From the category archives:

ideas

How We’re Remembered: Memorial Day 2011

Practically every business, organization and government has a banner. These are raised in the form of logos, motifs, icons and flags. We wear them and put them on our car bumpers and on signs and travel mugs. Every banner represents something—an identity, a set of values, a reputation, a history.

Breathing Room: The Role of the Space In Between

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Empty space in a design is useful. Think of it in this way: If there was a room in your home where every inch of space was taken up by a piece of furniture, you would be unable to navigate through or use the room. Empty space between furniture is required for the room to [...]

Drawing The Line Between Art and Design

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Where an artist can begin with a blank canvas and pursue a serendipitous route to an end result, a designer begins with a set of criterion and remains within set boundaries from concept through completion.

Creativity and Change

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Creative thinking requires us to cease from thinking as we always have. This is neither automatic nor easy because we automatically default to doing that which requires the least amount of effort.

Design As Your Ambassador

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Graphic design represents ideas and values. A design is not in itself the idea, but the expression of it. Design points to something greater than itself. In most cases design serves as an ambassador, not as the self-expression of the designer, but as the expression of a business or organization to its audience. The value [...]

The Obama Logo: Iconography, Ideas and Politics

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This is an excellent discussion of the power and influence of visual imagery – design and illustration – to change ways of thinking, morals and systems for good or for bad. No matter what your persuasion, you need to understand what’s going on. As you view this, consider how you’ve been influenced. Video from PJTV, [...]

How Do You Define Design?

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Toward the end of my design fundamentals course I generally ask my students how they, having gone through the process of learning design principles and applying them to a variety of projects, would define design. Here are the responses from several who recently completed the course: Design is the process of externalizing many possible solutions [...]

Technologically Incorrect: Why I Still Use a Paper Planner

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It’s red. It’s leather. It’s about two inches thick on its best days. It has rings. It is too big to fit in my pocket. I am describing my daybook: my planning/organizing/time management companion. It’s a throwback to the 1980s when planning systems first became popular, and Filofax and Franklin were the top-of-mind options. I [...]

Chart Wars: A Designer’s Critique of the Universal Health Care Charts

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Setting aside that fact that many think the Dems’ proposed national healthcare plan is a total nightmare, this chart is no sweet dream from a design standpoint.

True Lies

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Those who track and analyze cultural trends generally agree that our culture has become design-driven. It’s no longer based on business or technology but on design. We consumers generally assess the value of a product or idea based on post-modern criteria: its design, its visual appeal, how we experience it, how we feel about it. [...]

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