Archive for June, 2009
As I grow increasingly fascinated by design on larger scale websites, things like the recently launched public profile page for Facebook’s Design Team are internet gold to me. Rob Goodlatte has some background on the why and what, and Ben Barry illustrated that lovely seal.
[Good designers should] question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes…[They must] be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.
— Dieter Rams, 1980 speech to the Braun supervisory board
…And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?…Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come from it?”
I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, “Thank God that son of a bitch is dead.”
There was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the name of virtue, and I have wondered whether he knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.
There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize those fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?”
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Somewhere around 9:00pm today, I turned 30.
I’m strange; I adore getting older. I love that I am better at life now than I was a year ago. I hope I am more wise and less rash. But most of all I want for those changes (and others) to be felt in the lives of those closest to me. I want to be a man, “whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good.”
Onward and upward (albeit with a little more gray hair and a slightly slower gait).
1. Taking the long way
2. Sleeping in
3. Super sizing it
4. Not moving
5. Taking off my shirt
Tons of fantastic custom typography and graphic design at Complex Fruit, the portfolio of Paul Torres. He’s currently looking for fulltime employment, Bay Area folks.
Quote, “If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.” I don’t think Robert Ebert cared too much for Transformers 2.
Gawker has an interesting write-up on CP+B’s ad campaigns for Burger King over the past few years and how, despite all their weird cleverness, McDonald’s market share is still rising while BK’s falls. I stand by earlier rants: if your agency of record is making you less profit than you had before hiring them, fire them.
Ze Frank is doing The Show-style video for Time discussing current events. Unfortunately, I can’t just RSS Ze’s videos; I only see an option for all of Time‘s videos.
We bought a cow. Or more specifically, four families split a cow. So technically we bought 1/4 of a cow. In this video, however, you see the full beefy.
Here’s video of Jason Santa Maria talking about designing for print and web and the conceptual/dimensional differences. The lecture is from the The Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series for the MFA in Interaction Design program. I’m a big fan of Jason’s work and his blog, but it’s always enjoyable to find out designers are exceptionally articulate at speaking, too.
LetterCult’s Best Custom Lettering of the First Half of 2009 is from planet Hey Blankenship Your Typography Skills Are Still Severely Lacking Don’t Quit Your Day Job Quite Yet. (It’s an admittedly obscure planet.) Amazing work!
Dotcomrade Kory Westerhold has an updated portfolio full of fantastic graphic design, art direction and photography for clients like Complex Magazine, Adidas, and The North Face. He’s also responsible for the seemingly everywhere To Write Love on Her Arms branding. You should hire him to do something for you. He’s aces.
Quote, “It’s the sizes of items [on a webpage] relative to each other that really counts—that’s what gives us proportion and visual hierarchy.” Drew McLellan takes web designers to task for using pixel sizes for text with The Fallacy of Page Zooming. Proportion and visual hierarchy aren’t paid nearly enough attention. It’s the details. (via @beep)
Just so you don’t start thinking I’m all thinking and no designing these days, here’s a little illustration I did this morning for a project. A big part of the ensuing redesign of this site will be a better, more frequently updated portfolio.
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous atmospheric landscape photography from Tim Simmons. I particularly enjoy the Hawaii, Norfolk Woods and Snow sets.
You are not playing Contra. You don’t get 30 extra men.
That fact established, do you really want to die on that hill today? Is the outworking of whatever it is a dealbreaker? A vortex of inexorable woe? The end of all you hold dear? If not, let it go.
Fight for something that matters. Don’t die on stupid hills.
[In organizations denying risk] there is a marked decline in the quality and amount of dialogue and debate…a shift toward either concensus or dictatorial management rather than a process of arguement and disagreement followed by unified commitment to execute decisions.
— Jim Collins, How The Mighty Fall
Chattanooga’s downtown public spaces by the waterfront were one of my favorite places to relax when I lived there, especially the ziggurat-like series of steps between the water and the main road.
Coke is apparently talking up a new strategy for interacting with ad agencies based on the marketplace performance of each campaign. If said campaign meets consumer response criteria, the agency pockets costs plus profit. If it doesn’t, Coke covers costs but the agency gets no bonus. It’s so logical it’s practically revolutionary.
I’m glad someone is starting to take ad agencies to task and demand measurable results. As Mark Stevens notes in Your Marketing Sucks, “If every dollar you spend in marketing doesn’t bring back a dollar in revenue, your marketing sucks.”
From my perspective, too many agencies build creative for clients that eventually wins the AGENCY new business (or awards), but doesn’t effectively impact the CLIENT’s bottomline. And often this happens in the name of “brand recognition” or “you’re the talk of the town.”
But talk doesn’t cook rice.
Quote, “No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.” Great advice from Catherine Powell, aimed at programmers but good for anyone who works with people, on the lost art of being nice.
