I picked up this book a while ago. I usually don’t have the money in my budget for these kinds of purchases but I couldn’t resist. Fingerprint, The Art of Using Handmade Elements in Graphic Design by Chen Design Associates is filled with really great photos and ideas for getting off of the computer to create design. I fnd this book really interesting and inspiring because I’m interested in doing more handmade stuff but I usually resort to the computer. You can have everything you need around you to create really awesome design, but it takes a lot more thought and creativity sometimes. The book includes anything from posters, web design, to product design from all sorts of designers and a little blurb about their work. It’s worth checking out.

I went to the Droog Design lecture on Thursday- like getting a guided tour through the history of their company(based in Amsterdam) and many examples of their coolest projects.  He really emphasized the conceptual aspects of design whether its product design, architecture, etc.  My favorite was a building that had been a pretty trashed brothel, was in a terrible area of the city (of Amsterdam?? not sure) and was going to be renovated as a hotel, albeit an extremely cheap one.  A group of designers were chosen and each was given a separate room to work on.  The results were truly inspired:  instead of a gym, they printed (in the lobby and the steps up to the rooms) the amount of calories expended on going up each stair and one of the rooms was outfitted with a bullet-proof sleeping bag (this is a PERFECT idea for some hotels like the Pallister in downtown Detroit).  Rather than trying to hide the fact that this was in a bad part of town and very cheap, they made the most of it.  Another great concept was the “Go Slow” restaurant (done in Germany I think) where the concept was basically the anti-fast food place.  Again, the results were awesome:  they brought in a bunch of senior citizen to crochet the menu on a board, the teabags were each embroidered, and all service was done at a snails pace.  There were other features in the architecture and design of the room- but you’d have to see the pictures.  They do have a book out of their projects which is either called Droog Design or something close to that.  What was most impressive to me was the intense focus on taking a concept and really working with its essence to come up with creative solutions that were very functional, interesting, funny and also looked good.  If anyone has their book, please let me know- I’d like to look at it.      

Hey, has anyone heard of ijustine…. this girl literally broadcasts her whole life… There is a ongoing chat too between people watching.  I find it facinating that people are so interested in some strangers life and not there own that they actually sit there and try to predict what she might to next…talk about weird!

http://www.justin.tv/ijustine 

Logo Inspiration?

http://browse.deviantart.com/designs/logos/?order=9&alltime=yes

Kari

 Here’s an exhibition at MOCAD that I am planning on going to this saturday. It looks like a really interesting exhibit, and if anyone else is interested in going, you know how to get in touch.

Words Fail Me is an exhibition that explores visual art’s ongoing engagement – and entanglement – with language. Language is labyrinthine, its permutations endless: This is partly the pleasure of words. The complexity of language, its ability to both inform and confound us, is – no doubt – part of its continuing appeal to artists. Words Fail Me considers highly idiosyncratic manifestations of language in recent contemporary art produced by an international and intergenerational group of artists.  <a href=”http://www.mocadetroit.org/exhibitions/WordsFailMe.html”>More…</a>

Here are some really well done portraits by Annie Leibovitz, all for a show called American Music. She was at the DIA last year and I was really impressed with the quality of her work. I went to go see it twice, once was paid for by AIGA Detroit…gotta earn back those membership dollars.

Check it out though, the work is really good.

http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/annieleibovitz/americanmusic/index.htm

OK, this screen saver looks amazing, but it’s only for Windows… it blows everything on your desktop with a digital wind that correlates to whatever the wind conditions are in your home city:

http://scr.sc/products/kazetodesktop/

My only question is… how does this “save” energy on your screen? It’s $8 if you want to buy it, but you can download a trial… naturally, in traditional windows style, it caused an exception when I tried to run the program and I had to end the task, probably because I don’t have the .net framework 1.1 (or maybe I do, I thought I did…). When will you windows programmers learn to work together!

It’s funny what happens sometimes when programs fail in Windows…I used a PC at work for part of one of my last projects with Illustrator, and this is what happened:

It basically filled the entire screen with black copies of what I was working on and all of the tool bars turned white with a black outline. To be fair, I couldn’t actually do what I was doing on the MAC either, but that computer just showed the pinwheel moving and nothing happened. This also makes me wonder… why am I able to attempt operations that my computers can’t perform? Both computers are very fast, so it’s not even the computer’s fault…I guess it’s probably just an Adobe error. (I was trying to blend two live-traced images of really high resolution with 500-steps…just try to do it…go to object>blend>blend options, then select the two objects and go to object>blend>blend)

Here are some very old type examples:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/n1ke/sets/690970/

This book is from 1932, and it has some beautiful type in it. I really like seeing those old worn out books, and it’s rare to find one about typography (at least for me, maybe I’m looking in the wrong places).

At her lecture, Ellen Lupton mentioned her website www.design-your-life.org   Most of the content seems to be by Ellen or her twin sister Julia and is focused on DIY items or just their thoughts on random things.  Its worth checking out for some of the design issues they talk about, but a good amount of the stuff gets into absurdities of life with kids in school, getting older, etc.- and I’m not sure how much interest students have for those things.  What I do like about the site (and her lecture) is her sense of humor and looking at most things as an opportunity to play.

Click here