Dressed In Value is a design workshop in Louisville, Kentucky. Learn more.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Last week I was in the vast, wild, and sparsely populated lands of Alaska, where the air is crisp and moose roam free. Tonight my wife and I watched Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary film about Edward Burtynsky’s photography of quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams, and their implied impact on the environment and human life. Fascinating, heartbreaking, yet inspiring. See trailer on YouTube.

My wife thought of the clever title.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

I was just sifting through some of my old design work and found this illustration I made right after I finished school four years ago. Oddly, and perhaps ironically, the design program that I was enrolled in didn’t offer any classes on typography. Thankfully, however, one of my teachers gave me A Type Primer which lit a typographic fire under my rear. I started doing studies like this one, trying to understand type through giving it weight and physicality in two-dimensional space.

Friday, May 09, 2008

I’m over 20 years late to comment on this, but I found it to be quite fascinating: Erik Spiekermann’s Post Mortem (PDF) article from Baseline Magazine (issue #7, 1985). There was a commission to develop a new corporate design program for the West German Post Office (Deutsche Bundespost). Spiekermann writes about design choices behind the new typeface, which, in the end, everyone loved — except for the Deutsche Bundespost administration for fear of ‘causing unrest’. So, they defaulted to stay with Helvetica. Boring!

Friday, May 09, 2008

Certainly applicable to more than just type design — Fred Smeijers prefacing his book Counterpunch:

It seems that anything is possible now. We experience a world in which time, distance and production circumstances hardly seem important any more. But for this very reason, we need to look back and talk with our predecessors. The way to do this is by doing what they have done. Only then is there a chance of thinking the way they thought. And then there is some basis for comparison. When you stand on common ground with your predecessors, you can define your own position, estimate progress or see what has been forgotten in the meantime. Talking like this with colleagues from the past has nothing to do with sentimentality or nostalgia or a useless search for craftmanship. It has however everything to do with bringing back knowledge that can serve as a mirror for ourselves and our technical achievements. An honest assessment of this kind is thus an essential step in the search for relevant improvement: now, and for the future.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Milton Glaser in 2004, from Short History and the Longer View:

Being a legend is an accomplishment that is hard won and sadly ephemeral, but being part of human kind’s desire to make useful and beautiful things links us to a glorious history.

What the Designer Ought to Be

Let the designer be bold in all sure things, and fearful in dangerous things; let him avoid all faulty treatments and practices. He ought to be gracious to the client, considerate to his associates, cautious in his prognostications. Let him be modest, dignified, gentle, pitiful, and merciful; not covetous nor an extortionist of money; but rather let his reward be according to his work, to the means of the client, to the quality of the issue, and to his own dignity.

Adapted from a 14th century document entitled What A Surgeon Ought to Be.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Richard Anwyl writes about Lou Dorfsman’s 35-feet wide and 8-feet tall typographic wall “Gastrotypographicalassemblage” designed and built in the 1960s, and how it was irreverently removed by new management 30 years later. This kind of reflects what I had pondered about in A Digital Future.