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Typographic Movie Posters

Designer Able Parris impressed us with some recent sketches for documentary film posters.

These remind me of this brilliant poster for Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Sketch for a movie poster: 'Riding the Rails'
Sketch for a movie poster: 'The Thin Blue Line'
Sketch for a movie poster: 'A Brief History of Time'
Sketch for a movie poster: 'Horizon'
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PaulJul 1, 2009
 

Four Noteworthy Links: June 29, 2009

It's the Fourth of July this weekend and our bookmarks are bursting with links to share, so this week we offer a double-dose of four links. Today we have four images/ artifacts. Look for your regularly scheduled trends on Thursday.

1. Design for Disability

The Boezels: Toys for the mentally challenged
Twan Verdonck's toys for the mentally-challenged are now part of MoMA's permanent collection.

On the ethical design front: Brain Pickings has posted a collection of smart designs for the differently-abled. Bravo!

2. Betcha can't stop with just one click

Pringles Can Hands
How long will you click on it?

Check out this award-winning Pringles ad. Probably the wittiest banner ad we've ever seen ((maybe the only one)).

3. Chinese Painting Villages

A painting speed competition in Dafen.
This is surreal.

“Chinese Painting Villages”, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, ...employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings.

Via.

4. Design History Lesson: Keyboard Layouts

Lenovo keyboard layout with enlarged Escape and Delete keys
Why are keyboards so poorly designed and yet so difficult to fix?

USAToday writes about the updated Escape and Delete keys on Lenovo laptops. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is actually quite a bit of baggage when it comes to keyboard layouts. An interesting lesson on how bad design prevails and why innovation can be so challenging.

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NickJun 30, 2009
 

Design via Rubik’s Cube

Even if you can't solve a Rubik's cube, these designers prove you can at least make something with one.

Rubik's Cube Font Generator

Rubik's cube font generator

Jas Bhachu created a font generator by affixing different shaped rubber stamps to each cell of a Rubik's cube. It's probably a bit slow to write with, but the resulting letterforms are unique.

Rubik's cube font generator packaging
Also, check out this awesome packaging. Bravo!

Via.

Rubikcubism

Space Invader -- Rubik Kubrick
Rubik Kubrick (what a great title!) by Space Invader

French artist Space Invader has a series of art that uses Rubick's cubes as pixels.

In Rubikcubism, he recreates (in)famous images: everything from A Clockwork Orange (seen above) to 9/11 and the painting Origin of the World.

Via.

Bonus:

10 more Rubik's cube-inspired designs.

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NickJun 23, 2009
 

Four Design Trends: June 4, 2009

At DLB, we often have so much research to share that it doesn't always get posted. To remedy this, as an experiment, I'm going to try presenting some design trends in the style of Nat Torkington's "four short links" over on O'Reilly Radar.

1. Business needs to get social

In a Forbes.com article from last month, Joshua-Michele Ross neatly summarizes why social technologies are reshaping business and why this change in communication demands ethical behavior from companies:

[T]he organizing metaphor for the social Web is relationship, and the building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity...Businesses that ignore the call to be "social"--that is, to abide by a social contract with their constituents (customers, partners, resellers, employees)--run the risk of appearing pathological.

2. To survive a recession, spend more on design

When times are tough, companies often try to save money by cutting back on creating new products or marketing spending. However, according to a recent New Yorker article, companies that do this risk losing out to their competitors when the economy recovers.

a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.

3. More ethical MBA's?

The New York Times reports that ethics pledges and courses in business ethics are becoming more popular among today's MBA's:

In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.

4. Design versus Data

The web offers the opportunity to collect instant feedback from users, meaning any site design or ad copy can be endlessly tested and tweaked to perfection. This is causing a great deal of tension between traditional designers, who create through experience and knowledge, and analytic-driven design teams who base decisions upon data.

While the two sides can work together, for the time being, data seems to be driving designers out. Google's lead visual designer quit last month, citing a culture of data that was "unfriendly to designers". The New York Times wrote last week that marketers anticipate similar battles between "creative types and wonks" as they rely upon more and more data to craft the perfect pitch.

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NickJun 4, 2009
 

Kill ‘em with sensible business advice

A recent interview with Nathan Shedroff reminds us of just how important it is for designers to sell ethics on their clients' own terms.

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.

Design is the Problem by Nathan Shedroff
Probably worth a read.
(Photo credit: Core 77)
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PaulJun 1, 2009
 

Single Serving Zen

Japan is well-known for producing small, elegant things —everything from Bansai trees to Gameboys— but I had no idea they packaged food in such small amounts. Tokyo Damage Report has a gallery with some examples.

Consider the design of a package for a single piece of food. Is this practice wasteful or does this reduce waste?

Your moment of Zen for the day:

Small Japanese food packages
Clockwise from top-left: One banana, one plum, an ear of corn, a single egg.
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NickMay 29, 2009
 
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Design in a Depression

What effect will a severe economic downturn have on design practice? Opinions abound, but the one thing that seems certain is that the future of design is more uncertain than ever.

Way back in November of last year, we noted that economic signs all pointed to a foreseeable future in which designers were going to have to start thinking about ways to do more with less. We noted that "[s]chematically, a more challenging climate for business tends to mean a more challenging climate for design." We also wondered if this was necessarily the case.

If the economic downturn was looming then, it's nearly in full bloom now, and a lot of fine pieces have since been written about its effect on design to come. I thought it might be nice today to do a brief review of the literature which has helped my clarify my answer to our earlier pondering (in the affirmative).

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PaulMay 20, 2009
 

Brand Illustrated

In this clever illustration, Neutron LLC reveals the relationship between various marketing disciplines and their audience.

Neutron LLC -- Brand Illustrated
Link.
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NickMay 19, 2009
 
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