I have to assign a reading to the rest of my grad seminar today.... I'm still mulling it over. Somehow last night I'd convinced myself that Loos' "Crime and Ornament" was the thing to go with, because it always evokes a very strong reaction from people one way or another, they won't have read it before (graphic designers), and we've been talking a lot about manifestos. But then I woke up this morning feeling like maybe I should stop drawing attention to my archi-nerdiness by doing things like that, and should just assign my backup, which is a rant by George Lois on why there aren't good editorial concept magazine covers anymore. Everyone will know who Lois is, some may have read the article before, and everyone will come to the same conclusion, but it will be a solid reading and discussion.
You should give them your archi-nerdy reading as long as you feel confident with the reading I guess, and I'm sure you are. What matters is to have your own self interpretation of the text and to feel that the text chosen makes a point in itself; and if it says something about you, it's even better cause you can discover firends you would never have found otherwise. I guess.
I suspected you guys would say as much, just needed a little validation. LB is right, it is 'Ornament and Crime'- dyslexia strikes again. The library on campus had their only copy checked out, but fortunately one of my housemates saved her history readings, so I think I'll go for it. But isn't it something of a crime that a school of 40,000 people only has a single copy of this?
95% of my architecture books have been lost by the US postal service. I highly doubt that I'll ever get them back. = ( This is especially sad, because while I can buy more books, I had one signed by Pierre Koenig, and he won't be signing any more books.
sorry to hear that rationalist. you sound like you've taken it in stride, i guess. my books (architecture and other - 60 boxes or so last time i moved) are so much a part of my identity that if i lost them i'd certainly have to undergo some sort of counseling.
This was only two very big boxes. Somehow my graphic design stuff, the smallest of the arch books, and all my fluff reading made it, but the heavy architecture stuff did not. I miss it enough that I'm considering getting a holiday job at Crate & Barrell or Barnes & Noble to pay for replacements, as USPS doesn't seem very forthcoming with the cash.
That totally sucks Rationalist. I still have quite a few history books from my first degree, all of them are not only relatively expensive but have to be special ordered. I'd be sick if ever they were ever lost. Were the boxes insured?
Rationalist, I have had a similar experience with a lost book and the Post Office. Mine was signed by Oscar Neimeyer, guess it is now someones coffee table book and it was in Portugese to boot.
When I moved from CA to Boston, my one lone box that held all my notes and mementos and sketches from living and working in France never showed up. Everything else was fine, all the sox and undies were accounted for, but no record of my life abroad. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to go do it all over again. (ha!)
I'd go with the Loos b/c I know as an architect that I love it when people expose me to thought-provoking material from other fields--like painting, biology, psychology, astronomy, whatever. So if I were a graphic designer I'd love to hear about something from a slightly different universe than the one I was already thinking in.
The Lede
California Wildfires Have Burned 666 Square Miles
By MIKE NIZZA 56 minutes ago
The latest updates on the wildfires burning across Southern California:
maybe it is going to stick to people's minds as 666 fires. and a movie to follow. amazing thing is, almost no human loss. i wish i could say the samething for the flora and fauna. well, let the smoke clear before you act on the figures. maybe they will revise 666 sq. mi.
maybe the movie is going to be flora and fauna going to come back and kick human butt. all this in scary holloween movie genre...
los angeles is covered with thick fire air to a degree of catostrophic eeriness. it is highlighted by intense light, broken and filtered through the tickness of the firesmoke of plastics, chemicals in building materials, furniture and other consumer items you name it. add to that intense heat.
these fires in barely safe distances away from city proper, must have caused much more loss than what it is assessed now. it always is.
governor came through as a strong leader in the peoples eyes via cameras and captured the stage in a seemingly thoughtful ways. as strange as it might sound, i am beginning to like arnold as a govern'r since he came out and pushing for a health insurance plan for californians. i think his accent improved too. he is easier to understand. as a person with strong accent i relate to the issue.
on another note, i get to start a small but nice project detached from a known house with owners aware of architecture. this is my second project this year. the business is fun but slow.
perhaps it's the cynic in me, but i am having a hard time mustering any feeling for the cali-fires. now before you knock my dick in the dirt just know i am not typically a heartless prick. i think it's just when this disaster or that disaster happens, some part of this great country we live in goes, why should i care, why should i pay to help bail you out just because you live where you live...well cali, it's your turn, and i just bought a house, so i ask you; will i have to bail you out? if i do, then when the canadians drop the big one, and you know those fucking cannucks will, will you come bail me out and rebuild my hacienda?
