The Legendary George Nelson On Creating A Design-Driven Company. In 1984, Herman Miller asked George Nelson to write an essay on the nature of his design relationship with Herman Miller. This is an edited version the result. Here, he reflects on unfaltering trust the company’s owner, D.J. DePree, had in his designers, which resulted not only in superior products but a never-before-used marketing tactic.
--Ed. Life with Herman Miller began, for me, with a surprise visit from D.J. D.J. had read all this and, never a man to run with the herd, he had decided that if the Storagewall was indeed a wave of the future, it might make more sense to ride it than to fight it. Months later, after I had forgotten all about our meeting, he came back and we made what I suppose was a deal, although neither one of us ever signed anything; shortly afterwards I took a train to Detroit, where we met at the Book Cadillac Hotel.
What D.J. did to his designers was instill in them his belief that what they were doing was important. Yes, it worried me. D.J. was stunned. Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing. In sexy fashion world, one designer covers up. Paula Scher: Do What You've Never Done Before :: Videos :: 99U. Sometimes you have to ignore the brief, says renowned designer and artist Paula Scher. With a dry wit, Scher takes us behind-the-scenes on four landmark projects — from revamping MoMA’s identity to reinvigorating a Pittsburgh neighborhood through design — to illustrate how asking questions, pushing into uncharted territory, and doing something you’ve never done before leads to great work.
For four decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991.She began her career as an art director in the 1970’s and early 80’s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s, her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions. Pentagram Design Paula Scher Maps.
Grad shows 2012 review: Central St Martins. Central St Martins has a reputation from producing graphic design and illustration graduates who are brilliant, artsy and pretentious – with work to match. But from this year's grad show – the first at architecturally wonderful new campus behind King's Cross Station – we saw work that was incredibly good but often conceptually clear and even *gulp* commercial. Illustration graduates seem to have fallen in love with Victoriana or hipster comics. There's much delicately beautiful 3D collages, alongside narrative work that wouldn't look out of place on the shelves of Nobrow. The overarching influence of Apple's approach to product design permeated the graphic design section – and not just in the iPads and MacBook being used to display the work.
Neat type and the glossiest black were everywhere – though much good work took a less traditional approach. Here's our pick of the best work, chosen by Digital Arts editor Neil Bennett and art editor Johann Chan. Heidi Andreasen heidiandreasen.com. Free Range grad show report: Middlesex University, Havering College, UCA Maidstone. See the best graphic design and illustration work from this year's Free Range grad shows, featuring work from Middlesex University, Havering College and University of the Creative Arts, Maidstone. On Friday night, Digital Arts strolled down to Brick Lane to check out design and illustration from this year's Free Range group grad show. No longer incorporating the D&AD's New Blood exhibition – which takes place across Commercial Street at Old Spitalfields Market June 27-28 – Free Range still includes the must-see grad show for Middlesex University's creative courses, plus great work from Havering College and the University of the Creative Arts, Maidstone.
Here's our pick of the best work on show. You've only got til Monday to see the work at Trumans Brewery – so get down there quick if you want to see the show for yourself. To see other great work from young talent, check out our grad show 2012 listings. Middlesex University's creative grad show was titled Raw this year. Abigail Moulder.
Q&A With Motion Designer Barton Damer. Designer: Barton Damer; AlreadyBeenChewed.tv Specialty: design for new media, interactive, print and broadcast Location: Dallas, TX Under his studio moniker Already Been Chewed, Barton Damer designs in a variety of mediums for print, web, live productions and broadcast television. His digital illustrations are influenced heavily by his motion work. He was named Digital Artist of the Year by Computer Arts Magazine, Intel and 3D World Magazine, and he’s the recipient of the Veer Creative Catalyst: Design for Change award that encourages artists to create for nonprofit organizations that are helping to do good around the world. He primarily uses Maxon Cinema 4D in conjunction with Adobe products—both of which will be exhibiting at HOW Design Live in Boston this June—to create his award-winning work.
