Frank Chimero has a blog.

Enthusiasm

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:22:51 -0600

If you translate “enthusiasm” from its Greek origin, it means “to be filled with God.”

Being filled with God is a pretty ideal, state, huh? If you think about all the great philosophers talking about the supreme state of a person, and asking “What is the good life?” it seems to me that being filled with God is as fitting of an answer as they could come up with. The pinnacle of emotion in this world is to be filled with something otherworldly. The Greeks decided to call that “enthusiasm.”

Enthusiasm is an overflow of emotion. The old use of the word means to be divinely inspired to do things like speaking in tongues. When the work is good and fluid, it almost is like we’re speaking in tongues: we’re done saying something we don’t fully understand before we even realize what we are doing.

The ideal state of a person is not composure, peace, or a stillness. It’s movement. Frenetic, excited, jubilant movement. It’s a sign of life. It is atoms vibrating and an eruption of potential into kinetic. But, in movement, enthusiasm is not necessarily accomplishment, power, or wealth, but an intense interest and enjoyment about the thing right in front of you. Enthusiasm is about the work at hand. To be enthusiastic is to be present, content and elated. That sounds like a happiness cocktail to me. Maybe the Greeks were on to something…

what makes you skip some questions? have they been asked before?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:52:51 -0600

I skip questions that: have been asked before, are bad questions, are ones I’m not interested in answering, or ones I do not have an answer to.

"An elegant person is a gentleman, one who knows how to handle himself. He cares for his life, and..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:41:50 -0600

“An elegant person is a gentleman, one who knows how to handle himself. He cares for his life, and intends to live it in association with others who care and with things that are beautiful and fine.”

- Mid-century novelist David Loovis, quoted by Ivy Style, from The New Yorker (via putthison)

"Too many of us have become terribly insensitive to the things we touch, smell, taste, hear and see...."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:29:24 -0600

“Too many of us have become terribly insensitive to the things we touch, smell, taste, hear and see. We have forgotten how to feel, and so we take the next best avenue of approach to living. We intellectualize the things we have failed to grasp with our sense.”

- S. Neil Fujita in his book Aim for a Job in Graphic Design/Art, published over 40 years ago. Quote comes from an article from Heller on Design Observer.

Hi Frank,

I really admire your (hate to use buzzwords) clean, possibly minimalist style. What do you consider to be the tools for this style? Do you use grids? Stick to a certain style of typefaces? Anything?... or is it more of an organic process.

Please keep producing great work!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:32:29 -0600

I think there’s an overarching theme for people to say that getting to simple is starting at 100 and reducing down. I do this with my work. But, when I’m familiar with the problem, there’s another route: start at 0 and only add elements as I need them.

I much prefer starting at zero. It’s faster, easier, more satisfying, and additive rather than subtractive.

There’s no recipe for the style, so no specific typefaces or grids or tools. It’s just using intuition to know what needs to be there and what does not.

how do you use twitter effectively to network without feeling like a stalker?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:12:06 -0600

Play nice. Be polite. Don’t chew with your mouth open. Have a point. Be funny. Be helpful. Share things. Talk about stuff you have in common with someone.

If that fails, talk about your LOST theories.

With all the hype surrounding books moving from printed to digital platforms, is ANYBODY at all thinking about the impact it's going to have on our poor eyeballs? As if we needed more reasons to stare at screens for hours!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:48:23 -0600

Our poor eyeballs. They work so hard and get so little credit. So, let’s take a moment to think of our eyeballs. I’m going to close mine to give myself an ocular moment of silence.

Now, onward. I think we may be at a saturation point with how much of our time our eyes are on screens. Any new technologies will just be a new screen stealing time from a old screen.

And, if you’re really worried about it, you could always buy a reader with e-ink like a Kindle. Hopefully in the future we’ll either improve the quality of e-ink screens or hybridize them with LED screens. Maybe. But, who knows? I know diddly about the technology behind these screens.

Whats the best way to get recognized in this new age of media?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:51:00 -0600

By Jenny Holzer

What have you read recently that's really blown your mind?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:24:00 -0600

Let me show you what I think is blogging done right. I think we’re learning how to use this internet thingie better, and figuring out ways to leverage blogs better to make more convincing, fully fleshed-out content appropriate (and, in fact, custom-made) for the web.

