Category — Design

Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram, finally jumps on to the Obama branding bandwagon.

“Obama is marketing like Apple, Nike or Starbucks. He’s selling an experience. It’s all done with such skill and finesse that as a professional, I am in absolute awe,” says Bierut.

• Obama Wins | New at Pentagram | Pentagram

Armin Vit, a former Pentagram partner, and a bit more adept at the blogging when the subject matter is still timely and people still give a shit about what you have to say, covered this topic in response to a New York Times editorial on the subject.

For each segment of people, the logo changes accordingly, tip-toeing a fine line between cliché and clever, and never crossing to the former’s dark side. The iterations are quickly identifiable and feel genuinely concerned with connecting to the people they are talking to, without pandering. The executions are rather flawless and work perfectly on screen with the detailed gradients and subtle background illustrations. Even the typography is lovingly handled…

• Speak Up › The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo

Check out this blog posting, and its subsequent comment thread. Initially I was intrigued, and then as I continued to read through the commenting, and people got vicious about who should get blamed for what, I got disgusted. So I commented. It was a good comment. Hopefully it hasn’t been deleted by the editorial staff.

Design Observer: writings about design & culture: Good Font, Shame About The Reporting: “h”

My comment:

While a typophile myself, I am also a fan of entertainment. Mr. Nee is spot on with his comments. Even though this is a film made by a team of people who purportedly represent the best in their field, a 20+ comment rant on the eccentricities of Helvetica over Akzidenz or if the Art Director or the NYT Reporter should have their head guillotined is a rather pathetic example of how human nature is dissarmingly apathetic.

Consider this entirely hypothetical situation: a low-socioeconomic-status, low-income resident of New York has come into the Public Library to search the book catalog, or find the status of a claim made. Because this person is of low-income (perhaps due to an imbalance in the wealth distribution) they are using public computers to do their research. Someone on the computer before them has left this site open, with this particular comment thread. Imagine this individual’s disgust or dismay. What this individual must be thinking should be of concern to how our profession is projected: “who are these rich snobs to think that a single detail in a film should cause an Art Director’s defamation” or perhaps “go*da*n these upper-class yuppies arguing about nothin, while my brothers and sisters are struggling to make ends meet”.

Let me conclude by paraphrasing Milton Glaser - a good designer is a good citizen. Before we worry about any sort of anacrhonism, we should consider how our professional actions affect the world around us.

Thanks for listening.

After a full day of agonizing over getting the design “right”, while keeping it functional, I debuted the Q site today along with the weekly e-newsletter. We’ll see how things go in that direction. I actually have kinda become hooked on the whole web design thing, just because there are numerous possibilities of what one can do.

I was explaining to Stephanie Newman, graphic design professor at MSU, that I have a true love for type, communication, and calligraphy. While this truly isn’t calligraphy, it stems from a calligraphic language. Wow! If only I could read it.

test

You don’t want walk across him on a Monday afternoon in the cafeteria. He knows how to use that!.

So, being the genius that I am, and of course trying to play the uber-cool gay boy that I am as well, I totally fucked up. As usual.

So, there I was in Haynes (the art bldg on campus), with some friends working on our 3D organic objects. Don’t ask me why, but art schools have some sort of obsession with organic objects, because this is the second project that we’ve done (this time in a different medium) relating to an organic object. Anyhow, this project has to be completed using cardboard. I’ve discovered all sorts of new ways to manipulate cardboard for this project, not necessarily implementing that new knowledge well. While I’m creating the armature/skeleton for my banana meat, I hot-glue a cardboard disk… Oh wait, now I remember what it was. I was in the process of papier-macheing (sp?) some cardboard paper to my banana skeleton, and I wanted a stand for my banana so that it could dry while I worked on it. I had a left-over cut out from when I was making disks with holes in it, so I decided to kind-of make a stand out of that. Well, I get this big globby bit of glue that dripped from the cardboard onto my finger. Even on the “low heat” setting, hot glue is still amazingly HOT. So, instinctively, I put my finger in my mouth to cool it down, forgetting that there’s this big glob of still-hot glue on it. So, what started as a plan to reduce the pain, increased it tremendously by adhering my finger to my lower lip. As fast as possible, I pulled my finger and rapidly-cooling glue off my lip, taking some of that delicate lip skin with it. So now I have two blisters on my right hand, and a nice little dark red spot on my lower lip. This leaves my upper lip, feet, and left hand unscathed by the horrors of hot glue.

And I’m not sure if my plan to impress the extremely cute, potentially gay boy in the room worked. Actually, I don’t think it did. But he talked to *me* a lot, and smiled when we spoke. I don’t know, I always read too much into shit.

Bearskinrug, the Homepage

I’m discovering that I really like this “BlogThis!” button on my bookmarks bar. Makes it easy to post while you still remember what’s on your mind.

This website is way awesome. The guy has an amazing sense of humor, and great artistic talent. However, I can’t place where I’ve seen his stuff, because I know I’ve seen it somewhere. Maybe it was a book or magazine somewhere.

To really show how his humor carries throughout the website, check out the source to his CSS stylesheet.