24-7 Design Heaven

24-7 Design Heaven http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/ en Copyright 2010 Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:24:26 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Design at the Olympics; First Impressions
I won't lie to you . . . I care relatively little about the games as sporting events or the events as activities in themselves.

But I'm fascinated by the intricacy, complexity, and on-the-fly storytelling of the broadcasts of the games, and the subsidiary piranha swarms of the media as they go for blood on successes and failures.

I also love the Olympics as an opportunity for designers, an opportunity often ignored or failed. But success is there for the taking . . . if you count as success many millions of humans murmuring appreciatively "mmm coool!" in reaction to your design.

Quick Notes so far:

1) NBC's overall graphics package: average. When will we finally be DONE with the illusion of shiny metal on TV, especially for sports. FOX began doing it, then overdoing it, and all the other American major networks have slavishly followed suit. Enough, already!

2) NBC's shield: What? Are we medieval counts and countesses? The shield means . . . wha? . . . in this context?

3) NBC's mountain motif as a background for motion graphics: I like it. Sure, you could argue that all Winter Olympics involve mountains, but still, these are nice mountains, used nicely.

4) Vancouver Olympic Committee's basic workhorse graphics; the Green, Blue, Cyan system based on the curving lines of humans sliding across or down various kinds of frozen water. Unusually good. Gives a feel of the West; the coasts and forests and mountains. Best viewed at a distance. From up close the swoops are populated by dumbly literal illustration. Wish they'd kept it abstract. Looks great against the white. Somewhat annoying on the athletes bibs since it overpowers whatever country-identifying outfit the athlete is wearing, especially in head and shoulder shots on camera.

5) NBC's "ice cubes" made from the Vancouver Committee's somewhat retro event graphics. Terrible. Extrusions create confusions. The chunky line weight of the "ripples" on the front of the cubes are heavyhanded. So they whirl and rotate. So what?

6) The basic Vancouver logo modelled on anthropomorphic First Nations stone-stack sculptures. Good. Resonant culturally and historically. Tolerable color-wise.

7) Coca Cola's imitation of the Vancouver logo; making a coke bottle out of the same stone-stack shapes. Tacky. Culturally insensitive.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/design-at-the-olympics-first-i.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/design-at-the-olympics-first-i.php Blog Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:24:26 -0500 The Organic Paper Prisms of Jen Stark
Days ago the Miami New Times gave her their Master Mind Award.

Stark is rapidly becoming known in the Miami scene both as a sculptor and a cut-paper animator.

I like Stark's work at its least geometric . . . where she's playing with organic form developed from the world of right-angle-trimmed paper, and I hope she follows the curves more and more into this territory.

View image

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/the-organic-paper-prisms-of-je.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/the-organic-paper-prisms-of-je.php Blog Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:54:18 -0500 A Book You Could Live In; Olafur Eliasson's Lasercut "Your House"
In this economic climate I'm wondering if a bank will underwrite me for $3,500 for a copy of Olafur Eliasson's Your House, published by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Cut (and apparently exquisitely, to judge from the photos) by KREMO of Mosbach, Germany, Your House starts with just the shapes of the windows, like lights glowing out of the darkness. As you flip through, the rooms open up into deep volumes . . . architectural volumes, not bound book volumes.

Eliasson's installation art prowess comes into play here as he manages and creates with both the actual open shapes of the book in your hands, but also with our mind's knowledge of architectural volumes.

A great gift . . . from the craftspeople a Kremo to Eliasson, from MoMA to the world.

A great gift . . . for someone like me . . . with a birthday coming up? Hint, hint?

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/a-book-you-could-live-in-olafu.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/02/a-book-you-could-live-in-olafu.php Blog Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:36:30 -0500 Why I'm in Love with Zocalo raved about Cyrus Highsmith's serif font Zocalo, developed for a Mexico city newspaper El Universal.

I knew Iiked it a lot then . . . but I've recently begun using it on projects and I have absolutely fallen in love.

I weighed my choices carefully to start with --- there is a fine Zocalo Banner family, and a crushing, solid wonderful display (that gets spookily calligraphic in its heaviest italics) . . . but I have stuck to Zocalo Text Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic in my initial play, and have found it absolutely charming and pleasurable to work with.