here's another thought.
why is it i get this sense that the world is collectively holding its breath? why won't it just exhale slowly, and not run the risk of some bully coming along and punching it in the gut? it just feels like the end is near and no one is acknowledging that...
beta, I felt similarly this morning when I heard about a big mortgage bailout by Countrywide, who also holds the mortgage on our house. I turned to Brian and said "So we signed a contract for this house - think Countrywide is gonna show up and reduce our payments too?"
I feel for people who might lose their home because they can't afford it any longer, it is a terrifying feeling with which I'm familiar. But what about responsibility?
As for losing things in a fire, that's another kind of terror. It does break my heart to see these flattened charred outlines where someone's home used to be. I hope most of them were able to save the important things before they had to leave.
the bail out, if it happens is perverse. it isn't to help the little people. it is only to ensure that capital is available for the rich people to do their investments with. nothing more nothing less. if you could show them how your mortgage should be reduced in a way that would seem to be in their interests, LB, i am quite sure you could get the fat cats to fight on your behalf for just such a move. til then...meh.
losing a home to fire sucks. ditto for losing to flood. i have no idea if people are living in places prone to disaster or not. if that is the case then maybe they should not be allowed to live there...but it still sucks.
rationalist, why architecture sources? something frm outside your own field might be more educational, for you anyway. we did that for grad school seminar self directed course (we made the course ourselves ), with only rule being that we had to do one book a week and it couldn't be directly about architecture, then we discussed and wrote reports. was quite good for all involved cuz we had to find intelligent books to read without falling back on previous knowledge. learned a lot.
jump, I think for next time I want to branch out into some french existentialism, specifically some of the stuff regarding authenticity, but I haven't actually read it before, and I only got two days' notice that I needed to assign a reading today. I do agree in general that we can learn a lot from outside sources we don't know about yet, which is why I shyed away from the Lois rant that I thought everyone would know of and agree with, and would only serve to demonstrate that I know about him too.
I just got back from an AMAZING LECTURE! I finally feel like I belong here and I know that the things I want can be successful.
actually i have a question for you, how is art chantry so different from others in the industry? to me as outsider to the field it looks more like a different style in the same old venue than a real break from the norm. i assume that i am wrong, but the work looks as seductive as anything by more traditional designers. his work seems as purposeful, only more rough.... ?
I think that part of my impression is one of him as a person- he was tattooed, wearing a really terrible plaid shirt, and just seemed like a regular person who admitted his own likes and dislikes, and didn't need everything to have a meaning. I was as much impressed by the fact that his wasn't giving up who he is as I was by his actual work. I've been feeling a little boxed in by Swiss people lately, so he was just a breath of fresh air in that respect. As for why is work is different, from my blog entry:
"Why shoot a TV and then take a picture of it, when you can take a picture of it and shoot the picture? Why put flames on a poster, when you can set the poster on fire?" Several of his pieces use devices like these and are more tactile, more unique, and to me simply more real than much of what you see that is simply ink on paper. I certainly wasn't excited by every single piece he showed, but there was a certain branch of his work that really struck a chord with me.
That's sort of where the french existentialism comes in for me to, in the concept of 'the real' and authenticity. It's something I've been searching for, for a long time, and I finally feel like it's almost within my grasp. So this seems like an appropriate time to revisit those sorts of texts, to see if they mean more to me now, can help me unlock that last bit of idea that's sort of glimmering below the surface, still undefined.
also, the other thing about Chantry's work is that you have to remember that it has looked like it does for a very long time. He was speaking to us of a poster that he designed for a band where every single copy got ripped to shreads, literally, within an hour, because people were actually offended by how it looked. So it's the aspect of doing something because it represented you and represented your client despite it being almost universally detested at the time, and coming later on to enjoy the commotion of it. Anyway, while it doesn't look like anything particularly original now, that's because it was part of the beginning of that look, not because it joined into an existing look.
yeah i got that vibe. he seems like someone who was there at cgbg before it was really hip to be there. i suppose the link to his work online doesn't do it justice.
in a documentary called the pursuaders a critic of pr and design as natural progression of psychoanalysis (beginning with feud's nephew working for pres. wilson during the war, etc, etc, am sure you know the story) suggests that graphic artists and others in the industry are part of a crazy machine that requires more and more extreme actions to catch the attention of regular folk, simply because we have become desensitised to trad commercial fare and tend to tune it out...