HOW: Tell us a little about your background and the type of work you do today. Who are your clients? What’s inspires you and influences your work, in general? Focus on the design first. Daniel Clowes, Krazy Kat, and Rory Hayes: New Books on Comics Masters. Not very long ago, a dedicated comics library might have looked less like a rare books room and more like a semi-coherent junk store, containing a three-dimensional scrapbook of out-of-print books, half-completed reprint series, miscellaneous small press magazines, bound photocopies, and endless clippings.
But the rise of the graphic novel category over the past decade has yielded a rich vein of previously rare or inaccessible archival material in well-designed, library-ready formats: complete comic strip collections, surveys of mid-century comic book genres, art books dedicated to historical and contemporary artists, and other rare pleasures.
The cover of United Dead Artists/PictureBox's new Rory Hayes collection Today, a dedicated reader could fill several bookshelves with volumes compiled from this thoroughgoing history of comics, and a more casual reader or researcher can easily find the same at a well-stocked library. A self-portrait of Clowes Clowes's illustration of Bill Murray. The Bottle’s the Thing: The Branding Evolution of Soda Pop. A Pepsi-Cola serving tray circa 1940s My fascination with brand design started with the soda-pop realm. I’d always loved leafing through old magazines and usually paid more attention to the advertising in them than the articles. Because my father had a collection of Life magazines beginning with the first issue in 1936 and continuing through the World War II years, I had ample exposure to plenty of advertising from that era.
Soft drink ads were plentiful and even before seeing or owning the actual bottles, I was aware of the label and packaging designs, and how the designs changed from year to year. (When I was a kid, my dad also gave me an old Coca-Cola bottle that helped trigger what ended up being an collecting obsession.) After finding the vintage bottles in the Evanston garage, I set out to find examples of as many design and label variations as I could.
Spending time with these bottles inspired me to be sensitive to the evolution of logo and trademark graphic design. 1930s Nehi ad. On the Relationship Between Ego and Design. If I were to ask, I’d bet that most people would anticipate that technical difficulties—such things as programming and server-level configuration—would be the greatest challenge of web development. Those things are certainly difficult, but they are rarely the greatest challenge. This is because the expertise required to do that work—even to understand it—is held by few, and those that do not have it tend to recognize that fact and be okay with it. Design, however, has no such clarity. In my experience, the design process always presents unanticipated difficulty to everyone, delaying production and introducing interpersonal stresses that had been absent from the project before the design process started.
The reasons are many, of course. Our strategies for dealing with the unquantifiable difficulties of design should take two forms: Strategies for beginning, and strategies for keeping things moving forward. Beginning Your ego is a bad designer. That doesn’t mean “stop caring.” Progressing. A Fanzine Editor’s 60-Year Love Affair with 1950s Comics. There’s this comic-book story about space aliens who try to save our planet from self-annihilation. But they arrive too late: We’d already destroyed ourselves in an atomic war. They land their rocket ship on a chunk of a devastated earth and discover a science-fiction comic book amid the rubble. It contains a story about aliens who look exactly like them, who try to save the earth but arrive too late, and who discover a comic book.
And on the last page they see a picture of themselves looking at a picture of themselves, looking, etc., ad infinitum. And one of the aliens exclaims, “Squa tront!” Which is extraterrestrial-speak for “Holy shit!” Al Williamson: art Squa Tront is also the name of a fanzine that pays homage to 1950s-era EC Comics, a publisher that emerged in the 1940s. Wally Wood: art The following is the first of my two-part coverage of Benson, who’s been writing about comics since 1956. Harvey Kurtzman: art BENSON: I’d say my interest has been intermittent at best. D’em Bones. What would you do with d’em extra shin bones, knee bones, bone bones? The designer and photographer Francois Robert, who is known for capturing invisible alphabets on film (and digital matter), made them into a typeface.