The text weights come with a fine Text L, which has a bit lacier and thinner thins, and I'm sometimes tempted to choose it . . . but in the pinch I've always settled on the Text Regular, which has a solidity and joy in sizes big to small.

I'm sure I'll use the other families at some point as well . . . but right now I don't need to I'm blissed out with the jus' plain Text.

How do I love it? Let me count the ways (or at least start to . . . I could go on all night!

Let's start with the most workaday of all letters the text lower case e. Look at that cheerful tilt of the counter. Is the counter itself even symmetrical or is the center slightly of gravity slightly pushing to the right, pushing ahead? My eye is pretty good, but not that good. If it's not, the delight I'm feeling comes from the off-of-vertical thick and thin of the top form. I also love the perfect muscle of the lower-left sweep of the character and its great parallel, chunky ending at the lower right. Sure, I get it: the human brain is only too eager to read two dots and a line as a face, and if this isn't a face in profile I'll eat my tie. But there's more to this than that that parlor trick. It's a plumb beautiful form.

The Bold and and Bold Italic little "e"s continue the cheerful slant and comely proportions. This time you can't tell me the Bold counter isn't leaning forward a little in excitement. But then look at the how the straight lines and hard corners liquify in the Bold Italic, while retaining the same spirit! It's such smart and sensitive design!

Then there's the wave-like negative space under the awning of the little "a" and its swoopy, liquid counter, so lovely!

Then there is the wedge opening up through the heart of the little "f", like everything in the font, pushing toward the right, accelerating, opening up . . . the gently triangle at the top of the "t" . . . and I'm always a sucker for the long "f" in italics . . . in fact I'm a partisan of the long little "s" of the 18th century and earlier. Gotta run and check of Highsmith's thought of that.

I literally could keep going . . . but I can't end even a short post with a look at the big and little "w"s from the Bold Italic, each of which is sculptural and solid and pleasing in its own right, but they are so witty together . . . and the little "w" is basically a one line joke, comically leaning and evaporating stage left, reader's right, like a cartoon character.

Anyway, thanks Cyrus!

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/why-im-in-love-with-zocalo.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/why-im-in-love-with-zocalo.php Blog Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:15:23 -0500 First-Person Mediator. Playing for Good With Videogame Peacemaker
The one difference might be that the geography is hauntingly familiar. Is that . . . the Mediterranean? Are those . . . the Golan Heights?

But a few moments in, it's clear that this game is gnarlier, rougher, tougher . . . and more real . . . than any other gods'-eye-view empire game.

That's because the goal is different. The goal is not domination.

The goal is peace.

Impact Games PeaceMaker takes a truly gnarly situation and gives you the chance . . . nay, the obligation, once you get hooked emotionally . . . to solve the unsolvable puzzle. To bring peace to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Designed by a former Israeli Defense Force captain, and supplied with rolling video that brings the reality of its conundrums home, PeaceMaker has drawn critical attention and even garnered a nomination for HRH the Crown Prince of Denmark's INDEX, Design to Improve Life awards.

You get to experience first-hand the delicate web of interlocked and often conflicting forces that have kept the region in such turmoil for so long. Is it challenging? It's well nigh impossible. But once you get hooked on the goal, you can't stop. "There's got to be a way," you tell yourself.

It gets your adrenaline working . . . but also your heart and mind, in ways that the usual stomp-&-conquer games don't.

Try it . . . for a change of peace.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/firstperson-mediator-playing-f.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/firstperson-mediator-playing-f.php Blog Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:50:30 -0500 Speaking Delicately; the Cut Paper Eloquence of Hina Aoyama
This delicate sentiment (concerning silence and the soft voice of the heart) in delicate letterforms, cut small and precisely from paper and floating, in this photograph, on a human hand --- in it form and content as one.

And it's a helluva show-off piece!

Cut paper artist Hina Aoyama lives in France, shows her astonishingly detailed work in Europe and has an amazingly steady hand.

I admire the skill of her patterned and illustrative pieces, but where she really shines for me is in her cut typography . . . not even so much the letterforms themselves, which are fairly conventional, but her skill at massing text (if you can say that work so light has mass) and organizing it in two dimensions.

