Ralph Caplan interview with Debbie Millman

Former editor in chief of i.D. magazine Ralph Caplan speaks to Debbie Millman about being kicked out of high school, working for Industrial Design and the difference between making things right as a designer as opposed to making things nice.

Listen to the podcast interview at Design Observer.

Triangular design manifesto

This manifesto by Conceptual Devices is beautifully witty.

00_ Design should not be based on formal principles – but always on an idea of society.
01_ Designed forms represent possible social orders and a lot of their contradictions.
02_ Design is everything. Anything could be designed. Everyone is a designer.
03_ Design allows social innovations. Often it is not made by designers.
04_ Design has not scale. It could be small and have great impact.
05_ Design is not an innocent practice. Designers are wicked.
06_ Design should engage people and interact with them.
07_ Design is an interdisciplinary applied science.
08_ Design produces visual consciousness.
09_ Design is a triangular manifesto.
10_ Design makes you smile.
11_ This is the top.
12_ Enjoy!

Typographic wallet

This is a wallet I have made aimed at typographic minded people. It is made completely of duct tape and is part of a quick Entrepreneur project as part of my final year at Sheffield Hallam University.

The wallet is for sale at Etsy for $8 here. They are made to order and can contain any lettering you like, but only a maximum of 2 letters (one for each side) in any colour.

The wallets are extremely durable and contain 4 credit card slots, one clear I.D. slot, 2 sections for notes and 2 hidden pockets for loose change. Although these types of wallets are available quite widely, mine are custom made and aimed specifically at designers. Soon to come in white as well.

Project work 2010/11

I have decided to pursue 2 main projects this year as part of my final year of university. The first came as a result of being asked to design a new way-finding signage system for the Sheffield Institute of Arts gallery. I was approached at the end of the summer period following the production of the folder for the SHU faculty of ACES, with the request to design a new system to entice people into the gallery space and how to navigate towards it, due to it being rather non-descript and hard to find.

The other project will be an identity redesign for Browns fashion in London, which is a fictional brief. This project will focus on refreshing their current identity and applying it across a plethora of media, particularly packaging, which I want to use as an opportunity to really express the brand. Similar to how Michael Bierut achieved this with Saks Fifth Avenue.

Work in progress to be featured in the coming days.

Crap(Gap) up your logo

Join in the controversy currently sweeping the design and internet world regarding the new Gap logo at CrapLogoMe

Re-blogged from BrandNew

A pointless task

After a morning discussion with Ian Anderson, founder of the Sheffield based design studioDesigners Republic, a group of us (Sheffield Hallam final year graphic design students) were given the task of performing something completely pointless for an hour and to document our findings.

Examples of pointless tasks given were throwing a penny over a balcony every minute, riding the bus to a destination of no importance and back, and sharpening pencils for 60 minutes. All very pointless to a degree.

The task I thought up involved filling in the counters of every letter (well, the ones with counters) from a article I found on Design Observer entitled "Malcolm Gladwell is #Wrong" which makes reference to Twitter. I chose this article simply because it was the newest one added. This turned out to be more of a laborious task than I had first anticipated, I documented my progress by photographing it every 5 minutes.

We are to make a 10 minute presentation tomorrow afternoon, with the aim to convince the rest of the group that the task completed was in fact utterly pointless. I'm not sure at the moment what this will achieve, but as the overall theme is based on communication I expect it will improve our presentation skills and out ability to "sell" our ideas to clients.

My findings from this experiment concluded that after 60 minutes of filling in the counters I covered 48 lines of type, I filled in a total of 1246 letter counters, there was an average of 26 counters per line and finally that both my wrist and eyes ached after.

My horrible logo

I have just seen my taylor made horrible logo which only cost me a grand total of $5 over at www.horriblelogos.com It's truly disastrous. Have your own made and get a link to your website.