Let’s face it.
We find awesome stuff online to reference from. Whether it be a small art painting hung up in a local cafe to impress that cute barista or a new building project in Dubai, your initial idea will come from somewhere else.
If you really want to be “original” or “innovative”, projects that reference outside of the scope tend to be more interesting. Take examples that don’t connect with the topic at hand. For example, need to incorporate flying for an airline logo without using a bird? Look up giraffes or even father away 18th century doors (A bit absurd, but you get my point).
It’s lateral thinking. You’ll become more informed in and around your topic (obviously, you should understand what the topic is first). Your references could be taken from within the scope but if it’s lacking that “originality” that many of us desire, then try looking away to what it immediate connects to. However, that said, this doesn’t always work if you are trying to connect people with a familiar visual language and use a visual motif from something that they can’t relate to.
It’s effective to share as well. Larger teams like Twitter, hold a group conversation for an hour to go over what they want to talk about. It encourages bouncing ideas, sharing what new things they’ve found and looking into problems in a networked way. But what’s important is that they’re creating a new knowledge around a topic by engaging in a conversation of many different perspectives.
The lesson:
Look outside of the scope to find new connections for your design.
Nobody wants to read your shit.
There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.
They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it. What’s your answer to that?
1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.
2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.
3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.
We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed | Thought Catalog
This is a very fine examination of our culture of work and consumerism. As with all great work, it will make you very uncomfortable. At least it should.
(via minimalmac)
Video mapping + animating character from a custom typeface = I need to do more.
Deconstructing Jay-Z’s “On To the Next One”
radaradar:
The Art of Jay-Z’s ‘On To the Next One’
Directed by Sam Brown
Part 1 of 4I get a call about a Jay-Z track, and it turns out to be great. Raw, stripped down, back to basics. The images are already coming on the first listen. I usually find good ideas come instantly or not at all.
The track has this sample in it that sounds like a record being played backwards. It puts me in mind of some pretty dark imagery and I decide to take a big risk on pitching something pretty extreme.
So much high profile work is formulaic, mostly because it’s very hard to get labels and artists to trust you on something that doesn’t have instant commercial appeal. It’s a shame. I think that many directors are far more interesting than the work they get to make. I’m helped here because this is the fifth single off the album - the stakes are low and Jay is pressing for something different that moves outside the narrow boundaries of hip-hop videos.
Jay loves the treatment, so I’m shooting it in LA only a week later.
I’m speaking with Regan Jackson, the art director, about which of the set-ups he thinks we can achieve on the limited budget we have. “We’re going to do all of them”, he says, and then I don’t see him for three days. Sure enough it’s all there on the day, and more things I hadn’t even asked for. Regan worked on all the multi-million dollar Hype Williams videos back in the golden age, so I’m especially impressed at his resourcefulness.
Chris Probst, the DP, is amazing. If something needs moving he’ll move it himself instead of wasting time asking someone else to do it. His lighting is impeccable. We talk about this heavy, kind of soapy look that I want everything to have. It’s only when I’m putting the neg up in the TK a week later that I realise how brilliantly and subtly he’s understood me: everyone’s skin has this soft, cloudy quality to it. I’m always amazed at how tiny decisions can make a huge difference to how a film feels.
Matthias Koenigsweiser, a brilliant DP in his own right, is lighting the second unit, which is mostly table-top stuff. He and Bouha Kazmi, the second unit director, are having a fine time pouring cream and molasses on expensive props. There’s a constant production line feeding them stuff, and many of the ideas are improvised on the spot.—Sam Brown, January 2010
Director of Photography: Chris Probst
Art Director: Regan Jackson
Stylist: Arielle Antoine
Editor: Amanda JamesSecond Unit Director: Bouha Kazmi
Second Unit Director of Photography: Matthias Königswieser
Shot in Los Angeles, November 2009 · Released New Year’s Day 2010
—
The Art of Jay-Z’s ‘On To the Next One’ compiled by Trent Babbington
|| Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4 ||
Behind the Scenes · Controversy
Your visual references? They’ll find them sooner or later
Beautiful in function and in visual design. This personal connection online is similar to Skype or other video calling software and carries over into technical support for British Gas Energy (design by MmDesign).
I think it comes closer to solving the stranger effect when you call in for support on a helpline, giving a face for users to feel that they are being helped out.
Flat UI is not the only way forward
There isn’t really anything to be true to, except the user and helping them understand the device and its apps as easily as possible. If you can use textures and UI effects to help you with that goal, I think you should.
Agreed.
Industrial and UI design are different fields, they do however share traits that enable each to be better. This overlapping between design fields let’s UI Design have less “aesthetic” and focus on its function much like industrial design. Industrial design makes itself functional by having an appearance that suits the audience.
It’s like an art movement for mobile devices and operating systems in general. Remember the Commodore 64 and how that looked like? You’ll still have nostalgic die-hards (aka hipsters aka me) to recapture that in some sort of way. Whether they express it in a 8-bit visualized mobile app game or through the ironic use of Microsoft Publisher’s text effects.
The device is constant but the style is variable.
Let’s keep it that way.
Has anyone felt like this in their art/design school?
I certainly have and can tell you that it sucks.
Simply put, the thing that draws back a lot of the work I try to do is the scalability and time. Those two factors alone take up a lot of the process and reduce bigger ideas into smaller ones just to reach the deadline.
Be accepted amongst Deutsch designers. Dapper heads will be disgusted but creative kids will love you
Try it out
Source:
BETA version of Trend Generator
http://www.trendlist.org/generator
I had to use this awesome tool for my “happy apocalypse” message
Imagine responsive design that isn’t device dependent but body dependent. It’s a bit awkward trying out the site on your webcam in a coffeeshop, wiggling back and forth in your chair, so I advise you do this at home (or at casually slow).
This is another way for bodies to interact on the web (not that it doesn’t already exist). It does show how one of the most important elements in the web design, typography, has a chance to change again with how people read text on the web.
Here are some other ways to use this:
- Detect body presence and turn on/off scripts for site efficiency
- Play around with <canvas> and <video>
- Apply it on fine print so people can’t read it (kidding)
Responsive Typography is a stunning concept by Marko Dugonjić where the size of the typography displayed on the screen is based on the viewing distance of the reader, calculated via webcam. This concept can be very useful for tablets and eReaders and other applications.
Try it by yourself visiting the demo site (still in beta) that Marko have created (webcam is required)
http://webdesign.maratz.com/lab/responsivetypography/realtime/
