the official answer. And there's nothing wrong with that. But Google's constantly changing logo is part of a broader trend toward what are called dynamic identities: corporate symbols that adopt different guises at different times or in different contexts, so you're never sure exactly how they'll look.

The latest is the new identity of Saks Fifth Avenue, the American department store chain. A 1973 Saks signature logo was revived — and refined — by the Pentagram design group, then sliced into 64 components that are arranged in different configurations on bags and boxes. "Fragmenting the logo gave it energy and bravura," said Michael Bierut, the Pentagram partner who led the Saks project. "And now we can create numerous permutations of the logo."

Dynamic identities fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that consistency is essential to an effective corporate identity. The more we see the same corporate symbol — or so the consistency camp argues — the more likely we'll be to recognize and remember it. Companies adhered to this throughout the 20th century; and the designers of some of the most successful identities, such as Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books in the late 1940s, and Paul Rand as a consultant to IBM from the 1950s to the early 1990s, were renowned for their rigor.

Tschichold specified how every element of design at Penguin should be executed — down to the spacing of the letters in its books — in the Penguin Composition Rules. Rand did the same at IBM in a series of documents with self-explanatory titles, such as IBM Logo: Use and Abuse. Their objective was to protect the purity of their carefully planned design systems from being botched by dodgy printers and overzealous local managers. Both designers occasionally broke their own rules, but resisted the right of others to do so. As Tschichold wrote: "It is the master who establishes the rules... and is permitted to break the rules, even his own."

A few companies adopted a more flexible approach. One was the French tire maker Michelin, which introduced the cigar-toting bon viveur, known as Bibendum or the "Michelin Man," as its symbol in 1898. The Michelin Man has since been depicted in numerous guises — playing sports, quaffing fine wine and scoffing haute cuisine — to convince the public of the joys of motoring, in the hope of persuading people to drive farther and wear out their tires faster.

But such exceptions were rare, even as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. MTV unveiled one of the first dynamic identities when it went on air on Aug. 1, 1981. Its graffiti-inspired logo was conceived by Manhattan Design to be customized by any of the hundreds of animators, filmmakers and illustrators with whom the music channel would work over the years. When the Toronto-based graphic designer Bruce Mau created a new identity for the Netherlands Architecture Institute in 1993, he devised an infinitely variable system of 100 versions of the same logo in 1,000 different colors.

Radical though they seemed then, dynamic identities are increasingly popular, as Saks's new design program illustrates. One reason is that "consistency" is less effective in today's frenzied, attention-deficit-friendly society, where the average Western consumer is said to be exposed to more than 3,000 corporate symbols a day: that's everything from a logo on a passing truck to branded labels in the fridge. "A stable image becomes invisible," Mau said. "Unless an image is evolving and refreshing it becomes static, which is death to an image."

Another issue is that the media on which corporate identities are depicted have changed. We're now just as likely to see a logo flickering on a computer or cellphone screen, as printed on a company's stationery or a billboard. "Once you'd design a logo for a company, and you'd have to get it exactly right because, when it launched, it was going to be painted on the side of tanker trucks, hung off the side of skyscrapers and printed in closetfuls of letterhead," Bierut said. "You got one chance with no do- overs. Nowadays our main experience of a logo like Google's is the way it looks when it loads on a computer screen. It costs next to nothing to change it every time. So why not?"

It's easy to see why dynamic identities should strike a chord with today's spoiled, impatient and — to give us some credit — visually savvy consumers, but there are instances where the old-fashioned approach works best. "MTV has a dynamic identity because they are dynamic, and I want them to be," Mau said. "But I don't want my bank to be dynamic. I want them to be conservative and radically stable."

Join The Design Times

2007-02-11T17:05:00.000-05:00

The Design Times is looking for contributors and writers. If you are interested, please email patrick@thedesigntimes.com

TOP DESIGN: Jonathan Adler Speaks.. and then some..

2007-02-04T22:16:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Adler: "Oh my god, I mean, it needs like a huge dose of zoloft.. It's a total bummer!"

doug aitken: sleepwalkers

2007-02-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

MoMA presents Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers daily from 5-10pm through February 16th. Be sure to check out this free offering, time is running out.
*Note: quite an exclectic cast including Tilda Swinton and Donal Sutherland.

indie fonts from p22

2007-02-01T09:15:00.000-05:00

p22 announced new indie fonts 3 books, including specimens and fonts from:
Indie Fonts 3 includes specimens and fonts from:
Baseline Fonts, Blue Vinyl Fonts, Device Fonts, E-phemera Fonts, Font Brothers, Handselecta, Jeremy Tankard Typography, Kenn Munk, Letterhead Fonts, Pizzadude, Positype, Process Type Foundry, Rimmer Type Foundry, Shinntype, SparkyType, Suitcase Type Foundry, Suomi Type Foundry, Village, Virus Fonts, Wilton Foundry

100 best typefaces of all time

2007-02-01T07:54:00.000-05:00

check out font shop international's list of The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time".

BW: Crayola Brightens a Brand

2007-02-01T00:02:00.000-05:00

Binney & Smith has always been known as the maker of the country's favorite crayon. Now they're letting their most popular name do the talking for them

[ check out the full BusinessWeek article ]

it's official

2007-01-31T23:43:00.000-05:00

Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

Say goodbye computer

Hop on over to apple.com to see for yourself.

Volkswagen EOS is stateside

2007-01-31T23:40:00.000-05:00

Check out the www.vw.com/eos site for more info.

BW: the future of apple

2007-01-31T23:27:00.000-05:00

Oh how delicious it is!

The evolution of the pc to the tv, music device, and now mobile decide. Watch out motorola, nokia, and RIM.. the competition will be fierce. Head over to BusinessWeek's online report on The Future of Apple (sans Computer!)

Shifting Gears at Motorola

2007-01-31T23:25:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek reports on the Shifting Gears at Motorola..

the devil dials prada

2007-01-31T23:20:00.000-05:00

Head on over to BusinessWeek online and checkout their feature on the Prada mobile phone from LG.

Getty Images Live

2007-01-31T17:50:00.000-05:00

Getty Images has recently launched "Getty Images Live," bringing the latest Archival, Entertainment, Features, News, Portrait, Publicity, and Sports photos to your desktop (both pc and mac). This application streams live, is customizable, and even has a keyword search. Check it out, http://www.gettyimages.com/getlive.

Put some color on. Ipod Shuffle receives new color refresh!

2007-01-30T17:59:00.000-05:00

Apple today announced the introduction of 4 new colored ipod shuffles, same capacity and same great price.

Cisco: out with the old & in with the new!

2006-09-30T00:28:00.000-04:00

Cisco's new logo.. Wow.. what a change.

The Snapshot Project

2006-09-30T00:03:00.000-04:00

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and so the human rights campaign has started a global coming out project entitled "snapshot". Rallying nationwide support, the project has received the backing of Jessica Simpson, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, and P!NK.

People's Design Awards

2006-09-29T23:14:00.000-04:00

In the true spirit of democratic design, make your voice heard.

Volkswagen Iroc

2006-09-29T14:29:00.000-04:00

The Iroc is Volkswagen's successor to the Scirocco, a popular VW coupe on the market for about 20 years before it was pulled in the early 1990s. Its 1.4-liter TSI engine is the same as used in Volkswagen's Golf GT. (wsj.com)

Welcome to The Design Times

2006-09-28T18:16:00.000-04:00

Welcome to The Design Times.