December 2011
2 posts
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“I’m all for file sharing. That’s great—as long as people are prepared for the...”
– “good points as usual from Ian MacKaye from this Pitchfork interview - especially about advertising, that’s always been my fear/annoyance with the ‘free’ cost of many things online (when it stops being an annoyance and is, as he says, ‘couching’ content in a way we don’t really pay any conscious...
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I should be so lucky
I was driving home tonight listening to the 2002 album Two Guns Twin Arrows by Abilene. I have no idea how many people have even heard of the long-defunct Abilene but I’m guessing its 5,000 at the absolute max. There’s probably about 3,000 of these CD’s in circulation and because the label that issued it went out of business I have a feeling there’s boxes of these in a warehouse or, more likely, a...
November 2011
17 posts
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Kieler Woche posters
If you visit the website of the largest sailing event in the world Kieler Woche, you are not going to be struck by the quality of design. But the festival does have a legacy of commissioning great modernist design by the likes of Wim Crouwel, Anton Stankowski, Otto Treumann, Jean Widmer, Ruedi Baur, Ben Bos, Siegfried Odermatt, Rosemarie Tissi, and Bernd Kuchenbeiser.
Some personal favorites:
...
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“…“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high...”
– Jason Fried on software development (though the correlation to design proper is fairly clear), from “The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible” at Signal vs. Noise
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20 observations, questions and hopes in response...
Girl & Chocolate Trailer from Crailtap on Vimeo.
Is it really called Girl Skateboards Chocolate Skateboards Video? Or, from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema? I really hope so. Untitled Video from Girl Films & Chocolate Cinema would also be pretty great.
It’s cool that a lot of the makes are from ads—Alex Olson’s picnic table ollie and Gino’s kickflip-pivot-to-fakie stand out.
Is...
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Neat Vol. 1
Some interesting UI stuff—Namdev
5by5.tv has a button you can turn on so that links open in a new window. (I love this because I open everything in a new tab with the goal of making it take about 30 minutes for Firefox to start up.)
Top: The search field at apple.com when you load the page. Bottom: The search field once you insert the cursor.
Top: The footer on the already excellently...
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Introducing Boring Typography
It was in 2006 when I first noticed that I was going to used bookstores and purposefully looking for books with black sentence-case (only the first letter of the first work is capitalized) sans serif type on a white spine. This method of selecting books to browse through actually turned out to be fairly productive in that I ended up with a couple of books that I absolutely love. Later as I was...
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“Often the best way to find out what I think about something is to write about...”
– Project Projects principal, design educator and writer Rob Giampietro interviewed by Justin Kropp. A fantastic and short read on work of all kinds.
I don’t know that enough people understand that writing is a process of discovery moreso than a process of dictation.
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“The work was not idea-based in the sense of cute metaphors or rhetorical tactics...”
– Simon Johnston, founding partner of 8vo on the modus operandi of that studio. From his essay “Dust” for the 8vo monograph 8vo: On the Outside (2005, Lars Müller Publishers). I love the bit about “cute metaphors.”
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“In an undergraduate environment, you want to give students good basics — good...”
– Daniel van der Velden of MetaHaven on how he would design an undergraduate design program. I’m especially interested in the part about students “hopping their way through the curriculum in a completely haphazard way without learning anything.” I think much of the obsession with students needing to...
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“I like things that play with reference points in such a way as to throw you off...”
– British designer Julian House (Intro Partners/Ghost Box records) on the way he integrates visual references into his work.
This idea of references rather than pastiche is something that really resonates with us. We like to play with this idea of a piece containing a web of references that we...
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Typography Foundation monoprints
Last week I reported that my Typography Foundation class at MCAD were going to be making monoprints at Landland. Yesterday we spent a few hours printing, experimenting, and burning through paper before each participant had to pick just 1 print to keep before we chopped the other 30–40 in quarters.
Here’s the 10 we saved:
Alea with a piece that includes some layers from Jim Datz and Jes...
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Weekend Update Vol. 3
Five of the best things that I stumbled across this week and think you should get caught up on. I tried to get this out on Friday but it didn’t happen. Monday inspiration instead, I suppose.—Namdev
Poster by Martin Venezky’s Appetite Engineers
Posters by Martin Venezky and Appetite Engineers. We have been in love with Martin Venezky’s hand-made and obsessive graphic design since picking up a...
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5 Essential Design and Marketing Podcasts
The (consistently) great podcast is a kind of personal holy grail. I love being able to visit a certain site once a week (if I’m lucky) and know that I’ll hear a great conversation taking place. The following is my list of absolutely essential interview based podcasts. I’ve pointed out some of my personal favorite episodes from each show as well. 1. Typeradio No design podcast tops the Dutch...
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I want to be astounded by walls of interesting...
A couple of weeks ago I gave my Typography Foundation students what was hands-down the best brief for a project that I have ever written:
“What I want to see are things. Black and white typographic things. You may photograph, draw, collage, photocopy, scan, distort, manipulate, typeset, whatever. The only requirement is that things you make start out typographic or end typographic. I want to be...
