1. Saul Bass: On Making Money vs Quality Work

"It costs every designer money to make things beautiful."

2. Productivity in 11 Words

Photo by Jayel Aheram

"One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now."

Probably the best thing I read last week.

Via.

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I've found the idea that consumers will start spending less or change their spending patterns pretty encouraging. However, last week, Grant McCracken had a piece on the HBS Blog arguing that there is no new normal: consumerism is driven by deep-rooted cultural motives, not just greed, vanity, or desire for status. I think his article is worth a read. He also makes reference to a book on "Shoptimism" which seems to dive deeper into many facets of consumerism and retail consumption, and supports the prediction that spending will start again once confidence and credit come back.  Sigh.

It's always a thrill to read something that's nicely written by someone with whom you have some core value overlap. Thoughtful industrial designer Robert Blinn over at Core77 recently offered us the opportunity to do just that. Here's a sample:

If our response to our environmental debts is anything like our response to the current recession, we can be reasonably sure not only that the market will seek to correct it, but also that the response will come late, painfully, and with warnings that are only obvious in retrospect. Instead of waiting, perhaps we should fix our definitions of the economy, our definitions of growth, and most importantly our definitions of happiness today. Wouldn't you rather be making beautiful things of lasting value anyway?

Indeed. Blinn's article is full of similar sentiments, many of which I recognized from the DLB playbook. (He actually says at one point: "Make less. Make it better.")

I probably wouldn't have posted about this article in particular though, except for the fact that DLB is currently in the process of hiring someone to help us develop our business. We're doing some interviews this week, and this lovely sentiment caught my eye: "Don't let people who aren't involved in building your company get involved in selling it."

I think that ought to be an iron law for every little design firm.

The Zimbabwean is a newspaper produced by a group of exiled Zimbabwean journalists. It is sold in the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe but in the latter it attracts an import tax that renders the average Zimbabwean unable to afford a copy.

The newspaper and South African creative agency TBWA Hunt Lascaris have created a series of ads -- wall murals, billboards and flyers -- in Johannesburg using the Z$100 trillion dollar note. This incredible denomination is a poignant symbol of the country's world record inflation.

The campaign hopes to encourage more sales of the paper in South Africa, thereby subsidizing the cost of the paper to Zimbabweans, while simultaneously raising awareness of the dire situation in the country under the Mugabe regime.

The "Trillion Dollar Campaign" Billboard for The Zimbabwean newspaper. Check out more photos at the newspaper's Flickr photostream.

Via the Creative Review and Veer: Ideas.

WANT is the effort of four students from the University of Washington's Visual Communication Design program, whose goal was to help college students develop smarter spending habits.

It is billed as an "interactive retail experience" - a "store" in which goods are substituted with advice on how college students can save money. The "merchandise" inside the imaginary store is constructed from laser-cut cardboard, and includes everything from coffee to electronics to apparel, each printed with a different tip on how to save money on that item. As in a regular store, visitors are invited to flip through clothing racks and browse the shelves at their leisure.

Via.

I've extolled the virtues of getting fired here at BlogLESS before. I think everyone should get fired from a gig for standing up for their principles at least once, and this weekend – while you're upacking your winter sweaters – I wanted to give you something to think about with regards to the seemingly less accessible half of this equation. After all, it's easy to get fired: it's harder, though, to quit.

So get out your pencil and paper, this is going to require a little math. And listen: Don't think you can do this in your head and internalize it. You can't. You've got to see the numbers. Otherwise, its all going to seem like sound and fury, which I promise it's not. The payoff is huge. The day I really internalized this was the day my life got a lot happier. A lot.

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One of the questions that has been on my mind recently is, "what exactly happened on Wall Street last week, and why?" Thankfully, we have the New York Times' Freakonomics column, which offered a beautifully clear summary in a guest post by economists Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap on Thursday. I paraphrase what they say below.

1. The US Treasury nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 8, and has since replaced the management of both companies and will presumably oversee their operation.
2. On Monday, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history was made by Lehman Brothers.
3. On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve made a bridge loan to A.I.G., the largest insurance company in the world, securing the option to purchase up to 80 percent of the shares the company.

In short, the Fed has intervened on an unprecedented scale, in an unprecedented form, and in firms unprecedentedly far removed from its own supervisory authority. Wow! That's about the craziest thing that's happened in the financial universe since the Great Depression.

But why?

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If you're keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you've probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.

If not, then you have now.

The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

I've always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?

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