He gave me a preview of his most recent skeleton project. And I asked him a few questions about what’s rattling around in his skull. Why bones? What is your message here? How long did it take to find such a perfect assortment of them? The arrangement and composition must have taken some time. You’ve photographed lots of different “found” alphabets. Classified Moto: A lamp in the next life. Marcel Breuer Digital Archive. Fuel Your Product Design. Michael Harvey’s Life of Letters. I have known Michael Harvey, the British book jacket designer / lettercutter / type designer, for nearly thirty years. And I have known his work for far longer, having first discovered it in Erik Lindegren’s ABC of Lettering and Printing Types (Askim, Sweden: Erik Lindegren Grafisk Studio, 1964–1965, 3 vols.) when I was a teenager.
There his typeface Zephyr, done for Ludlow at the dusk of the metal era, was displayed along with a hand lettered greeting card. In the early 1980s I stumbled upon a number of Michael’s handlettered book jackets while preparing an anthology of such things (which never came to pass). We became friends around that time as I helped arrange his first professional visit to New York City. Now Michael has allowed me an advance look at his autobiography, a book not yet published (and with a title that is still unsettled). Its contents have sparked this conversation—really an edited exchange of emails—between the two of us over the course of the past few weeks. How Walt Disney Used His Kansas City Library Card. “Animated Cartoons – How They Are Made Their Origin And Development” by E.G. Lutz 1920 (U.S. printing Charles Scribner’s Sons) When the word “Disney” is mentioned, it’s almost impossible to separate it from the craft of motion picture cartoons.
Whether it’s used to describe a multinational entertainment corporation, or it alludes to Walt Disney the man, it’s easily synonymus with the technique of film animation. This was obviously not always the case. (I strongly encourage reading Michael Barrier’s wonderful book, “The Animated Man” University Of California Press 2007. Disney was born in Chicago in 1901. Laugh-O-Grams building in Kansas City circa 1920′s. Laugh-O-Grams building March 2013. It was short lived, and he (and Iwerks) soon thereafter took a job with the Kansas City Film Ad Company doing still advertising images that were projected as slides in motion picture theaters.
First editions of the British and American printings with dustjackets Scientific American October 14, 1916 1. 2. Industrial Design Sandbox. A Day in the Life of a Graphic Designer. CocaColla.it - Story of a Brand. on the Behance Network. Student Showcase - Student Design Blog - Exhibiting the best student design work from around the world. - Part 14.
Bona Fide Designed by Amy Nortman | Country: USA Bona Fide is a concept brand and product line that I named and created from scratch. After receiving my assignment, which gave me no more than the subject of ‘cake mixes’ to work with, I decided to design a modern take on the tradition of Southern hospitality, creating a genuine Southern eating experience through beautifully handcrafted baked goods that anyone can access and enjoy. Read more… DoveLewis Designed by Beth Chapleau | Country: Canada DoveLewis is a non-profit emergency animal hospital located in Portland, Oregon. Good Meats Designed by Chad Kirsebom | Country: USA GOOD MEATS is a local butcher shop where quality cut meats and family, sit at the top of the list. Geo Organics Designed by Freddy Taylor | Country: United Kingdom Brief: Walk into any supermarket, choose a brand you dislike and re-brand & re-package, anything goes.
Meet George Designed by Siobhan Gallagher | Country: Canada SEMKE Sunflower Seeds Read more… yum. To The Printers. As Albert Hurter Drew, He Pleased The Disney Artists Around Him. In 1948 Simon and Schuster published a book titled He Drew As He Pleased. It’s a tribute to Albert Hurter, an inspirational sketch artist who worked at the Walt Disney Studio from 1931 until his death in 1942. A 1939 shot of Hurter at work on "Pinocchio". The book itself was planned and prepared by Hurter himself and as outlined in his will, he personally picked Ted Sears (Fleischer animator/Disney storyman) to compile the material and write the forward introduction. The drawings are wonderful and recall the fantastic work of artists like Heinrich Kley. Hurter’s function at the Disney Studio was to create drawings that would inspire the artists, animators, and story people.
It’s mind-blowing to consider in our modern day industry of tight deadlines and tighter budgets, someone who’s job it is to simply sit and draw to inspire a group of production folk. "T.S. " stands for Ted Sears who Hurter willed the task of editing this posthumus compilation. More Design Resources: