Playbook for Business Designers
Marketwatch reporting today:
Otellini reaffirmed the company’s plan to introduce a 32 nanometer production technology in the second half of the year, saying, “We’ve always believed that the best way to successfully emerge from recessions is with tomorrow’s products, not by standing still with today’s.”
Intel, please help us by describing what attributes make for desirable products that people truly love to use? I call this going beyond the nanometer yard stick.
The 15 Things Charles and Ray Eames Teach Us is an excerpt from an essay by Keith Yamashita:
1. Keep good company
2. Notice the ordinary
3. Preserve the ephemeral
4. Design not for the elite but for the masses
5. Explain it to a child
6. Get lost in the content
7. Get to the heart of the matter
8. Never tolerate “O.K. anything.”
9. Remember your responsibility as a storyteller
10. Zoom out
11. Switch
12. Prototype it
13. Pun
14. Make design your life… and life, your design.
15. Leave something behind.
Looking at these adaptable interfaces and thinking about ways to prototype this thinking into a demo (Irene-Au interview).
I’m what you might call a brand advocate for outdoor adventure living, it therefore comes as no surprise to find a particular attraction to www.howies.co.uk. Here’s a link to the winter catalog 8mb
AGENCY.COM produced and directed a mini intro video (1999) to help user understand how to use the interactive digital services provided by Chorus in Ireland.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.
From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps the leading choreographer of her generation, Tharp offers a thesis on creativity that is more complex than its self-help title suggests. To be sure, an array of prescriptions and exercises should do much to help those who feel some pent-up inventiveness to find a system for turning idea into product, whether that be a story, a painting or a song. This free-wheeling interest across various creative forms is one of the main points that sets this book apart and leads to its success. The approach may have been born of the need to reach an audience greater than choreographer hopefuls, and the diversity of examples (from Maurice Sendak to Beethoven on one page) frees the student to develop his or her own patterns and habits, rather than imposing some regimen that works for Tharp. The greatest number of illustrations, however, come from her experiences. As a result, this deeply personal book, while not a memoir, reveals much about her own struggles, goals and achievements. Finally, the book is also a rumination on the nature of creativity itself, exploring themes of process versus product, the influences of inspiration and rigorous study, and much more. It deserves a wide audience among general readers and should not be relegated to the self-help section of bookstores.
Twyla Tharp’s new book, The Creative Habit, is
1. Practical and straightforward, two attributes to be expected from a dancer. Dancers wrestle daily with the obstinacies of the flesh. It’s not about smoke and mirrors. It’s about hard work and commitment, the “habit” of showing up to do the work and developing one’s creativity in the process.
2. Literary and literate. Tharp quotes the Bible, Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and many other greats of the Western Canon to illustrate her points and show that the struggle to be creative is nothing new and that great artists have fought the same battles as anyone who strives to create.
3. Accessible. There’s no mystery or theory of genius here other than the habit of work. Tharp constantly makes the point that we have to establish habits for our creative pursuits or the work will not get done and the creativity will have no place to manifest.
4. Myth Busting. Mozart didn’t get his musical genius from On High; in fact, he worked his fingers into early deformity from practicing so much. Not that Tharp proposes hurting oneself in the creative quest. She’s merely making the point that practice is supreme, not sitting around waiting for the muse to make an appearance. Her choice of Mozart is historical, but I’ve heard similar about Michael Jordan. When other ball players were out doing whatever, Jordan was on the court practicing his shots.
5. Encouraging. One of America’s greatest choreographers shares her demons with us, so we know our fears aren’t “special,” and no, they won’t go away with success, so stop with the “if only.” Wrestling demons is just part of the process; it comes with the territory.
I love the layout of this book: an airy, elegant use of color, font, and white space, which parallels the visual of her stage work. Tharp is very generous in sharing details of her work regimen and her methods for getting things done. Obviously it works for her. The good news is that because her methods are so practical, they can work for others, too.