Those two dimensions rapidly become three with the addition of a shadow, impossible to avoid without pasting or pressing the work, in her unmounted pieces.

I'm crazy about this piece sitting in someone's (her) hand . . . and also about the cascades of text shown elsewhere in her flickr portfolio pinned to the wall with (seemingly) massive and high tech little straight pins.

The work must be great live . . . but the photographs are marvelous . . . and a good thing for art directors to tuck away in the backs of their minds for a rainy day.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/speaking-delicately-the-cut-pa.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/speaking-delicately-the-cut-pa.php Blog Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:33:06 -0500 Need a Hero? Try Vestergaard Frandsen

These Danish folk are smart.

They've done their homework and read the science, read the sociology, read the political theory, read the news.

They've strategized to use their R&D and manufacturing power to maximum advantage --- like by helping fight malaria by creating low-cost, insecticidal nets to put around kids' beds and save lives.

Like by creating ZeroFly . . . plastic sheeting for emergency shelter . . . impregnated with long-lasting insecticide to fight malaria and dengue fever.

And . . . my favorite . . . like creating the LifeStraw a low-cost drinking straw that makes contaminated water drinkable and will last a person around one year. It's so simple, and so moving. I'm tearing up, sorry. Call me a sentimental fool.

They are design in the broadest sense and with the deepest humanity. They are: Vestergaard Frandsen, Disease Control Textiles, and I love what they do.

Beyond the simple brilliance and excitement of the products, they have "a unique Humanitarian Entrepreneurship business model, whose "profit for a purpose" approach has turned humanitarian responsibility into its core business."

Need a hero? Try these folks.

And to send LifeStraws to Haiti click here.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/need-a-hero-try-vestergaard-fr.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/need-a-hero-try-vestergaard-fr.php Blog Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:30:55 -0500 Slideshow of Cut-Paper Inspiration Flickr Group Devoted to Cut Paper images.

Amazing work in a wide variety of styles, from traditional to funk and punk.

Nice to see people making the crossover connection between cut paper and collage, especially echos of the great Hannah Hoch.

Ransom-note graphix are cut paper, too!

And remember my hot tip: Put Flickr groups onto slideshow, crank up the tunes of your choice, and take a 5 minute inspiration break on a bone-crushing day at work! Tell the boss I said so!

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/slideshow-of-cutpaper-inspirat.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/slideshow-of-cutpaper-inspirat.php Blog Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:48:09 -0500 The Cool Kids Re-Invent the Newspaper; McSweeney's SF Panorama
I guess that just comes with the territory when you're the most interesting literary "magazine" in America.

If you haven't stepped back from the phenomenon that is McSweeney's for a while, let's just review it from the top. Founded by novelist David Eggars, based in San Franscisco, and published physically in an entirely different format every issue, McSweeney's has been whre the cool kids hang out for much of the last decade.

Not content with revitalizing the moribund and often deadly dully formatted literary magazine, the McSweeney's crowd has combined their ongoing search for new design formats for their issues with another question that has been looming darkly over the American cultural scene: What about the newspaper crisis?

You see newspapers big and small all across the country floundering and flailing for a formula to make up for the disastrous loss of advertising revenue from classified ads that has put the teeth in society's reconsideration of the traditional daily. From tabloid to broadsheet and back again. Young, hip and free, like Chicago's initial unveiling of the Red Eye with its signature scarlet sphere on the street boxes. Or just plain shrinking like so many medium-to-small market dailies.

And yes, let's pause a moment to reflect that, no, it is not news competition from TV news and internet news that threatens the dailies. I wish it was something so high-minded. No . . . the real attack is from freaking Craigslist.

So what did the McSweeney's gang do? They, in their own words, "collaborated with over 150 freelance writers, designers, and artists from around the city and the world. . . . dozens of working and laid off Bay Area journalists" and Public Press, a nonprofit investigative journalism project to create a (sadly sole) issue of a speculative newspaper, the SF Panorama. Get your own copy here.

With a star studded list of big name writers including Stephen King and Wlliam T. Vollman, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and visual experiments using design schemas drawn from graphic novels and magazine design, SF Panorama is a breath of fresh air in the broadsheet format.