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“I thought I’d better try painting with oils. I can’t remember exactly why, but I...”
– And there you have the creative process.
Source: Stanley Donwood to a “snazzy magazine from Hong Kong” on the artwork for Radiohead’s The King of Limbs LP.
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“We thought a lot about musical pauses, silent passages instead of constant...”
– Alec MacKaye reflects on The Warmers’ minimalist post-punk masterpiece from 1996 The Warmers (a record I have on repeat as I work on Boring Typography Vol. 1).
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De-professionalizing the web
I don’t know why it took me so long to realize the easiest way to find the pre-2005 archives of Signal Vs Noise would be to Google “Signal Vs Noise, June 2004” but on some Andrew Wiles solving of Fermat’s Theorem deal (this is a more complex set of references than I actually have time to explain here, sorry) I finally stumbled upon the right course of action for solving this confounding mystery....
October 2011
12 posts
3 tags
Moosiah Mondays: It’s a Private Party (But I Can...
Each Monday we’ll be publishing a story from The Moosiah, aka Moose Hardisty, 1/2 of the MVA 2012 expansion team. This story was originally published at TheMoosiah.com in June 2011. This also marks the beginning of an intentionally more random, less focused (less business, less calculated, less boring) approach to blogging. Enjoy.
It’s a Private Party (But I Can Show You to the Door)
The...
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Nick van Woert
While I was on a trip to New York in 2008 I had a realization that there was a certain kind of artwork that was guaranteed to get my attention. Walking through the exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, and later the 2008 Whitney Biennial I noticed that I was consistently stopping at and being blown away be pieces that fit a few criteria. They were large, usually geometric,...
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“If we consider the effort put into graphic art and the general level of its...”
– Josef Müller-Brockmann, The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems. I find this quote interesting for a couple of reasons:
The mythology of the Swiss school of design paints them as corporate whores that never questioned who it was that they were working for or why, only that they would be...
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Vinyl Protection: new LP packaging
There’s no denying that the art of music packaging is entering some kind of totally unexpected new golden age. Here’s some things that caught my eye recently.—Namdev
Dinosaur L (Arthur Russell) 24-24 Music 4LP Box Set (Traffic Entertainment/Sleeping Bag) Details: 4 vinyl LP’s (each housed in a screen-printed jacket) with artwork by Russell’s longtime partner Tom Lee and an oversize book...
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Hand Job revisited
In 2006, I was fortunate to have a selection of my hand-drawn typography featured in Mike Perry’s Hand Job: A Catalog of Type. In addition I also contributed an essay (then under the name Sparky Hardisty [this is a longer conversation for another time]) “All Hail To My Hands” consisting of my observations on 10 years of making stuff by hand.
If you’re familiar with The MVA’s work then you know...
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Moosiah Mondays: Johnny Backhoe, The Livery...
Each Monday we’ll be publishing a story from The Moosiah, aka Moose Hardisty, 1/2 of the MVA 2012 expansion team. This story was originally published at TheMoosiah.com in March 2011. This also marks the beginning of an intentionally more random, less focused (less business, less calculated, less boring) approach to blogging. Enjoy. (Updated 10/28/2011 to split into 2 chunks and apologize in...
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Thoughts on an art education
The Quodlibetica salon on “Art & Design (Mis)Education” that I wrote about last week was a great way to end my weekend. It was set up as a panel but with an open discussion with the audience. There was something very fascinating about this arrangement. The inclusion of a panel seemed to anchor the event and give it a focus but the non-panelists (which is weirder non-panelists or audience?) did...
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My main priority? Get money.
According to Twitter, Namdev Hardisty is “Thinking, writing, designing, editing, sharing, teaching.” What that actually means is that he is in order of priority the Creative Director of The MVA Studio where he and a small group of collaborators design books and posters, a design educator at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the author of multiple books on visual culture, and a sometime...
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Finite.
Most graphic design has a finite edge. It exists in a context where it will be looked at, perhaps read but its not likely to become an object of contemplation. And most graphic design was a thing that mattered already—a text, an image or some combination thereof—before it was turned into a piece of graphic design. All of this to say that when we design we are always in a competition with context...
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“What we strive for has more to do with purity. We strive for purity of form even...”
– Jon Forss of Non-Format on the topic of decorative elements in their work. From the book Non-Format: Love Song (Die Gestalten, 2007)
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Where simplicity and complexity intersect
Doing one thing at a time (or solving one problem or communicating a single idea) is a concept occupying a lot of my mental space at the moment. It led me to try to find an old interview with Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne where he was asked about the band’s approach to music and the fact they most of their songs consist of single riff. His answer consisted of something to the effect of “Sometimes...
August 2011
3 posts
3 tags
“The most innovative moments, the sparks of ideas, & fundamental truths come...”
– Presumably by Richard Saul Wurman (creator of TED, from the website for his WWW.WWW conference. Have you ever seen such a bold and beautiful ambition for a project?
