Sylvia Harris : 1953-2011 Butterfly in meadow, Seal Cove, Maine, 2011 In the spring after my mother died, I was in the garden with our daughter, Fiona, then just four years old, when we noticed a large, orange butterfly. Wherever we went, went the butterfly — through the garden, past the stone walls, up and down the hill — hovering near us for close to an hour. “Buddhists believe that after a person dies, their soul remains present for awhile,” I told Fiona. “So maybe that butterfly is really Nini,” I added, referring to the name our children used for their grandmother. Fiona poked at the earth with her plastic shovel, pretending to plant something, and said nothing. “Daddy’s mother is downstairs,” she announced, a propos of nothing. I first met Sylvia in 1979, when I was still a teenager and she was a graduate student in graphic design at Yale. But my experience of Sylvia was a personal one — tethered to professional practice in a way, but enriched and ennobled by who she was, not what she did. So, here goes.
Competition: five copies of Folding Techniques for Designers to be won Competition: we've teamed up with publishers Laurence King to give Dezeen readers the chance to win one of five copies of Folding Techniques for Designers. The 224-page paperback book gives step-by-step instructions for creating 3D paper forms through photographs, diagrams and drawings. These movies show demonstrations by the book's author Paul Jackson - watch more movies in this series on the Laurence King website and check out their Facebook page. This competition is now closed. Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions. Here's some more information from Laurence King: Folding Techniques for Designers From Sheet to Form by Paul Jackson Folding Techniques for Designers by Paul Jackson and published by Laurence King in May 2011 is an elegant, practical handbook, covering more than 70 folding techniques explained through clear step-by- step drawings, crease-pattern drawings and specially commissioned photography.
These Brands Allow Users To Design Them. How'd They Pull It Off? | Co. Design Branding continues to evolve at a gallop, spurred this time by advancing technology and the rise of social media. "The internet has challenged the conventions of branding,? says Simon Browning, a brand specialist at Tokyo creative agency EAT. "We believe that smart companies will shift focus from logos and CI's to actively demonstrate what they are capable of and establish innovative policies that people can align with." Logos, to be sure, are inching towards interactivity and mutability: There's Bruce Mau's frame logo for an art school, which is filled with student works like a gallery wall; the MIT Media Lab's morphing logo; and Google's web signage, which was recently made into a pluckable guitar. These logos don't just change; the patrons of the brand change them. SALT debuted in Istanbul this summer with an identity by New York graphics studio, Project Projects. Provoke participation Make the system bigger than you Create, share, distribute
ChangeOrder: How to Conduct Post-Mortem Project Evaluations This is an extensive rewrite of a previous ChangeOrder post for my next book Design Business from A to Z—so much so I'm reposting it! The website went live last week, and the entire staff is throwing a party to celebrate! The developers are huddled in the corner with some microbrews, plotting how they'll splice into the agency intranet to add a virtual dartboard. Designers are mingling with the copywriters and account people, clinking wineglasses and bonding over the ads they saw during The Office. Yes, the job went way over budget—and the last thing your team wants to think about is who needs to take responsibility for it. Not the best time to mention that tomorrow, you're scheduling a post-mortem meeting (a.k.a. lessons learned, post future, etc.) to talk about how the project really went. Was the estimate wrong to begin with? The flow of a well-structured post-mortem meeting Here’s a draft agenda for an hour-long post-mortem meeting. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Understand the Psychology of Design Excerpted from 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People by Susan Weinschenk. Copyright © 2011. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders. To receive a 35% discount on this book, go to the Peachpit Press Online Store and enter the discount code 100T during the checkout process. This offer is valid through December 2012. In addition to the HTML version of the excerpt below, you can also download the excerpt as a PDF that retains the full design of the printed book. WHAT YOU SEE ISN'T WHAT YOUR BRAIN GETS You think that as you're walking around looking at the world, your eyes are sending information to your brain, which processes it and gives you a realistic experience of "what's out there." Figure 1. What do you see? Figure 2. The Brain Creates Shortcuts Your brain creates these shortcuts in order to quickly make sense out of the world around you. You can influence what people see, or think they see, by the use of shapes and colors. Figure 3. Figure 4.
