Blogless

At DLB, we are especially thankful to be part of the design profession. We believe that design has the power to make a profound impact on the lives of millions, and we’re thankful to all of those designers by whose vigilance and creativity we are daily helped to envision a better world.

The Holy Bible by Nike (Via)

Thank you.

Hand turkey by Jimmy French

Gooble, Gobble!

I love Andy Gilmore. Something about him reminds me of Stanley Kubrick.

While we may have a taste for fine design and art, we certainly don’t have the budget to own much of it ourselves. Ask me what design I’m truly thankful for, and it would have to be the little things I enjoy using every day.

Here is my list of some affordable, unsung heroes that don’t often make the magazines and blogs, but are superstars to me nonetheless:

Pilot G-2 .07 Pens

They wouldn’t win any beauty contests and you can pick up six for five dollars, but these guys are my workhorses day in and day out. I don’t like to be caught without one. What sells me is the gel ink which glides across pages smoothly and at just the right width. Besides a solid clicking mechanism, their rubberized grips aren’t too shabby for a budget writing instrument. Moreover, you can actually buy replacement cartridges for them, provided someone doesn’t run off with your pen (or you lose it) before you run out of ink.

Jimi Wallet

Billed as the “Wallet for People Who Hate Wallets”, the Jimi has been my trusted companion for the past two years. It’s a thin plastic shell that holds your credit cards and ID’s on one side and your cash on the other.

The Jimi is small enough to fit in your front pocket (where I like my wallet) or even hang off a lanyard. So small, in fact, that you can’t carry a lot of junk in it, so you have to get down to essentials to make it work. It’s not bad looking, either. Seems almost every day, someone at the checkout counter asks me about it.

5” x 8” Legal Pads

I’m still a big fan of regular sized legal pads, but lately, I’ve really taken to these little half pads. They’re small enough to be manageable, yet big enough to write on comfortably. I use them for my daily to-do lists, so there’s always a few laying around my desk.

SanDisk Cruzer Micro

There’s an ocean of keydrives out there with any number of styles and gimmicks, but this one serves me well with its no-nonsense design (and low price point). It’s black and about as minimal as you can get—in a smart way. It has a retractable plug, so there is no cap to lose, and the slider doubles as the access light. To top it off, the lanyard it comes with has a detachable clip, so it’s better than most. I use mine everyday to do simple backups and ferry files to school and back. I don’t often think about it (unless I forget it!), but it’s a pretty important item in my routine.

Philips DiVX DVD Player

By and large, DVD players are pretty cheap these days; so cheap they’re practically disposable. But I love my old Philips DVP-642 player so much that when it died this summer I went through the trouble to fix it myself, replacing a burst capacitor. Why? Besides being a decent DVD player, this particular model can play practically any standard media format you throw at it. So, instead of converting videos from my computer to DVD or VCD MPEG’s, I can just watch them. ((Which means, occasionally, I can actually spend some time away from my computer)) This is an uncommon feature. Hence, it has something of a cult following. I know of a few people who have two DVD players—a high-end one for their standard discs and the Philips to play their files.

University of Michigan 7-Fast Inter Library Loan

It’s more of a service than a design object, but U of M’s ILL site is my academic savior. The hardworking library folk at ILL locate obscure texts for me and send me crisp PDF’s in timely, reliable fashion. This saves me an incredible amount of time and allows me to read even more, which has made my research even better. It’s all through a web interface, so I don’t get to speak to anyone at the service, but I want them to know, whoever and wherever they are, that I appreciate it very much.

A week of stuff we like

The Internet is a teeming mass of great stuff, and this week on BlogLESS we’re going to share some of our favorites with you. This is our way of showing our thanks to the designers and artists who freely share their time and talent with us all. We’ll get back to griping and talking about design ethics before November’s out, but on this Thanksgiving week, let’s rest our weary heads, count our blessings, and take time to enjoy the Internet’s rich pageant.

— Paul and Nick (DLB)

Brandon Bird

I thought I’d start off this week with an artist whose paintings always give me a chuckle, California based Brandon Bird.

BAM THWOP by Brandon Bird

Pax Cybertonia by Brandon Bird

I am the night by Brandon Bird

We’ve been slamming BlogLESS this month, trying to start stake out some positions on design ethics. About three weeks ago, though, Nick first asked a question that’s crystallized the tone for our first investigation: Namely, "Why bother?" Why be ethical at all when we all know that greed is good?

Since then, our collective agenda has been to show that we don’t know that at all. I think, inadvertently, we may have finished doing this last week. Here’s what we’ve come up with, in all its syllogistic glory:

It’s necessary for effective advertising to be coherent with reality. When it’s not, people notice, and it’s going to hurt you. Which leaves you with two options. First, you can act unethically and then lie about it or just omit it from your advertising, but there’s reason to think that won’t hold up. Otherwise, you can be good, and then put that right on the table. There are ways to do it, and it’s probably less work.

If you are good, and you can coherently advertise the fact that you are good. If you’re generous, conscientious, and civically minded, you won’t have to resort to tricks or other ineffective strategies for profit maximizing. Your products and services will advertise themselves.

Therefore, be good. That’s it. Simple as that.

Check out their blog for more vintage screen-print inspirado

Consumerist is for sale.

For those of you who don’t follow, Consumerist is a consumer-advocate blog run by Gawker Media. Hard times have hit everyone, it seems, and Gawker can’t afford to maintain all of their sites. So they’ve put the worst performers up for sale.

Consumerist is in a tough spot because it doesn’t bring in any direct revenue. How’s that? Well, as a blog that points out the bad behavior of big companies, Consumerist is ethically bound not to accept any advertising—as if any company would dare to purchase some. Instead, Gawker counts on the blog to bring traffic to other sites within its network. So, I suppose if something’s got to give, a site with no effective income is the place to start.

“How does Consumer Reports do it?” you might ask. Their situation is similar in that they cannot accept any ads or even demonstration products as it might potentially bias their work. To make money, they have to charge subscriptions—even on their website. It works well enough to keep them in business, but it keeps a resource for good out of reach for many people.

Why blog about this? Because it goes back to the key question Design Less Better is wrestling with at the moment: How does one make money being ethical?

We don’t know yet, but we will venture to say that if advertising and subscriptions are your only ideas for making money online, you are screwed. Not just if you’re ethical, but in general. Nobody likes ads, that’s why they block them. Subscriptions don’t work out, either. These revenue sources do not take well to the web. The medium —and the customers— tend to flow around them. The sooner we figure out alternative business models that don’t annoy customers, the better for everyone.

That’s a tall order, especially if we’re striving for the highest ethics. I’m not saying we have the answer, but we’re cooking something up that may work for ourselves. We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I hope someone smart buys Consumerist and figures out a way to keep it going. They’ve helped a lot of people and have been a great resource as we build the Taxonomy of Unethical Designs. It would be a shame to see it disappear.