June 2012
21 posts
“The whole experience makes me want to pull aside politicians and business leaders and maybe everyone else and offer some pious advice: Don’t try to be everyman. Don’t pretend you’re a member of every community you visit. Don’t try to be citizens of some artificial globalized community. Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your own past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.”
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—David Brooks on The Power of the Particular
Good advice for artists, designers, creators, politicians, entrepreneurs, and pretty much all humans.
“If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place. What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.”
—Milton Glaser, considered by many the greatest graphic designer alive and celebrating his 83rd birthday today, on art, purpose, and the capacity for astonishment. (via explore-blog)
“Time is less a rigid vase and more an unfired lump of clay, malleable at the hands of experience, better measured by the richness of our memories than any clock or calendar.”
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—Jack Cheng, on an idea his dad has about time and memory and meaning and experience.
I don’t want him to ever stop asking me about it, because every time he asks, it’s a reminder. To make next week longer and more memorable than this one. To make each subsequent year slower than the one before, by going off the rails, opening myself to richer memories. Every time Dad tells me his idea, it’s a reminder to step away from the machine and pay attention to the world.
Oh man, this is good.
“Glass is a writer’s writer, or more aptly a writer’s radio host. He understands how narrative works, how to build tension, how to place words within sentences and sentences within paragraphs, how at the end of a story a character must be transformed. Every good writer knows that the most important, most evocative information should come at the end of a sentence or paragraph, and even in conversation he does this. Take his earlier words, for example: “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.” He doesn’t say: “I love that they’ve chosen food as their medium.” Because he knows — probably instinctively — that what comes last will carry the most weight; he knows where inside a sentence the power lies — or rather where inside a sentence lies the power. And so even in his speech you hear the pregnant pauses, the places where, if he were writing the conversation, he would use colons, semicolons and dashes.”
—Rachel Louise Snyder on Ira Glass from her 1995 Salon profile on the host of This American Life.
Graphic Design as a Liberal Art — Part III: The Future
This is part three of a three-part series. Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 (You are here.)
Are we really afraid? Are we afraid that we’ll be out of jobs or are we afraid the design can’t solve all the problems we think it can? Do we think opening up our toolkit1 — improvising, frameworks, storytelling, and delight — will ruin our field? Or is it possible that these are skills that can help push the world forward, shining light into the darkness?
Graphic Design as a Liberal Art — Part II: The Tools
This is part two of a three-part series. Part 1 / Part 2 (You are here.) / Part 3
“The liberal arts have always been changing just as much as we have.” —The New Liberal Arts 1
The liberal arts are those subjects that were considered essential for students to study. They provide the student with the tools they need to learn and a framework in which to navigate through the world. Somewhere along the way, we decided writing was something every student should learn. Public Speaking is a required course in most university programs. Could graphic design sit along side these liberal arts?
Graphic Design as a Liberal Art — Part I: The Curious
This is part one of a three-part series. Part 1(You are here) / Part 2 / Part 3
“The teaching of art is the teaching of all things.” —John Ruskin
The graphic design field is awash with contradictions. It sits in the awkward cross-section between service and craft. It’s at once a service given to others and a craft we hone for ourselves. It can be both invisible and influential, sometimes showing a point of view and other times remaining apathetic to its content.
Pixar Story Rules →
pixartouchbook.com
Pixar story artist Emma Coats has been tweeting a series of story basics she’s learned from senior Pixar employees on how to craft good stories. Here are some of my favorites:
Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.
You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
“Great art is when you come across an object and you have a fundamental, personal, one-on-one relationship with it, and you understand something you didn’t already understand about what it means to be alive. That’s why people with loads of money want to possess it. That’s why it’s worth so much fucking money. But it isn’t. They want to possess it. But they can’t. Throw money at art, you get nothing back. You die.”
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—Damien Hirst
(via ubuwaits)
“We use novels, not old newspapers, to get a sense of what life was like 100 years ago. I believe 100 years from now, future generations will still use novels the same way. They’ll use novels, not tweets or posts like this. And they’ll use the rich ones — the ones that have things to say things about culture and politics, the ones that absorb and synthesize.”
—Robin Sloan, writing for The New York Times, on the future of fiction.
“What I am interested in seeing (and making) is a synthesis of concept and form, of meaning and realization, of the syntactic and the semantic. I want to see work where the meaning is reinforced by the form, and the form is reinforced by the meaning.”
—Mitch Goldstein on form
“On Flipboard, we encourage readers to do just one thing: flip. Just open the app, and flip from left to right. By minimizing friction and encouraging readers to focus on the content, we become transparent. And that, we believe, is the secret of great design.”
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—Marcos Weskamp, Head of Design at Flipboad, from this great interview from Mashable.
Flipboard is my all-time favorite iPad app and easily in my top five iPhone apps. The user experience is pretty much perfect and it’s great to hear some of the thoughts and process behind the product.
The Low Anthem, What The Crow Brings-"The Ballad Of The Broken Bones"
The Low Anthem
Song of the moment: The Ballad of Broken Bones - The Low Anthem
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest for something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidarity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.”
—E.B. White, Here is New York