Make Grids Quickly in InDesign This article originally appeared in InDesign Magazine #37, August/September 2010. Subscribe now! Some designers use structured grid systems with guides on Master Pages to influence their layout decisions. Others rarely use formal grid systems at all. Yet all designers have the occasional need to arrange images in rows and columns, and for that, you need a grid. But how can you create a quick grid without resorting to subtraction and long division? This article explains six ways to create grids in InDesign: 1. Click the image below to read the article as a PDF:
Beautiful Catalog Design Ideas to Spark Creativity Inspiration August 17, 2011 Catalogs are multi-paged printed materials that can either be stitched or wire-bound on the sides. They are popularly used as menus, service and product listings and directories. Like magazines, they can often be kept by customers for future reference or left in stores for daily use. It is only but necessary to design these catalogs well and to only have its color printing done by a proper print shop. A good design and print makes readers want to read the catalog from cover to cover, and perhaps even want to order more stuff than they initially intended. Here are 30 beautiful examples of catalog printing. View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source View Source Author: Leah Oripaypay
Periodic Table of Typefaces I love type and I love the periodic table, so I adore this mashup by designer Cam Wilde: The Periodic Table of Typefaces. The table is available as a poster, a giant wall decal and even a Moleskine book cover! The Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world. via How About Orange Type Idea Index: The Designer’s Ultimate Tool for Choosing and Using Fonts CreativelyGet more design strategies: Advertising Design and TypographyWant to brush up your design skills with the basics?
Adobe's Muse Lets Designers Make Websites Without Knowing Code | Co. Design Adobe makes programs like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, which enable nearly every graphic designer on the planet to create nearly every piece of visual content you've ever laid your eyes on. Naturally, their bread and butter is making graphic designers happy. So their newest product, Muse, hopes to make life even easier for designers--specifically ones working in more traditional mediums who are being tapped to take on more web-based projects--as an ultra-simplified, graphically focused tool for making websites. Muse's biggest selling point is that designers don't have to learn code (or "markup languages") like HTML, CSS, or Javascript to break through the barrier of designing for the Internet. As Muse's engineering director, Joe Shankar, says in the introductory video, "We're going to change the way websites are built for graphic designers." For some design firms, learning code isn't a bonus, it's a requirement. [Top image: A still from the video for Radiohead's House of Cards]
Don’t Do TOO Good Of A Job! Maybe this is happened to you. You’ve really nailed a project. You skip out of the client’s with a big smile because you’ve done the best work you have ever done. Months down the line, you haven’t heard a thing from the client and your emails are either not returned or they have cool salutations and don’t answer your question of when there might be another project. One of my clearest examples was a freelance project for a firm that made postcards for the medical profession. NOTE: This article, the sixth in a series of eight articles on Professional Practices which they don’t teach you in art school. I was called by the new creative director; a man with forward thinking and cutting-edge vision. That doesn’t happen much these days. I attended a meeting with him, the art director/art manager/frightened personality and the staff of designers. After designing 30 cards, I was informed I would be limited to 15, and choosing those fell to the creative director. “What do you mean?” 1. 2. 3. 1.
45+ Free Lessons In Graphic Design Theory Sep 15 2011 Considering how many designers are self-taught, either in whole or in part, the importance of a solid foundation in graphic design theory is often overlooked. New designers often want to jump right into creating websites, rather than learning the basics of why some designs work and some don’t. But they’re putting themselves at a disadvantage to designers who do have formal training or have taken the time to learn the principles behind good design. Below are more than 45 recent lessons in graphic design theory. General Design Theory The Lost Principles of Design Covers a number of basic graphic design principles, including balance, contrast, emphasis and subordination, directional forces, proportion, scale, repetition and rhythm, and unity, all with illustrations. Principles of Good Design: Balance Discusses how important balance is to creating an effective design. Web Design Tips: The Use of Balance This covers how to create balance in your website designs. Typography (al)(rb)
15 Top Resources For Learning Photoshop Online Adobe Photoshop is one of the most powerful and impactful photo editing program that can turn your imagination into reality without any hitch. There are so many resources and tutorials available online that you can master the skills of Photoshop without attending any class/es. Today we are listing 15 Very useful sites to Learn Photoshop online that takes off the load of huge monetary expenditure on learning Photoshop. If you like this article, you might be interested in some of our other articles on Photoshop Shortcuts, Top Photoshop Tips, Photoshop Tricks, and Photoshop Manipulation Tutorials. Advertisement Good Tutorials Here you will get tutorials ranging from Animation, Photo Effects, Basics, Photo Retouch, Buttons, Scripting, Color, Text Effects, Designing, Textures, Drawing, Web Graphics, Effects and Web Layouts submitted by users. More Information on Good Tutorials Tutorialized Learn tips and tricks, cool effects, and how to use the Photoshop tools more effectively. TutorialKit Tutorvid
Photoshop vs Fireworks in Web Design - The Last Battle Most people try to compare Fireworks and Photoshop in the field of web design. Everybody knows that a lot of things you can do in Fireworks, can also be made in Photoshop. This is a fact but is not demonstrating that Photoshop was built for making screen layouts. Photoshop can’t create pixel-precise layouts for web design and can’t make quick changes to screen layouts. Fireworks is at the core of the design process and the following video will demonstrate some of the most important features . This tutorial was made by Andre Reinegger on Vimeo. It will be very interesting to discuss about what people tend to use and why. So What Graphic Program Do You Use for Web Design? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Don’t forget that we talk about the use of these programs in the field of web design ! Let “The Fight” Begin !