Tharp uses photos very sparingly in this book, so if you’re looking for a photo history of her career or her company, this isn’t the book. She focuses on the Creative Habit and she doesn’t make herself or her work the center of the story; she draws on the experience and history of many well-known artistic giants and a few lesser known artists as well.
If you want to create or you’re interested in the creative process, don’t wait for the paperback. I’ve seen many books on creativity, but this is by far the most practical and accessible one I’ve read. Tharp knows that it takes hard work and good habits to create something tangible, and she doesn’t waste our precious time on mystical mumbo jumbo or some magical “way” of the artist. It’s the work, folks.
Another classic BBC comedy, another classic set of titles. The graphics at the start of the gently subversive allotment-com – a bird flying round the petals of a flower to reveal the programme’s name – arguably stands alongside anything ever created by Saul Bass. Which is pretty much the biggest compliment anyone could give them.
NY Times ran an amusing series of illustrations from Christoph Niemann
All New Yorkers develop tricks that allow them to stay ahead of the pack in daily life. These are generally tightly guarded secrets, but now that I don’t live in New York, I have generously decided to share some of mine. What follows are a few handy charts that will, I hope, help readers to improve their lives.
Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is information architect, type designer (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography.
He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Projects included corporate design programmes for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing and way-finding projects like Berlin Transit, Duesseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts. He is board member of ATypI and the German Design Council and Past President of the ISTD, International Society of Typographic Designers, as well as the IIID. In 2001 he left MetaDesign and now runs SpiekermannPartners with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco.
In 2001 he redesigned The Economist magazine in London. His book for Adobe Press,“Stop Stealing Sheep” has recently appeared in a second edition and a German and a Russian version. His corporate font family for Nokia was released in 2002. In 2003 he received the Gerrit Noordzij Award from the Royal Academy in Den Haag. His type system DB Type for Deutsche Bahn was awarded the Federal German Design Prize in gold for 2006. In May 2007 he was the first designer to be elected into the Hall of Fame by the European Design Awards for Communication Design.
Erik is Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen and in 2006 received an honorary doctorship from Pasadena Art Center. He has just been elected an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA in Britain.
“I have demon masks all over the house, because it’s good to know your demons.” – Peter Sellers
This reminds me to send out some summer postcards. I’m digging through my scribbled notes desperately trying to credit the person with such lovely work. Please help identify the designers name please!
No kidding.
I love these little Picasso drawings. Even better when a renowned filmmaker like Scorsese is reminding us about it. Try Sport is simple (when your name is Howies)
I put this up to remind me to think about the insightful title of this painting, “The Betrayal of Image” – it’s the most famous painting from Magritte. I’m pondering how bring about such a concept into another medium.
Google results are your new resume whether you’re going on a date, getting a job, or representing your company. Reputation management is the new personal branding. Here’s some tips on emancipating your reputation. It’s not EASY – but it’s better than having a video of someone singing bad karaoke ranking for your name.
Some know issues about putting your ideas/thinking online: People trust other people’s opinions more than your own. Often, other people’s websites can have more link authority than your own websites. With those two guiding propositions you should be able to muster enough link traffic to rescue your Google listing. Don’t fret, follow these 10 steps and think carefully about the importance of building the right sort of credible name for yourself online. Terrible search results are allotted like bad karaoke, but they can be avoided.
Seth Godin’s says, Is architect a verb?
“I confess. I like using it that way. I think architecting something is different from designing it. I hope you can forgive me but I think it’s a more precise way to express this idea. Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a bauhaus, white space, font-driven, IDEO-envy way of thinking about design.
So I reserve “architect” to describe the intentional arrangement of design elements to get a certain result. You can architect a computer server set up to make it more efficient. You can architect a train station to get more people per minute through the turnstiles.
More interesting, you can architect a business model or a pricing structure to make it far more effective at generating the behavior you’re looking for. Most broken websites aren’t broken because they violate common laws of good design. They’re broken because their architecture is all wrong. There’s no strategy in place.”
