[Dose of Design Activism] Make a Poster in The Fight Against Global Climate Change

The poster remains a formidable way to communicate messages. This September, Green Patriot Posters will launch an online competition. With the intersection of movements and posters in mind, there was the Hurricane Poster Project, a response to New Orleans hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Flickr Taps Into Our Inner Typographer

There’s a growing number of Flickr communities of interest, or “Group Pools” in Flickr-speak, honing their lens on the expanding range of typographic mattter from Business Cards to Letterpress to Table of Contents, Signage Systems to Type Specimens. Complementing these few examples of community-driven sets of images are solo exhibits such as the Great Ideas, Volume III, book cover series, Iain Follett’s Stamps collection, 1950s–1970s advertising, Vintage Logos, retronomatopeya, The Letterpress Process, and Good design on paper. More info about a couple of these Flickr sets can be found at the We Made This and grain edit blogs.

Typographer Erik Spiekermann said, “Picture yourself in a world without type. True, you could do without some of the ubiquitous advertising messages, but you wouldn’t even know which package on your breakfast table contained what.” More than an image-hosting service, Flickr helps reinforce the importance of type and typography. It celebrates the lettterform factor, beyond the “breakfast table.”

Wearable Calder

To celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Calder, an exhibition of his jewelry is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show’s curator Elisabeth Agro said that Space to Calder “is about occupying space. And he just sees the body as a grounding element for this other aspect of his work. Not that the body gets in the way—the body is one part of this larger work of art, when you put it on.” The master of mobiles brought his artistry down to a more intimate level.

[Connecting Bits] Concrete Design

Founded and led by Brent Constanz, a biocement entrepreneur, Calera is in the business of innovating cement. This common material is criticized as a polluting agent in concrete. Constanz’s company has a process of producing cement that’s low-cost and environment-friendly. Calera is highlighted in an article entitled “Rethinking the Material World” in the July/Auguest issue of Dwell magazine. Its primary investor is green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla who’s featured (along with Constanz) in the July/August issue of Fast Company. Now jump back to the June issue of TIME magazine which featured architect Tadao Ando’s latest concrete design, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. It “calls to mind the delicacy and simplicity of traditional Japanese architecture.” The article’s author Richard Lacayo further expresses that Ando’s “buildings bear the mark of two 20th cetnury Modernists he admires, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, who found in concrete an opportunity for blunt majesty and even a kind of lyricism.” In a way, architects are like the material scientists who design on the molecular level.

[Easier Said than Practiced] Quotes about Execution

“The follow-through ... is a thousand times more important than a ‘great idea’... if execution is perfect, it sometimes barely matters what the idea is.”
—Felix Dennis, Magazine Publisher

“Ideas on their own are just not that important. It’s incredibly rare that someone comes up with an idea so unique, so protectable that the success story writes itself. Most ideas are nothing without execution.”
—David Heinemeier, Creator of Ruby on Rails web development framework and Partner at 37signals

“There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation.”
—Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon

design mind magazine debuts

Strategic-creative consulting firm frog design releases their publication design mind this week in a new medium: Print. Defying death, the revolutionary method of ink to paper thrives.

Update, August 16, 2008—Review by Michael Surtees: Part One, Part Two

Ethnography and Design

One of my favorite thoughts on design is the phrase “Design is People” by Jane Jacobs. Ethnography echoes that sentiment and is a prolific term in the design field. Kristy Scovel and Gabe Biller, graduates of IIT’s Institute of Design (ID), created a how-to video called Getting People to Talk, in which the duo offer best practices for getting meaningful information out of user research and informal interviews. ID’s student-run blog has some background of the making of this indispensable video.

Related material can be found in the booklet An Ethnography Primer, a joint effort by the AIGA, the professional association of design, and strategy and marketing consultancy Cheskin.

Of course, connecting with people is one of the central goals of ethnographic research, especially with attention to specific location. Ira Glass, host and producer of the documentary series This American Life is an expert in making such connections with ethnography. When asked about conceiving a complete show in 24 hours, his answer was: “My producers and I would probably stake out one location. We would have to choose a spot where stuff is happening, where there are regulars and people have had time to build up relationships. That way the story can be about the drama between them.”

Designer’s Quest(ionnaire): James David Morgan of The Groundswell Collective

The Designer’s Quest(ionnaire) is a Design Feast initiative embracing the perspective of a designer in a succinct format. The Groundswell Collective’s James David Morgan is committed to challenging dominant ideologies through visual communication. Read about his intriguing ideas on design and designing.

Welcome to Design Feaster!

Took me awhile to commit to blogging, in part because several great design-related blogs already exist—including Grain Edit, Swissmiss, Ace Jet 170 and Signal vs. Noise. But I thought I’d give the medium a try, as blogging remains poised for ever-growing popularity. This blog is primarily a reporting board for Design Feast, including related projects, such as Thought Leadership by Design and others currently in the works.

Making a blog is easy. Committing to the writing is the challenging part. I predict that the writing will be infrequent but steady, along the lines of slow cooking. My hope is to share observations and views, mostly about design, as they’re discovered. In the process, perhaps design is indeed everything as Paul Rand said. Here’s to finding out.