misterlorde asked: I became familiar with your work via gigposters.com, so I have to ask: Do you have a favorite gig poster? You don't have to limit it to one fave, if you have several.
This! The color, the flow, the blobs, that scanned phone book, that orange blob, that gut feeling that some sort of acidic sound is being made. Sonnenzimmer = pure gold.
nickross asked: Do you have any tips for finding inspiration for those certain projects that you don't really feel a strong connection to? I'm doing an internship right now at a large corporation's communications department and many times I find it hard to focus on/come up with new ideas for the more boring projects.
No tips. I am awful at working on things where I don’t feel a strong connection. I try to avoid it, but that’s not always possible. My friends will testify: I complain and whine and moan for days at a time until the project ends. I’m a miserable cuss of a person to be around.
Sorry. No magic spells. Pretend you’re making an ice cream sundae? That’s as close to magic as I know…
Anonymous asked: What typefaces can't you stand seeing?
It seems silly to get worked up over typeface choices that you have no control over. I’d rather celebrate the times a great choice is made than rue the times a poor choice is made. I don’t want to grumble about things for the rest of my life and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family to death. It’s foolish to think that getting worked up about Papyrus will make you a zealot.
I saw this great flyer the other day for piano lessons that looked like it was made in Word. It was all typeset in 72pt Bodoni Poster Compressed and it was just perfect. It was classy and dignified and it looked like Chopin. An amateur did that, and it was wonderful. Made my day more than any professionally designed piece I saw.
Swish.
ethanbodnar asked: You put together the remarkable Text Playlist along with the listing of 10 Blogs, might you have some a list of books (or even just a couple) that you would recommend that are not about design, though maybe they are related in some way to design
This is long. I apologize. In that big advice post, I said keep one fiction and one nonfiction book on your nightstand. Nonfiction can give us the truth about what is happening in the world. Fiction can give us the truth that won’t fit in nonfiction and the truth that is happening inside of us.
I’m not as well read as some, but here are a few titles that I quite enjoy. This is a half-baked reading list, and I am sure I am omitting many wonderful things on my own shelf which I can not see right now. For this, I apologize too.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
If you come to this book correctly, it will teach you more about process than any design book could. It’s written by a choreographer, and it is very tempting to consider design a choreographic art of content and concept. Anyway, if there are ideas and areas that seem to overlap between her experience and yours, there’s a high probability of truth, because, you know, unrelated fields and such, right?
This book is pretty much the cornerstone of any collegiate class on aesthetics. It’s great (albiet written in the 70s and dated in some aspects), but it’s easy to find applications of the ideas presented within to our current visual climate. This is the book that was ported from the original television series by the BBC. The television series is available to watch online as well, and I would suggest that over the book, if only for Berger’s vigor and intensity. But, buy the book too. Why not, for $5 used on Amazon? If only to fulfill your liberal arts student obligations…
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White
You should already have this. What, you don’t have this? Get with the program, kid. Learn the rules, then selectively break them.
Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
Oh, lordy! An economics book! Oh, the terror! But, this is good. If only to get a grasp of how folks respond to incentives and to develop a latticework of how people make decisions to hang your design choices upon… If you go to a state school instead of an art school, make friends with an economics student. You’ll get into all sorts of fun arguments when your two hyper-idealistic outlooks clash with one another, and that friction is a wonderful thing. (But, buy each other a beer so you don’t hate one another at the end of the day.)
Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
It’s easy to take things for granted, especially when you view them out of context of the time they were made. I wasn’t a big Woody Guthrie fan until I realized, “Oh my god! This guy was painting ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on his guitar and singing right wing/left wing/chicken wing when folks were singing gospel tunes and picking dirt out of their toes in the Dust Bowl.”
That’s kind of like McLuhan. It’s easy to think of the idea of a global village as ho-hum, or you might think the influence of electronics and mass communication have on our lives is an easy concept to wrap your mind around. But geez, to forecast so much of this in the technology’s infancy? I mean, sometimes it’s just uncanny, almost like the dude invented a time machine in the future, jumped back to the past, wrote a couple books, and then vaporized in some sort of space/time rip. Maybe.
Anyway, this particular book is a gem because it takes dense ideas and makes them presentable through juxtaposing image and type, and fully leverages the power of design. (It was designed by Quentin Fiore.) Working on an updated version of this is one of my dream jobs. (But, the other part of me says it should be left untouched.) Pick one up, and get an old copy. (Read as: don’t get a new one because you’ll get it with that crappity crap David Carson cover that makes it look like some sort of stupid Nine Inch Nails album.)
