Archive for the ‘design’ Category
The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance
Design Council: The study has charted the performance of companies grouped together for their consistent showing in design award schemes. It has discovered that a Design Index of 63 companies and a further Emerging Index have held their lead over the stock market as a whole during bull and bear markets as well as during the recovery period which began in 2003. Since then, the Design Index has grown by 43 per cent and the Emerging Index has risen by 74.3 per cent, compared to 26.2 per cent growth for the FTSE 100 Index.
Bokardo: The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be…
Web design is anything but boring. Look at what is happening with Facebook right now. They are exploring a new paradigm of social design. Can we build recommendation systems that inform us while not pissing us off? What part of social interaction can we model next? Are there social relationships we can’t model? Shouldn’t model?
07.11.20 / design
Most online stores are built for searching, not browsing. Yet we love the experience of casually perusing products, seeing what will catch our eye. Browse Goods was designed to support this type of undirected search. It allows you to scan hundreds of products at a time via an interface that mimics Google Map. Products are subdivided into different categories such as brands or style and placed on a large map.
07.08.04 / design
An article about artist, Jonathan Harris in Metropolis: If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the largest number of people possible,” he says…
Jessica Hagy’s Indexed is everything simplified into hand drawn charts and graphs on index cards.
A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design
Allan Chochinov: We are suffocating, drowning, and poisoning ourselves with the stuff we produce, abrading, out-gassing, and seeping into our air, our water, our land, our food—and basically those are the only things we have to look after before there’s no we in that sentence. It gets into our bodies, of course, and it certainly gets into our minds. And designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about it, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be…
07.04.07 / design
President of the United States Typographicus
Steven Heller: No president before Bush—not Kennedy, Reagan, or Clinton—relied on such huge typographic statements to get their messages across. I checked 100 or so photographs of past presidents’ major speeches and saw no such signs or banners for “The New Frontier,” or even “The Evil Empire.” Their respective oratory did the job just fine without any need for read-along subtitles. But the current administration, perhaps worried that Bush’s less than commanding oratorical style could have an adverse or emetic effect, has committed to using visual/verbal aids—like cue cards aimed at the audience—to steer our gaze straight to the point. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this age of diminished attention spans, but the strategy would be more effective if the White House communications department hired real typographers and graphic designers instead of computer geeks.
07.03.25 / design
Bruce Nussbaum: So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.
07.03.22 / design
Willi Kunz: What we’re experiencing in graphic design goes hand-in-hand with other evidence of current societal decline: obsession with monetary and material values, craving for instant gratification, lack of manners, short attention span, foul language, etc. Graphic design will always continue to be produced in one form or another but no one can predict how future iterations will take shape. Human beings by nature are problem solvers so it is likely that today’’s problems may spark tomorrow’’s opportunities…
07.03.05 / design
Virginia Postrel’’s The Substance of Style - How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness: The twenty-first century isn’t what the old movies imagined. We citizens of the future don”t wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get food in pills. To the contrary, we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world. We want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, several different cuisines, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative facades on our supermarkets auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell. Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate develops, and BBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it…
