Designer Albert Exergian. See more here.
Posts Tagged ‘design’
Caught My Eye
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Churning Out Crap
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009I got to thinking about the history of design. I can imagine back when a person hand-crafted a chair or sewed a shirt they may have given thought to the design of the object. I’d assume that unless it was commissioned by a buyer they were far more concerned with utility and construction than aesthetics.
When people were able to make products faster and with less effort I imagine their priorities changed. That’s when capitalism became a factor in the design process– producing more products means they’d likely create inventory. Need keep the selling inventory to make a profit, so they’ve got to produce something that people want to buy. I’d guess the driving factors for consumers would be need, price and/or design.
I’m interested in the moment in history when people started considering how to sell their new mass-produced wares. Specifically, was there a period of time when idea bubbles appeared and people said “Eureka! I will compete in the marketplace with the lowest cost item and design be damned!”
How did it come to be that people choose low cost over aesthetics for products like decorative outdoor fencing? Fake Christmas trees? My personal bugaboo is vinyl siding (and please don’t look to my house as the pinnacle of beauty. Believe me, the moment we have $10,000 it’ll be clad in the most gorgeous Hardy Board.)
Yesterday I was driving down a road of million-dollar houses and saw what I thought might be vinyl fencing. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But that’s what got me thinking– if you’re going to have a house that’s a million dollars, it’s kind of incumbent upon you to make it look like a million bucks. You know? Of course you’d have to consider the value of your house when making improvements (who’s going to shell out the big big bucks for your vinyl-clad house?) I’m not so much making an argument about taste. There are plenty of ugly, hugely expensive houses out there. But you can’t go cheap and cheesy with your money–even if your taste isn’t mine.
I really thought I had a good argument going here. But the little voice in my brain is saying that sometimes things are expensive and are really POS [that stands for pieces of S] while other times a lesser price can be just chock full ‘o value. I’m stumped on this one. May I revisit when I have a clearer answer to this personal brain teaser?
Thank you for the free pass. I appreciate it.
Who Am I?
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009I was always known as the ‘crafty’ one in high school, but to be honest, I’m not one for crafts. I went to art school for Industrial Design so I could learn to be a designer, yet my work was always among the ‘craft-iest’ produced in my class.
I want to be nestled in the place between craft and industrial design, but I have no idea if there is a place like that.
I’ll try and tease apart this personal conundrum. I like to make things by hand. I’ve been known to make myself skirts, knit loads of hats to give as gifts, and I made a tiny envelope and fabric pouch to hold my daughter’s first curl. Other than a penchant for needlepoint, I rarely make anything that is purely decorative. In fact, I think my handful of needlepoints are the only decorative things I’ve ever made, aside from sketches and drawings.
…And then there’s the design-y side of me. I like products that are well designed, mass produced, but never if they skew more towards eye candy than user friendly. I’d never want to buy a product or a piece of furniture that costs exponentially more because it’s been “designed”. Some of my most favorite products are the ones that work well and look good in an unassuming, maybe it was designed for convenience rather than aesthetics, sort of way.
I have a rocking chair that gives me an inner smile every time I see it. It’s pretty low-key, a simple wooden chair with a caned seat (and normally I don’t even like caned seats). The scale of it is unusual and the style blends in perfectly with our Ikea furniture and repainted thrift headboard and night table. I wonder who the original manufacturer was and who was their intended audience? Could have been 50 years ago they designed that chair, and it looks thoroughly modern in 2009. Now that’s good design!
I wonder if there are other designers out there looking to transcend craft and design. For me, the term ‘craft’ lost its allure in the late 70′s and ‘design’ started to tarnish in the early 21st century. I hate to see myself thumbing my nose at conventional terms, but I also know I’m quick to shirk being defined by a group or a term.
Maybe I’m too postmodern for words.
When Graphic Design Rocks
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009Paul Rand was talented and prolific. He was a graphic designer beginning in the 1930′s in NYC. Rand worked in advertising and branched into designing book jackets and children’s book illustration, as well as teaching at Yale. Here’s a book that documented his life in graphic design: Paul Rand by Steven Heller.
Heller writes a nice biography of Rand that helps to put his work in historical context. I especially liked that Heller often includes a sentence or two about each example of Rand’s work because he often has a blurb that adds a lot of info. Accompanying an advertisement for his employer William H. Weintraub & Co., Heller writes:
The agency desperately wanted to win the lucrative RCA account, and Rand learned that its Chairman, General Sarnoff, knew Morse Code. For this one-time full-page ad, Rand’s sublime solution was to use Morse Code glyphs to grab the General’s attention. The agency did not get the business, but the ad made history.
The ad, needless to say, involved a bunch of giant dots and dashes along with several lines of text. Winetraub & Co.’s name and address are at the bottom of the page, and a giant dot and dash on-end appear behind the word ‘Advertising’, making them look as though they’re an enormous exclamation point.