SF Panorama is strongest when design and writing combine to bring the progressive magazine world into newsprint.

I hate to even murmer a criticism, since I so applaud the idea and admire the coordination it took to bring off such a complex collaboration . . . but if I were to offer any advice it would be to suggest that they hook up with even more experimental designers, East Coast and European radicals for lack of a better term, so that the design might truly match the innovative spirit of the writing. Is being a little more homespun and a little more comfy-conventional in design taste a Northern California thing? Oops, did I say that outloud?

In any event, SF Panorama is worth your attention . . . and admiration.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-cool-kids-reinvent-the-new.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-cool-kids-reinvent-the-new.php Blog Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:40:33 -0500 The Genius of the A4 Sheet: Peter Callesen
His growing success, however, has come from his work with perhaps the most ubiquitous and underappreciated art material --- the everyday business paper sheet. The European A4 size (equivalent culturally and socially to North America's 8-1/2x11" sheet) has never behaved so poetically as under the eye, hands and blade of Callesen in his large and small installations. Though he sometimes uses large sheets, I find his most haunting and poetic work to be the framed and installed work made out of A4.

With a postmodern, almost Pop-Surrealist sensibility, Callesen partcipates in the growing culture of micro-sculpture and mini-installation. His work has a narrative power and raw visual design impact cutting and folding the paper into surprising metamorphoses.

One of my favorite Callesen pieces is the subtle, haunting and gorgeous Erected Ruin, which shows both the current dilapidated state of a vanished church and the shadow --- in the negative cut space --- it once cast in its heydey.

Also astonishing and inspiring are the multiple works he created in 2007 for installation for children in Copenhagen. More figure/ground, object/shadow, solid/empty conceptual play here . . . and a laudable resistance to the temptation to oversimplify and water down the conceptual thinking for children.

Callesen's work has toured Europe and I'm hoping an enlightened curator will see fit to bring some to North America. These would be outstanding works to bring breadth, depth and surprise to the right group show or concept show.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-genius-of-the-a4-sheet-pet.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-genius-of-the-a4-sheet-pet.php Blog Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:20:17 -0500 At Last I See! Catherine Mulbrandon is Visualizing Economics
This shape, and its significance, was engraved on my memory and I realize that, consciously or unconsciously, I mentally refer to it and navigate by it as I wrestle to understand social and political issues.

I've been looking for that poster for years. Although I haven't found that same one, I've found a young designer who has taken the same kind of information and made the same kind of powerful graphics --- Catherine Mulbrandon and her website Visualizing Economics.

Mulbrandon has put her twin background in economics and design to great use and the posters and gallery graphics she has available are amazing supports for conversations of all types. "How Much Do You Earn?" and "How Rich is the United States?" are instant classics.

I want these posters in the room any time I talk society and politics . . . hanging right beside the computer screen that connects to Google Earth.

Mulbrandon states her goals thusly: "While the Internet allows even greater access to economic data than ever before, much of it is hidden in databases, spreadsheets and academic papers. At the same time, the discussion of economics in the media can be confusing and contradictory. Often numbers are quoted out of context, while political agendas distort the presentation of economic data. The goal of this site is to help people who are interested in economics (but are not experts) to understand and gain insight in the subject through intuitive and beautiful data visualizations."

Mulbrandon's design lives up to her ideals. Her work is clear, powerful, deep and eminently useful.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/at-last-i-see-catherine-mulbra.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/at-last-i-see-catherine-mulbra.php Blog Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:48:30 -0500 The Edge of the Stacks Nick Georgiu finds a way to look at paper, to work with paper, that re-asserts its materiality.

So often we then of paper and paper communication head-on, perpendicular to the flat surface. We deal with paper as a wall or window --- a wall for text and a window for images.

But part of the pleasure of paper is its heft, its grip, its thickness and gravitas . . . the third dimension . . . the view from the side, the edge.

And it's that view from the edge, the depth of paper, that Georgiu has made his specialty. What he's discovered is a jittery, expressive, painterly, gestural intensity of line from all those edges grouped and stacked and shaped and molded.

