Jessica Hische has created Day-Ruining Invoice Notepads. The covers are letterpressed and the interiors are 2 color offset. They're bound with glue black binding tape. As Swiss Miss notes, a set of them will "certainly make any designer snortlaugh if you give it to them."
You can buy them here.
"It costs every designer money to make things beautiful."
"One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now."
Probably the best thing I read last week.
Via.
Pentagram's Michael Bierut offers seven ways designers can work smarter, not harder.
#4. Do as you’re told.
Simply following the client's instructions will yield wonders. For Bierut – who likes limitations – creating the gargantuan sign for Renzo Piano’s New York Times building was fairly straightforward. The Times Square Alliance mandates that all buildings in the neighbourhood feature bright, large signage, to "keep Times Square looking like Times Square,” says Bierut. (He adds that, for Piano, hearing the words large-sign-stuck-on-your-building must have been, "like, the biggest 6-word, ‘F--- you, architect’.”) And so, the almost 6 meter-tall logo was chopped into 893 pieces and applied to Piano’s ceramic rod façade.
In a story related to Paul's piece last week, Golan Levin writes:
some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists.
Matt Daniels chronicles how not to pitch a client your expertise.
Lost Garden has an extensive article about revenue streams for independent game publishers. Even if you're not into selling Flash games, there are some good thoughts to consider.
Ads are a good secondary source of revenue, but surely there are richer sources …? There is an obvious one, used for decades by all other game industries...why not ask the players for money?
Those used to reading blogs don't often see design criticism of this magnitude: Nicholson Baker of the New Yorker has 6,300 words on the Amazon Kindle.
I forced myself to read the book on the Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would.
A recent New York Times article showcases the so-called "social design" (alt. "service design") phenomenon. Social design, apparently, is a sort of hybrid practice that applies the creative approaches traditionally associated with professional designers alongside the research approaches of ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists to create novel solutions to social problems.
This is certainly an interesting territory for designers (reminiscent, philosophy heads will recognize, of the great Critical Theory movement as defined in the Frankfurt school in the 1930s and 40s) and I would argue it is also one whose every potential engagement will be an incredibly high-stakes ethical proposition.
Consider the Times' example: The ReD Associates social design firm (comprised of designers alongside ethnographers, etc.) was asked by the city of Copenhagen to propose solutions to improve the rate of employee sick leave in the city's offices. Apparently, sick leave was costing the government something on the order of $140 million per year.
The firm found that a third of all of employee sick leave was motivated psychologically -- mostly low morale -- rather than by poor employee health (e.g. caused by physical stressors in the work environment). That is a tragic, Kafkaesque fact, and there's no doubt that design brains could be put to good use in addressing it. The tragic nature of the problem is also what makes the ethical stakes so high in developing a design solution. The Times writes:
ReD suggested various measures...intended to coax absentees back to work. After four weeks' absence, each employee has a formal discussion with a manager, who will be encouraged to consider whether he or she would benefit from changes in the working environment, or from edging back to work by returning part time.
Which I read, sadly, in the following way: Rather than address endemic problems of office culture, the designers put procedures in place to provide therapy or threats to downtrodden office workers. Of course this worked: the Times reports that "the sick-leave numbers are already heading in the right direction -- downwards." But is it a good design solution?
Core 77 semi-recently posted an interesting, longish interview with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and the author of several books on design. His most recent book is Design is the Problem, which is about "how the design industry can approach the world in a more sustainable way."
The interview itself is broad -- Shedroff expands on ten or so related concepts, each one germane in some way to his overall view of "sustainability." Whether or not you'll find his take on every topic persuasive in every detail, they are as a whole uniformly interesting and well-measured. No small task, considering the breadth of opinions he delivers: he discusses everything from the maligned value of business to the proliferation of NGOs to rampant occidental capitalism.
His points are also admirably rooted in practical reality. One of my favorite moments from the interview comes in response to the question, "What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can designers do to encourage this to happen?" The quote below is his answer to the latter half of this question, abridged in several places where the lack of context rendered it unintelligible.
Designers need to start making changes ourselves, with or without a mandate, in the things we make. We can choose to not talk about materials substitutions or other improvements in impacts if our managers don't want to hear about them and, instead, we can highlight the improvements they do want to hear about -- like improvements in efficiency. We can learn to speak "their" language authoritatively and speak to risk mitigation and gains in owner's equity.
We need to talk about this to our peers, managers, and clients with an encouraging, quiet, and strong imperative that isn't sensationalized. If they turn-off at the mention of climate change, switch to cute, fluffy polar bears drowning. If they don't respond to that, explain that the market for their goods tanks when customers are out of work, afraid of the food they eat, or their homes are flooded.
Sometimes in the history of this blog, design ethics has bled into business ethics. It's easy for this to happen, because design and business are so closely tied. Almost all design is undertaken for commercial purposes, and this means that business requirements are inherent in almost any design project. Because of the unfortunate character of business, though, these requirements are often unethical. Therefore, it has seemed natural for us in the past to suggest that ethical design meant either taking on only clients with highly ethical businesses (call this the Tibor Kalman approach) or else advocating for more ethical business practices with the clients we do have.
The big problem is that neither of these approaches is feasible for most working designers. The first case is untenable because (as of now) there just aren't enough ethical businesses to go around, and so most designers wouldn't have the option to practice ethically. This would mean that for most of us, the choice would be between an unethical practice or no practice at all.
In the second case, designers overstep their roles in their engagements. Our clients aren't paying us to audit their business practices, and overwhelmingly often, they're not interested in getting that service from us pro bono, either.
In an America whose economy is ravaged by the twin budgetary disasters of the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailout, money's scarcer than it used to be. Coupled with the success of the Democrats in Washington this week, and thus the looming possibility of near-term financial regulatory tightening, the conventional wisdom says that clients are going to tighten their grip on their money, and thus, designers are going to have to tighten their belts.
Schematically, a more challenging climate for business tends to mean a more challenging climate for design. But does this have to be the case?
This question is one that DLB ponders all the time. We think that a big part of the problem is the function that both clients and designers alike understand design to serve. Specifically, back in the old America, money was cheap. This meant design could be used in the service of long shots for maximizing profits: just-maybe type social networking strategies, fancy textures on every element of the webpage, the list goes on. Basically, design didn't have to be accountable for its ends, because companies could afford to bet on both red and black.