Books in the Age of the iPad from craigmod - Take all of your skills as a designer: critical thinking, communicating, writing, forecasting, narrating, organizing, synthesizing and hypothesizing, and put it into one blog post. Then, use the distribution of the internet to do it in a timely fashion. That’s this blog post. Imagine what would happen if we all took the care to craft such a convincing hypothesis… How would the discourse online be elevated?

Designing for Improvisation from Bobulate If you’ve read my blog over the past several weeks, you’ll see several recurring themes here: platforms, frameworks for improvisation, etc. These models directly address a couple of the big questions we face on the internet: how do you get people’s attention, how can you let them contribute, and how can you make those contributions meaningful?

What do you see yourself doing 3 years from now? Is there anything you'd like to dabble in, that you haven't already.. or maybe incorporate your work into a different medium?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:12:29 -0600

I don’t know what I’ll be doing 3 years from now. Three years ago, I would have never predicted I’d be writing, speaking, and illustrating more and designing less.

We’ll see where things go, because new opportunities bubble up every day. If there’s something that I think will unify my efforts over the next couple years, it’s these three things: purpose, impact and legacy. I want to have a reason to do the work, I want the work to have meaning and influence, and I want the work to last and not have a short shelf-life.

What illustration or cartoon (but not comic) character would you like to be?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:30:27 -0600

Probably Roger from 101 Dalmatians. Let’s see: a great wife, a maid, spends most of the day sequestered up in his attic working on his craft. Also, a house full of puppies in London and a cool pipe and sweater vest. Sounds like a dream life to me, right?

When's the store coming back? I wanted to buy some stuff around Christmas but missed out.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:28:56 -0600

The Shop will be back in a couple weeks. I took it down because of moving preparation. Sorry about that. Once I get my feet under me again, I’ll flip the sign to “open.”

what is your all time favorite design book?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:10:17 -0600

The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.

You know how most good movies aren’t about how to fall in love, but are about the experience of what it’s like to be in love? That’s what this book is to me. It’s not about how to design, it’s not a documentation of specimens of design, it is a giant book that is about what it’s like to live a visual life where everything is special and interesting. It’s a treasure chest of insight, wit and delight. And it made me realize that even though this work may mutilate us in its own special way, maybe that mutilation is desirable, if we can just steer it correctly.

Thanks, Mr. Fletcher.

How much of your talent do you feel or you were born with and how much do you feel is learned?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:59:08 -0600

If I look at the things I think I do well, I feel like they’re a part of my personality, and my “talent” has been to be able to take my personal qualities and figure out how to integrate them into my work.

I speak in analogies. I draw in them now too. I write in short sentences in a way that I hope has clarity. The images, I hope, have that too. I value ideas, so they show up in the work too. I’d say I was born with a propensity to break things apart to try to figure them out. I was the kid who took apart the watch to see how it worked.

I think some people start with more talent than others. But, often, I think people use talent as an excuse to not have to push themselves. We all need to work on things, because we all need to get better. Part of me wants to believe that most talent is fuzzy logic, learned experience and intense observation that’s difficult to express with explicit rationale. Most talent is hard work wrapped up in a romantic ideal.

If graphic design/art wasn't part of your life, what would you be doing as a "grown up" right now, and where you would you might be?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:44:24 -0600

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. The Indiana Jones films warped my mind into believing that fact-finding was a life of adventure, death-defying escapes and bad guys. (And snakes. Eeeesh, snakes.) Wrap that in with Tintin’s fact-finding, and you’ve got one excited, terribly misguided kid with an incorrect view of what the these jobs really entail.

But, I still loved it. Old stones buried in the dirt. Stories of a cities long-forgotten. Artifacts of how we used to be and stories encased in objects. I kept the flicker interest alive through art history classes and an intro to anthropology course in college. And now, I find myself returning to these topics to frame ideas, so I suspect that’d be the direction I’d head in if forced to give up design.

Why do you blog?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:24:40 -0600

Writing is a way of organizing thought. Publishing is a way of receiving feedback.

"Worry more about being good because you probably aren’t."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:35:00 -0600

“Worry more about being good because you probably aren’t.”

- Stop saying ‘innovation’ by Scott Berkun

From the same article as the last post, but I some how missed this bit. So, let me take this opportunity to say: BURN!

Innovation

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:37:00 -0600

Innovation:

bobulate:

Scott Berkun on banning the i-word:

Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you.