He takes stacks of paper (I always get echoes of the stacks at the library, my favorite labyrinth) and lets the edges run wild forming folks and creatures that seem to burst and wriggle and move with the combined power of all their pages.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-edge-of-the-stacks.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2010/01/the-edge-of-the-stacks.php Blog Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:04:49 -0500 That New Biomorphic Look: Parametric Design in Architecture
We are in the Biological age --- the genome and the functioning brain our in the foreground. Technology is . . . well, now part of "nature" . . . in the background.

Here's another clue.

Philosopher/architect Patrik Schumacher is championing what he contends is the Next Big Thing after the crisis of Modernism in architecture: Parametricism. Not surprisingly, he finds good examples of it in the firm with which he works, Zaha Hadid architects.

Parametric design comes from the world of digital animation. An example is when two video game avatars are combined --- morphed --- on the fly to produce a new image. It's essentially a fast way of doing the zillion computations it takes to extrapolate forms along a developmental timeline.

Visually, Parametricism produces quite organic-looking, rounded, structures that adapt to terrain and existing streets in a way that looks like the friendly agglomerations of cells nestling among veins and arteries.

Schumacher sees Parametricism as apt for large-scale city planning, and I'd love to see it in that context. New visual modes generally have to start small, however, and I'd love to see more examples of individual buildings and small campuses using the look.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/that-new-biomorphic-look-param.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/that-new-biomorphic-look-param.php Blog Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:22:10 -0500 Seriously. Dude. Papyrus?
The logo is a tinkered Papyrus, but the in-movie subtitles are also in Papyrus, which was the most jarring to me. Dude. Seriously. Big blue humanoids aren't weird enough? You have to pseudo-weird it further with Papyrus?

While its technology is cutting edge, its story is so old and trite that it goes back . . . almost to the Egyptians.

Cameron's tired Hollywood narrative formula for "exotic coolness" is exactly as tired as . . . well . . . the "exotic coolness" of the font Papyrus.

Would a film made in New York have used the font Papyrus? Paris? Amsterdam? Berlin?

This may be a reminder that, despite the virtual omniverse, the anywhere-workplace, geography still matters . . . and LA tends to be a little podunk in its music tastes and in its graphic design. No offense to the great designers out there fighting the good fight. But part of the reason movies can innovate --- technically --- so wildly is that the mainstream west coast tends to be a little slim on its sense of cultural history.

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/seriously-dude-papyrus.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/seriously-dude-papyrus.php Blog Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:18:47 -0500 Farm Town's Floating Diamond --- Snapshots of the Late, Late 00's
Mafia Wars people, and

Farm Town people.

Hopefully you don't have a clue what I'm talking about but, if you really want to know, Mafia Wars is software company Zynga's hugely successful, cartoonish Facebook-based game (in which players accumulate weapons, hits, etc.) and Farm Town is a game where you plant crops . . . tend them . . . and harvest them . . . all on a fierce and unforgiving deadline that demands your participation every X hours. Both free games share the characteristic of . . . fancy that! . . . coercin . . . I mean encouraging you, to whom Facebook IS your social life, to spend even more time under the shadow of the blue F.

It used to be that the most common thing you'd see on the screens of people who are supposed to be working was . . . solitaire! Now, more and more, it's either the dark world of the mafia or the cheerful floating diamond of people's farms.

There's something about that relentlessly geometric projection of the diamond . . . like the bird's-eye squashed-perspective of Chinese and Japanese court scroll paintings . . . that I find visually compelling. It's such a brutal symbol of three dimensions, realistic only to the most reptilian parts of our brains. Plus it's outrageously old-school in terms of game visuals. But I get it. There's something weirdly attractive about it.

The best Farm Town story I've heard so far is of the inebriated young woman who called her good friend from a scary bar in need of a ride and was told she'd have to wait half an hour until the friend finished harvesting her Farm Town strawberries.

Mafia or Farm, your choice. Do want to kill imaginary lifeforms on purpose, or by negelect? Ahh, the late 00's!

]]> http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/farmtowns-floating-diamond.php http://24-7DesignHeaven.com/24-7dh/2009/12/farmtowns-floating-diamond.php Blog Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:43:24 -0500