I hate to always be so picky, but I’ve got to say that this book not what it could be– not that I’m an expert on Rand, but I don’t think Heller picked the cream of the crop for examples of Rand’s work. Having said that, it’s still a book worth looking at. Better yet, it’s a book to read and whet your appitite for Rand designs. Because they’re all over the place. Of course you konw the UPS logo? Rand designed it…IBM, ABC, Colorforms, Westinghouse, all of them and more…
I’m Talking Scrapbooks, Not Scrapbooking
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009I frequently visit the site Design Observer for news and reviews on design– I highly recommend it. Jessica Helfand is one of the people behind the scenes at Design Observer and she has both undergrad and grad degrees in Graphic Design from Yale. So I assumed any book she was involved in would be worth looking at. And here is one such book: Scrapbooks: An American History.
Helfand chose to show a limited number of scrapbooks that date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each scrapbook is a unique and cohesive collection that is highly personal. One scrapbook was started by a 19 year old who eloped. She collected all kinds of ephemera from her honeymoon, including a telegram from her parents responding to news of their daughter’s marriage [they took it very well]. Another scrapbook was devoted to scraps of fabric, each stained with a different substance. Each swatch is accompanied by a description of the stain and what the scrapbooker used to remove it.
What I like best about this book is that it makes the contents of fragile old scrapbooks accessable and it reveres the intent of early scrapbook makers. I don’t think that modern scrapbooking has the same sense of preservation, and more focus may now be on the display of information rather than the information itself.
The only thing I didn’t particularly like was the heavy-handed use of graphic-designy introductions to each chapter. Helfand laid out the pages in bright red and gives the weight and dimensions of the scrapbook. To my eyes it’s a tired old layout, showing a product on a grid with dimensions in a quasi-commerical, design-jargonny way. It’s so far afield of the contents of the book I’d rather not see it at all or have it somehow reference the content in some way. [I'm not a graphic designer, but I do have some sense of design and my own personal taste. Sorry, this really bent me out of shape.]
This book is great. Go take a look for yourself, and leave plenty of time to get totally wrapped up in it.
Designing your Nest
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009Looking through home design idea books often leaves me left wanting more. My house and photos in home decorating books usually have nothing in common. I saw the cover of this book: The Nest Home Design Handbook by Carley Roney and I thought ‘that could kinda be my house, maybe’.
A brief description of my house: it’s tiny, furnished with a mix of mid-century modern+traditional and IKEA, and our rugs and pillows tend to be bright. We moved in recently and as of yet we have not hung a single picture. So far we’ve painted the walls in muted colors that were not the original tremendously ugly yellow, and all the trim’s been painted white. Some design inspiration could serve us well right now.
I liked that the rooms pictured shared the same spare design that my house has. I’ve realized that a sparsely furnishing a room is treading water in shark territory– every piece really needs to work or it looks like the final days of a clearance sale. Less furniture means every curve, every corner is potentially on display. I think that’s why modern design really works well with high end furniture. You need to spend a lot of money to really get nice lines and curves and a high degree of finish. Once in a while you can get lucky with IKEA or thrift, but walking into a fancy furniture store is (of course!) the most efficient way to go. I’ll need a critical eye to make sure our furniture works in each room of our house.
The other thing that I can see is important to modern-ish design is texture. A fluffy flotika rug (is that what it’s called?) can really give visual interest to break up a space. Fabric and patterns are great too.
Ironically, looking at this book was similar to looking at my own house, but if I’d finished decorating my house and it looked really good when I was done. I’m not sure that I love the room designs in the book, but I feel like I can handle replicating them and they work well with my lifestyle and current taste in decorating. I guess it’s a little deflating to know that a design book that gives me usable ideas is boring. I guess that’s kind of inevitable because it’s not a great leap from how I’m already decorating. There weren’t any photos that were particularly dreamy and enviable, but they’re pleasant and livable. (Dull? Does this make me dull? Yikes! Sounds like I’m settling for something less than fun+exciting.)
I think the downside to this book is that none of the vignettes look particularly inviting. Even IKEA makes more welcoming rooms in their store displays.
The most delicious drawing book
Friday, January 16th, 2009This is the book at the top of my Want To Own list: Fashion Sketchbook by Bina Abling. It’s a textbook on fashion design sketching for apparel students.
Bina’s technique is phenomenal and the way she describes and illustrates her process step-by-step is superb. I have a collection of art and craft ‘how to’ books, and this is far better than anything I currently own. She shows the best way to angle a model to show off clothing features, the way to describe the all kinds of fabric weights and textures, how to draw models that are toddlers, tweens, men, shoes, belts… everything. It’s so comprehensive and well executed I feel like I am learning much more than fashion drawing from her text.
I have to warn it is a giant hard-covered spiral bound book and the pages are thin. It’s big like a coffee table book but there’s no glamour to the binding. Other than that, I give it 10 stars; a must-read.
