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I was lucky enough to have been invited to a party celebrating Creativity Magazine’s annual Creativity 50 last night in New York and had hoped to bump into a few of the honored guests. Creativity’s list “represents the biggest innovators of the year, who—through repeated demonstration of sheer brilliance or even just one spectacular feat—brought new spark to their respective fields of advertising, entertainment, marketing, technology, design and beyond” and included such names as Radiohead, the Coen brothers and Yugo Nakamura.
With that in mind, I had conjured up a brilliant conversation between myself and the Coen brothers about their use of postmodern visual art and techniques in Miller’s Crossing. Of course not all of the honorees could make it, including my new best pals, Ethan and Joel, but nonetheless it was a great party and led me to discover (and re-discover) a lot of amazing design in the work of the Creativity 50.
So, as you may have guessed, I did not actually find Yugo Nakamura at the party, but I did revisit his work. Yugo P, as he is also known, is a brilliant web designer who has researched and developed both experimental and consumer projects dealing mainly with interactivity. Read the rest of this entry »
Graphic design seems to finally be getting some deserved attention from businesses these days and design-related salaries are steadily rising, however I can’t help but wonder what the overall perception of graphic design is from the general public. Good design can sell a product by consumers recognizing it as so. Products are more about style and what they say about their owner these days, rather than solely about the job it performs or the service it offers. This has led consumers to place certain products/companies on a cultural pedestal (people NEED their iPods). In the same way, consumers influence design by setting the bar on how it’s quality is measured.
There is an abundance of bad design in the professional world that is widely accepted and it is leading consumers to lower their design standards. This is one of the reasons the iPod absolutely exploded and became a cultural phenomenon. No other mp3 player at the time offered such ease of use AND looked amazing doing it. I’m getting a little sidetracked, but the point is that I decided to do a little experiment to see where most people are being exposed to graphic design and what quality of design is readily available to their eyes. Read the rest of this entry »
Now that everyone is back from Austin and has returned to their normal sleeping patterns, we can take a closer look at all of the web award winners this year. One of the cooler sites, which I’ve already found useful, did not win but it was a finalist in the Experimental category. After first seeing Issuu on the web-resource-heavy Go2Web20.net, I decided to spend a little more time with it. Issuu allows anyone to upload a publication to their site in the .pdf format and create an online library of other publications, including magazine, portfolios and articles on just about anything. I discovered it to be another great place for design inspiration and networking, as well as a great current events resource.
Now for the winners (definitely check out the Passive-Agressive Notes blog for a laugh)…