Image: Henri Cartier Bresson
Ernst Haas—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Colonel Blimp is a music video production company, it was named in homage to the 1944 film “The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp” directed by Powell and Pressburger. In that film Roger Livesey plays a man who fights a duel and cuts his top lip so badly that he is forced to grow a large and unusual handlebar moustache which he keeps for the rest of his life.
Creating a memorable music video is much like growing an unusual moustache. It takes patience and nerve. During the early planning stages it may be difficult to perceive exactly what the finished ‘tache’ will look like. The growing period may be arduous, drawn out. The moustache’s grower perhaps tempted by the easy clichés of fashion to compromise their original design.
Like many future filmmakers, British-born Christopher Nolan began making amateur movies at an early age, playing around with a Super 8mm camera that belonged to his father. When his family relocated to Chicago for three years during his formative years, this child of a British father and American mother traded tips on movie making with pals Roko and Adrian Belic (who in 1998 premiered their documentary “Genghis Blues”). While an undergraduate at University College in London, Nolan saw his short “Tarantella” air in the USA on PBS in 1989. By the mid-90s, he had hooked up with Jeremy Theobold who appeared in the shorts “Larceny” and “Doodlebug”. Theobold would go on to produce and star in Nolan’s feature directorial debut, “Following” (1998). Serving as director, co-producer, co-editor and cinematographer, he inverted some of the conventions of the film noir to recount the tale of a blocked writer (Theobold) who spends his days stalking strangers in the hopes of jump-starting his imagination. Then, one of his “victims” turns the tables and invites the scribe to join in a series of petty thefts. Juggling time via flashbacks and flash forwards, Nolan established a key signature of his work in which chronology takes a back seat to character. Critics found much that was admirable in Nolan’s first feature, although most felt it was a marginal achievement, at best.
Nolan took a giant leap forward with his second film, “Memento” (2000), working from an unpublished short story by his brother Jonathan. An intriguing skewering of the conventions of film noir, “Memento” centers on a man with “anterograde amnesia”, a condition that does not allow him to form new memories, who is seeking the man who raped and murdered his wife. While the heart of the piece was a conventional revenge drama, the story unfolded in an intriguing manner — backwards, with bits of additional information added each time. Fascinating and complex, “Memento” earned great acclaim when it opened in Europe in fall 2000 and at its US premiere at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival where Nolan picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. The film also earned him numerous citations from critics’ groups. Despite the fact that the idea for the story originated with his brother’s fiction, Nolan’s screenplay was deemed an original for the purposes of Academy Award consideration, in part because the film had premiered in both Great Britain and the USA before the short story was published in the March 2001 issue of Esquire. Capitalizing on his success, Nolan directed the English-language remake of the 1997 Norwegian crime thriller “Insomnia” (2002), starring three previous Academy Award winners, Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank . The critical response to the film was mixed: while some labeled the thriller as an early Oscar contender and heaped praise on Williams’ smart, controlled performance, others found the film a lackluster sophomore follow-up to the bravura efforts of “Memento.”
Nevertheless, Warner Brothers, which produced “Insomnia,” was still confident enough in Nolan’s talents to tap him to direct its long-aborning effort to revive the all-but-defunt “Batman” franchise after various other incarnations failed to make it into production. Teaming with screenwriter and comic book author David S. Goyer, who’d previously translated the “Blade” character from comics to film, Nolan took the film series 180 degrees from its increasingly gaudy and campy direction, envisioning “Batman Begins” (2005) as a pitch-black, deadly serious psychological exploration of the origins of the legendary comic book superhero. Taking direct inspiration from many sequences from the post-“Dark Knight Returns” era of the comics, Nolan’s film traced Bruce Wayne’s journey from orphaned millionaire to intensely skilled crimefighter, taking pains to craft both a Gotham City and an outer world that was as realistic as its pulpy source material would allow and eschewing over-the-top theatrics and computer-generated special effects in favor of nuanced acting and old-fashioned stunt work. Nolan and Goyer’s take attracted an all-star cast, including Michael Caine as Wayne’s faithful aide Alfred; Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon, Gotham’s sole uncorrupt cop; Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, the provider of Batman’s technology; and Liam Neeson as the mysterious, machiavellian Henri Ducard; but the true discovery of the film was Christian Bale in a star-making turn as the titular superhero. Though the film lacked some of the darkly manic pop inspiration that characterized the Tim Burton films, “Batman Begins'” soberer take was a breath of fresh air for loyal fans of the comic books and moviegoers turned off by Joel Schumacher’s more recent camp efforts, and the film proved to be both a critical and commercial success. Nolan was set to return to the franchise for “The Dark Knight” (scheduled for release in 2008) reteaming with Goyer on story chores (with a script by Nolan’s brother Jonathan) and helming again, this time with Heath Ledger in the role of the iconic villain The Joker.
