Record of a Remembered Event
Above: Jen Magathan’s response to the assignment, which re-examined a set of drawings made along a street in Assisi, Italy during the course of a single day. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”
Make a record about an event from your life that you have a particularly strong memory of. Gather visual evidence and secondary supporting information as well. The record should fit entirely in the manila file folder that I’ve provided for you.
This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.
Graphic Design & Critical Thinking
Preamble
How do ideas become visual? How do emotions take shape? What do we assume about the things we see? What do we take for granted? What are our expectations for communicating with others? How do they communicate with us? How should information be organized? In what form does it pass from one person to the next? What are the boundaries between the precious and the everyday? How do we evaluate beauty? When do visual things become ideological? Which kinds of communication are information and which are propaganda? Which kinds of communication are ethical and which are unethical? Who decides? What should learning about design require? How should we do it? What does criticism have to teach us? Who can make design? What kind of rights and authority can those people lay claim to?
In Living Color
Above: Claude Closky’s design for Adidas’s new “Adicolor” line.
The D.I.Y. movement has gathered steam and gone mainstream. In recent months, companies as different as Hewlitt Packard and L.L. Bean have encouraged their customers to customize, and nowhere has this trend been more prevalent than in the all-important sneaker market. Nike’s “iD,” launched online and through brick-and-mortar, was followed by a similar effort from Vans, who tossed in a few models by celebrity fashion designers for those with artist’s block. Converse soon followed suit, asking sneaker fashionistas to “unleash their inner control freak” on their classic Chuck Taylors, and now Adidas has joined the mix with their “Adicolor” line.
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Courtesy of the outstanding film blog / braintrust Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You, a comprehensive bunch of click-throughs for Saul Bass’s film titles.
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A really outstanding cross-section of work from Amsterdam-based duo Maureen Mooren and Daniel van der Velden from Metropolis Magazine, c. 2001. Five years later, it seems their formal and intellectual influence on graphic design has been huge (and growing).
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NYT’s Stuart Elliott on “a growing agency in Toronto” you might have heard of. (Tangentially, I think more people should get their portrait taken on the phone. Artist Martin Kippenberger was definitely onto something.)
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“You would have to look rather closely to see it. Extremely closely. In fact, someone could set the old logo and the new logo side by side and stare for some time before detecting even the slightest distinction. The folks who led the exhaustive makeover process couldn’t be more pleased.” NYT on the ginger redrawing of MoMA’s logo, set in Franklin Gothic No. 2, c. 2003. Shortly thereafter, NYT announced its own redrawing in the form of a slightly tweaked—but subtlely compelling—new Cheltenham. Whose ghost haunts these two typographic facelifts? Morris Fuller Benton, for one. Who else? Matthew Carter, of course. For further reading, try this interview with Carter, which helps connect some more dots between the two.
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I just spent an intense few minutes watching architect Joshua Prince-Ramus’s presentation from the 2006 TED Conference. The way he breaks down design problems and presents his work so simply and directly is admirable.
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A post about my ongoing fascination with film editing would be quite a long read, but I know I share the opinion of many designers that the craft of film editing shares a great deal with the craft of, for instance, the design of visual books. A good intro can be found in this article from the Boston Globe, where we get quotes from the venerable film editor Walter Murch who observes that film editing “could just as easily be called ‘film construction.’” Also quoted are rising stars like Steve Hamilton, who explains the ever-shrinking number of long takes in feature films this way: “The power of the gaze has been circumvented by technology. We can’t look our matinee idols in the eye anymore.”
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A really charming selection of fonts with ball terminals “those sweet dollops of goodness that are rarely discussed, but so widely appreciated.”
