Christine's Design Blog

Such great book designs by JR Harris. They have bookmarks sewn into the spine. Brilliant!

Found on The Dieline.

This video’s hilarious, created by FaceOut Books … Came across it on Drifting Creatives’ Twitter. Seems it was also a part of Make|Think.

I myself love books (so much so that my childhood dream was to be a novelist) and would hate a world without print, so this is very fun to watch. Well, things being smashed is always fun to watch anyway, right?

aiga makethink interviews from drifting creatives on Vimeo.

Love this video made by Drifting Creatives interviewing 20 designers at the AIGA Make|Think conference held in Memphis. Includes Chip Kidd, Stefan Sagmeister, and Michael Bierut — who, by the way, was hilarious at the AIGA My Dog and Pony II event in DUMBO. Especially love the part where they give advice to graduating students! (‘Don’t fuck with typefaces’ haha — note taken.)

Found via Chip Kidd’s Twitter, and so glad he tweeted about it.

Sagmeister is back!

Last February I was at Barnes and Noble, reading an issue of Print magazine, and there had been an email Q&A in which Steven Heller asked Sagmeister questions about the sabbatical in Bali, which was still going on at the time. (Just found a link on Heller’s site to download a pdf of the interview here.)

Even then, Sagmeister was very preoccupied with the dogs:

Heller: But what have you actually learned so far?
Sagmeister: When attacked by hollow-eyed Balinese dogs, I can make them scatter by pretending to pick up a stone.

This amused me so much that I’d written it down in my Moleskine, and it’s really funny to hear him talking about the dogs again. At least he’s made peace with them now, albeit after making T-shirts with such a menacing message.

Also love the coffee table with the compasses and the cups with the magnets.

I can’t wait to see the work that comes out of this sabbatical. I’ve been spouting off knowledge I learned via Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far all year (the most helpful of which have been ‘Trying to look good limits my life’ and ‘Having guts always work out for me’), and that had been a result of his first sabbatical. Much to be anticipated!

His ‘obsessions make my life worse and my work better’ is now on view at the gallery at the AIGA National Design Center as part of the 365 annual exhibition. My volunteer friend said she actually had a Sagmeister sighting while manning the door at the opening reception. I, sadly, was serving wine and cheese sticks upstairs and missed him .

Some images from the reception (click to see full-size), and here I’ve circled the location of Sagmeister’s work. The exhibition is well worth checking out — I’ve been meaning to go back for a second look, but unfortunately the gallery is open only during the week until 5 p.m.

Design legend Paula Scher, partner at Pentagram Design, gave a lecture as part of the FIT Visiting Artist Program on Monday evening. The event was free and open to the public, so my Electronic Page Design II class went as a field trip.

Somehow I’d always had a hard time truly relating to Paula Scher’s designs, but listening to her talk about her past, her reasons for doing certain things, and various experiences really brought Paula as a person home to me. Here are some of my favorite parts of the night:

Here, Paula showed us a photo of the house she grew up in in Maryland. It was a cookie cutter house that literally got her lost, because all of the houses looked the same. She said that this upbringing caused her to rebel against all things Helvetica and in the Swiss international style, because things are prone to look the same when you strip things down to that extent. Instead, her heroes became the likes of Pushpin Studio — one of the founders of which eventually became her husband, her ex-husband, and her husband again (yes, I’m talking about Seymour Chwast — talk about a prominent couple in graphic design).

I wish I could find a better quality image of what’s shown on the screen here, but it’s such an old work that it seems untraceable on the Internet. It was a job that Paula did for AIGA called ‘Graphic Design USA.’ She was told that they had no fee to pay her, but they had $1000 to cover expenses. Paula said, ‘Well what are expenses?’ and they said, ‘You know … like if you need to buy a typeface and photos and stuff.’ So Paula asked, ‘What if there are no expenses?’ to which they replied, ‘I guess you can keep the $1000.’ So Paula executed the entire cover by hand. The front shows her estimation (based on a presidential election — I can’t remember when she said this was, or which election) of how many people in each state uses Helvetica. The best part is that on the back she drew a map of the United States from memory, and she’d accidentally left out Utah, so you see it added in below the rest of the country.

And of course we have her famous designs for the Public Theater. (Sorry, that’s a railing getting in the way in the photo above.)

That is about the extent of which I took photos of the work she showed, but she showed a lot of work. Some of my other favorite things she talked about were the environmental graphics projects that she’s done. She said that somehow seeing huge banners in the Public Theater that she’d designed made people think that she could do environmental graphics, but she usually doesn’t know what she’s doing when she tackles these projects. It’s always great to hear such accomplished designers saying that they don’t know what they’re doing. Among her environmental graphics projects are the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh North Side. She’d commented that she didn’t know how they expected a logo to help bring people to visit that side of town, so she decided to present all these crazy ideas, figuring that it’s Pittsburgh and she can simply just not go there anymore if things don’t work out.

At the end, Paula took questions from the audience, and many people were asking about how she’s dealt with changes in technology. She said that yes, technology is always changing, so young designers should definitely look into mastering new technology, as she’s found that in the past, economic downturns and technological changes coincide. Though the result is the loss of one medium (such as records — Paula started out doing album covers, like many famed designers did, but with digital music that profession’s gone out of the picture), she says that because people don’t change (when it comes to clients, etc.), the same problems are there, so she feels that essentially it’s all the same.

One of the very encouraging (or depressing? I can’t tell) things she said is that in a bad economy, even if we’re not making a lot of money, we need to keep making things — ‘Because if you’re not doing [design] to make things, there are other ways to make money.’ Great advice, because sometimes it’s easy to forget why we’re doing this in the first place.

Oh, yes, and it was the day before her birthday, so they surprised her with a cake in the beginning. Happy birthday Paula, and thanks for the great talk!