* Born:
July 30, 1971 in England
* Job Titles:
Director, Screenwriter, Director of photography, Producer, Editor
Family
* Brother: Jonathan Nolan. wrote short story upon which “Memento” (2000) was based
Education
* University College, London, England, English
Milestones
* 1989 Made short “Tarantella” which received airing on PBS in USA
* 1996 Short film “Larceny” screened at the Cambridge Film Festival; Jeremy Theobald made acting debut
* 1998 Feature directorial debut, “Following”; Theobald starred and served as one of the producers
* 2000 Helmed second feature, the acclaimed thriller “Memento”, adapted from a story by his brother
* 2002 Directed the English-language remake of “Insomnia”
* 2005 Directed and co-wrote the fifth Caped Crusader installment “Batman Begins” which starred Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman
* 2006 Directed Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale in “The Prestige,” about rival magicians working in early-20th-century London
* Began making short films at age seven
* Collaborated with Theobald on the short “Doodlebug”
* Spent three years of his youth living in Chicago; made early films with Roko and Adrian Belic (the future Oscar nominees for the documentary “Genghis Blues”)
1. The ultimate in image sharpness (100+ million pixels)
2. A specific look
3. Widest tonal range
4. Budget, digital can be very expensive to do it right
5. Widest range of lenses, especially wide angle
6. The magic of developing it
1. The connection between value and scarcity is something we all know. Gold is precious because there is not much of it to go around, not because you can use it to build skyscrapers. The psychologists reasoned that this link has become deep-wired into our neurons, so that we unconsciously call on it—and its inverse—for life decisions.
2. Is it human tendency to make negative conclusions solely because we are unable to fulfill our desires? Maybe we should try to a little harder as it is never too late. In the case of a friend, the belief that good men are vanishing has resulted in refusal to see any other guy who is actually standing right next to her. More often than not, the solutions to our problems are so obvious that we overlook them.
3. Most people think of prejudice as simple animosity. But psychologists are coming to see this common human trait as far more complex than that. Indeed, it appears from a growing body of research that our emotional reactions to “others” are quite nuanced. We may pity people who are powerless but benign—the elderly, for example—yet we don’t despise them. And we may respect but dislike people who are powerful but not particularly warm–the very rich, for instance. It appears that we save our most extreme emotional assessment—pure contempt—for the doubly cursed: those who we perceive as not only cold but incompetent. At the extreme, we view these extreme rejects—addicts, bums, modern-day lepers—as barely human.
4. I think most folks don’t quite get that courtship/mating problems are actually marketing problems. If you look at marketing you will see that ‘cold mailing’ results in about a 0.5%-1% return while a warm campaign can give more like 2%. A person selling themselves to others is not at all different. What she doesn’t understand is that she may have to converse with 100 guys before she hits a real prospect. Perhaps her problem is the same as most start-up business owners who think that 10% of folks who see their product will buy it! You have to figure out your target. You have to look in the right places to increase your chances and then accept that it’s going to take longer than you think, maybe 10x longer. Accept that.
“Just to clarify, because it’s better to look stupid by asking, than be stupid by not.”
I thought that seemed to be whole appropriate to make such an honest remark.