The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda
Maeda outlines 10 principles (I wouldn’t call them laws) of simplicity. It’s a quick and breezy read, with tons of insight per word. You should read it online, because, one, it’s free, and two, the book, while a beautiful design specimen, can sometimes feel a bit inflated to generate enough pages to warrant a book.
This is simplicity at its best: as a call towards making things more human and humane.
Ok, ok. You got me. This has everything to do with design. But, BUT! Riddle me this: why haven’t you read it? Why don’t more people read it? There aren’t many pictures, but screw designers with picture addictions. For truth, this is better than most design books that you can buy, each chapter is an individual essay, so it’s easy to pick up and read and put back down, and the sucker fits in your back pocket. This is like the original design-writing blog, and it is the best design blog ever. Just go buy it. Why isn’t this required reading for every design seminar ever, ever, ever?
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
So, a neuroscience book? Okay, one, the brain is awesome, and two, if your thesis statement is that creative people in the humanities usually make meaningful insights about how the brain operates through art and then the scientific community later produces studies that verify… holy-cow-gee-whiz, I am going to snatch that book up and devour it like some sort of seagull shoving a fish down its gullet.
I demolished this book the first time through. Also, everything good in WIRED is usually by Lehrer. Also also, the dude’s what? 26? 27? Let’s all hang our heads in shame while we eat a ham-and-swiss Hot Pocket while sitting in a bean bag chair in our parent’s basement.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
If you have read The Little Prince, you are shaking your head in agreement. If you have not, just trust us on this one, okay?
Read a Book that Changed the World
It doesn’t matter. Take your pick. They’re cheap. And usually available for free online. Pick up your shiny iPad or Kindle and search the store and see if you can nab it for free-ninety-nine. I’m talking Silent Spring, or Common Sense, or The Origin of Species, or Paradise Lost, or The Republic, or The Iliad, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or Shakespeare, or Divine Comedy, or Moby Dick, or 1984, or Don Quixote, or Walden. These are the books that define who we are as humanity. And we should cherish them and consume them, if only to be in the presence of something bigger than all of us for a little bit.
By this, I mean the books that everyone reads at some point when they are in high school and it changes a little bit of who they are or how they look at the world. Frequently, they are things like Slaughterhouse Five, or Catcher in the Rye, or Franny and Zooey, or Of Mice and Men, or Animal Farm, or The Giver, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Pride and Prejudice.
These are the books that have sentimental power over us (or at least myself) because they feel like the first documentation of how it feels to be yourself. Someone is speaking to you that knows you better than yourself. These books are the first things you choose to like and believe in, they are works that you can own yourself, and you chose it, and it is not given to you from any one else. “This is mine,” you say, and that is true, like this book helped to unbury something hidden inside of yourself that had always been there.
If you have read one of these before, read it again and see if it has the same effect, and think about how you are more angry now than you were back then, or how your angst has subsided, or think about how you feel less lonely now or more lonely, or think about how time has changed you. Maybe see the times where you pull out something new from the pages that you were not able to grasp before.
By revisiting something that has not changed you can see how you have changed. Think about how reading a book like this is like putting another notch in the door frame where you measured your growth when you were growing up. Look at how far you have come.
These books are litmus tests for friends. For me, if Franny and Zooey changes a little piece of you, I will probably be friends with you. These books never stop having an affecting power over us.
“Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.”
“And so it goes.”
By now, everyone knows that marble sculptures of ancient Greece weren’t actually bone-white, right? They were painted because guess what, everyone loves color. So I hope you don’t freak out if I say that I’m kind of getting into the look of these re-colored pieces. I still appreciate the ascetic white look, but, y’know… color!
If you pull something from archaeology.org, I will smoosh the “like” button with the fury of a million burning day stars. Plus, that archer is dressed up in an M.I.A. album cover!
cardcatalogue asked: What's your favourite book cover? Does it differ from what you'd consider the best book cover?
This is my favorite book cover. It is for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. The cover is designed by David Pearson and I think it is a masterpiece. It describes the content and references the format, and wraps it all up into a concept that any one can understand. There’s a pleasing restraint, and a forthright confidence that is attractive. It communicates well too: between the title and the cover, you know what this book is about.
I don’t know what I’d consider the best book cover. I’m not qualified to speak to that.
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
Gosh, I was going to write something all misty and tender about yellow, wooden pencils and what they are and what they do and what they can represent.
But, I’m going to have to go with grilled cheese sandwich on this one, TumblrBOT.
Curiosity, questioning, and answering, done through the lens of design.