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La typographie bibliographie un: Top 5 books on...
An occasional series highlighting indispensable texts for practicing typography.
1. Typographie, Emil Ruder (Niggli, 1967, 2001) I kept a copy of this book on constant rotation while at MCAD, later I spent $80 on the new hardcover and have never regretted it. This is the one book on typography that every designer should read.
2. Thinking With Type, Ellen Lupton (Princeton Architectural Press,...
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“Handling text and image, object and space chiefly determines our field of...”
– Total Design*, statement of purpose (from Ontwerp: Total Design, 1983)
Its a quaint notion, I know, but I think this is the whole game for us (The MVA) these days. That is, to share information clearly. To layer in concepts but have the focus be on the information, the stories, the content.
*This...
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Weekend Update Vol. 2
Five of the best things that I stumbled across this week and think you should get caught up on.—Namdev
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, David Rock—I got 2 chapters into this book and realized it was a life-changer. Author David Rock takes the foibles of an average day of work and uses the latest neuroscience to explain...
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Lessons learned from public speaking
In short—use less slides, have a content strategy, under-estimate the running time, use a script (or don’t), and use a microphone. In case you need some info to back that up, here it is:
I’m sitting on the tarmac at Chicago O’Hare wating for a storm to pass over Minneapolis so we can get in the air. I’m coming home from the Wharton Web Conference in Philadelphia where I gave my first public...
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Weekend Update Vol. 1
Look a new feature! Five of the best things that I stumbled across this week and think you should get caught up on.—Namdev
The Rune Grammofon summer CD sale—The Norwegian record label Rune Grammofon is the only label that I’ll buy a record from without knowing anything about it and I’m guaranteed to be happy with the purchase (as a matter of fact, I’ve done that twice in the last week). I...
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“But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful....”
– “Subconscious Information Processing”—a great Father Day’s post by Fred Wilson over at A VC.
June 2011
7 posts
3 tags
Stop looking, start reading
The line that “designers don’t read” is a tired bit of crap. My own experience has been that designers tend to be voracious readers. I think that line could just as easily be “people don’t read” (and it would still be crap).
But, there’s a variation of that idea that I do believe which is that designers don’t read their own work, especially at the points in the process...
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7.4.11 Trailer
I’ve sung the praises of Plan B’s promos a couple of times already and the full trailer for Torey Pudwill’s upcoming video part doesn’t disappoint. Crafts a nice narrative around the struggle to film a full part in six months and delivers some amazing skating. I still think that line in the beginning is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
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Namdev to speak at Wharton Web Conference →
I’m really honored and excited to do my first bit of non-MCAD public speaking next month in Philadelphia. I’ll be giving a talk called “Beautiful Typography on the Web”:
“Web fonts are revitalizing excitement about typography on the web but is it really the choice of typeface that makes or breaks a site design? Will access to a broader palette of fonts actually improve most websites or only...
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Street Cinema Vol. 3: Dylan Rieder “dylan.”
Street Cinema is a weekly selection of our favorite skate video parts chosen with an eye on the marriage of content (tricks, style, spots) and form (editing, cinematography and music).
Dylan Rieder’s Gravis promo might be the first video part to be released online that won’t be described as a “web-video” or worse, “just a web part.” After a solid but not very well-received part in Alien...
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Rules, principles, guidelines*
#1 You don’t need rules if you actually care
My students in the Certificate in Graphic Design program at MCAD tend to be a hungrier lot than usual. Having one degree under your belt already or realizing that you don’t like what you’re doing a couple years into a career can feel like lost time so these guys really go all in to learn as much about design as possible. This leads to a lot of...
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Recent Plan B promos
One of the first posts on this blog was about Plan B’s promos for the P-Rod video so its nice to see they’re still doing it right with these recent clips.
7.4.11 promo #3 Looks like Torey Pudwill is the next Plan B pro to go the iTunes solo-part route. This music-less clip of a fast, powerful line calls to mind the P-Rod picnic table promo.
Pro Spec wheel promo PJ Ladd in HD slow-mo. Stunning....
May 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Happy Birthday! Now buy something already.
Kim received this postcard from our (ex-)chiropractor’s office the other day. The only reason it wasn’t immediately tossed into the recycling with the rest of the junk mail is because it sparked the following ideas.
We get cards like these all the time. Generic, ugly cards that no one would ever go to the store and buy (but doctors think they should order in bulk) because the only message these...
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Bill Early, Bill Often
Cash (flow) rules everything around me
I think a common trait amongst business starters (or at least the male ones I know) is an intolerance for all things boring, uninteresting or not fun. This isn’t a total shocker as a need for novelty often leads people to quit their day jobs and start businesses. One of the major problems with this particular personality trait (and there are a lot of them)...
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Link: Every time you add something you take... →
“Screen real estate. Interface clarity. Simplified testing. Shorter development time. Certainty. Agility. Manageability. Familiarity. Adding anything dilutes everything else. That’s not always a bad thing, just be aware of it. Be aware of the trade-offs.” (via Signal vs. Noise)
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