Because:

Ask people who say innovation what they mean. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved everyone in the room hours of time. Using the i-word is often a cop-out for clear thinking. They are trying to signify creativity, without actually being creative.

A-men.

So, I’d like to try to try to communicate my enthusiasm for how much I agree with avoiding the word “innovate.” It makes me want to light my hair on fire and run off a cliff. (I love hyperbole.) Unfortunately, my grasp of language can not express my raw disdain for these red flag words, so I will resort to this: “!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!” [sic]

What do I mean by red flag words? I mean words that clients say when they have no idea what the real objectives of the assignment at hand are. Or, maybe, they just do not know how to communicate what those needs are. (We’re all not professional communicators, you know.) If you ask hard questions like “What does this widget need to do?” and “Who is it for?” you may get shallow answers or perplexed looks. Thankfully, none of my current clients do this, but hey, there’s always the possibility of these sorts of issues occurring again. Things are cyclical.

Other common offenders that make me break out in hives:

The word “Sexy.” Usually, if a client tells me it needs to be sexy, it means that they want it to look desirable in their own eyes, and not necessarily sexy. It also means that they haven’t really thought about the best way to communicate whatever they’re saying.
When asked who the audience is, they say “everyone.” This exemplifies a lack of focus. I usually follow this up by saying “If you’re talking about whales, would you talk the same way to a class of kindergarteners versus a class of Marine Biology majors?” Everyone doesn’t work. Making something for everyone makes it useful for no one.
Ideate The horrid verb form of “idea.” This usually means that the client believes that ideas come from a magical black box process. This also usually means that the client will not understand that iteration leads to good ideas, and that there is a lot of waste in gold mining.
Web 2.0 Avoid at all costs. Do you know that part of the Sand Lot where the kids lose their ball over the fence and there’s a snarling, barking dog with rabies and drool oozing out of it’s mouth aggressively barking at them? This is what I see in my future for any client that uses the word “Web 2.0.”
Make It Pop This means that you and your client have not agreed on a simple question: What is the most important element of whatever you’re working on? Because, well, your client thinks one thing, and you think another. Usually, the client thinks it’s who is talking (“Make the logo bigger!”) and the designer thinks it’s what is being said. Some times the client is right. Some times the client is wrong.

The article gives a clue as to how to dissolve these situations if you can not avoid them: ask the client what they mean. The beginning of most design jobs is like an interrogation: you’re trying to squeeze the truth out of someone who is trying their hardest not to give it to you. So, if you must, resort to the handcuffs, the strong light, and water depravation. Maybe, if you work in a studio, you can work a good cop/bad cop schtick. Regardless, you need that gem of wisdom that is actually useful that let’s you get on your way.

When dealing with rough spots like this, I try to explain to my client that I understand what they are telling me, but they are not particularly helpful because they’re being vague in their requirements. So, I tend to drill with questions. “What does this need to do?” “What is an optimal outcome?” “What does success look like?” And then, when presenting solutions or sketches, I frame every single decision I’ve made based on what the client has dictated to me as success. It also helps to deflect bad client feedback. If a client tells me that they want to make the logo purple, it helps to be able to say “We agreed that the main audience for this is 40-something males. And those guys hate purple.”

Client Relations 101 is about knowing where the mines are buried and trying to avoid them. Then, once you find work that is an opportunity, being able to milk great information about the requirements and needs of the project from your clients. The forgotten good steps about doing good work happen in choosing the right work to accept, then understanding what the work needs to do in order to be good. I’m tempted to say a designer is only as good as the questions they ask their client.

Kanye on Creativity

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:54:00 -0600

Am I really putting up something Kanye West said? Yes I am. Because it’s about better. And, I’m inclined to believe this thought, regardless of what I think of the man’s music or behavior.

There’s no such thing as fact anymore, only opinion. The closest thing we have to fact is “common opinion”. Everything is an opinion. The way you dress is an expression of your opinion. Your religious beliefs are your opinion. The music you turn up loud is your opinion. For most people it’s easier to just agree. For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree and that is what sparks creativity, the feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something’s missing. The feeling that something’s needed.

(Oh, and obviously facts still remain.)

via putthison, converted to non-all-caps by Colin Marshall

"The moment just past is extinguished forever, save for the things made during it."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:07:53 -0600

“The moment just past is extinguished forever, save for the things made during it.”

- George Kubler