Interestingly one of the things they mention in the documentary is how to do work that feels authentic, cuz people are turned off by the fake...so the best designers are the ones who can use authenticity for commercial purposes...apparently a rare breed. What that all means, i am not certain. my favorite paranoid documentarian, adam curtis, did a nice series called "the trap" that examines similar ideas. He is really interested in how people are controlled by media so you get a negative view of the biz, but is still worth a viewing.
anyway, i found chantrys work quite nice. sorta like banksy's work somehow (reactionary in interesting way). thanks for pointing it out for us here!
ratio, i am with you on "authenticity" the only problem i am trying cross the chasm of being "authentic" and trying to get paid...does anyone care that i am authentic, i want to get a "sleeve" tattoo, but will anyone take a 40 year old seriously with a sleeve? i am by nature crass and un-apologetic, but will that fly, who are my clients, can i survive, do i care, will going down in flames be as fun as it sounds???
Orhan, I'm glad you have a potentially fun new project but I'm shocked that it's only your second of the year. Why is it that the most talented people always have the hardest time getting work?
On authenticity:
I know I've posted this image before:
I was completely taken by the graphic design of this book cover when I first saw it, and still think it is exceptional. But I think part of why I loved it so much is that at the time I was at Cranbrook, surrounded by graphic designers doing work that looked like this:
The Dewey cover looked so un-self-consciously designed; it looked like a solution not a "design", if that makes sense. I realize there is absolutely nothing "inauthentic" about the second example, and authenticity is a very slippery concept to try to explain.
lb, I likey too. My current seminar prof would rip it apart though- she hates when the negative spaces get 'trapped'. Maybe it's an architectural thing that we find that attractive? I like to look at the shapes made by the trapped spaces.
BTW, it just occurred to me that you might know one of my profs, depending on when you were at Cranbrook- were you there the same time as Annabelle Gould? I just ask, because that cover you posted seems rather Annabelle-ish.
oh, and beta, I know what you mean. My ink is hidden, only metal shows. That way if I ever had a job that was really, really worth it I could take them out or put in retainers and look 'normal'. I guess though that I don't necessarily mean tattooes and punk records though, but in general about producing work that is authentic to who you are. My type teacher is sooooo Swiss, but it really suits her. There's something technical about her, small but strong, and she really is Swiss to the core (despite being Japanese), so it works for her. But for every person like that there's another hundred doing it because just because that's the way they were educated, and they haven't bothered to think beyond it...
I think I do know her....let me verify with my husband, he'll remember design better than I; he hung out there a lot with his roommate Matt Owens (whose work you should know if you don't already - very influential). volumeone.com
Oh and Cris: please return the favor and euthanize me if I ever do a text-only Power Point in which I type the sentence then read it out loud to my audience. gguuaaaaaahhhhhh......
Just for the record, firm partners shouldn't be allowed anywhere near AutoCAD, upon pain of death.
I'm currently working on a couple projects for a particular partner who insists on doing most of her own design work in AutoCAD before handing it off to me to clean up the drawing and "do the formatting".
First, wouldn't her billable time be better spent doing partner type stuff (whatever it is they do) instead of CAD monkey stuff that can be done by somebody with a much cheaper billing rate?
Secondly, it will take me longer to clean up all her sloppy drafting and non-standard layers than it would have taken for me to just draw the whole thing from scratch to begin with.
Arrrgh... Almost lunchtime. I need a cheeseburger.
Beta-
I hear you bro- there are no safe places in the world, so peeps better accept the risk or move to somewhere else where they feel safer. Floods, tornadoes, blizzards in the midwest; hurricanes, tsunami's, nor'easters, east coast; drought, fires, avalances in the rockies; and cali has earthquakes, volcanoes, mudslides, floods, and fires. Just that cali is the most beautiful state in the union, so I'd gladly take the risk and make the tradeoff for this frozen northwoods.
LB- the point of powerpoint is to not have to repeat the info on the slide, so you go girl!
I'm sorry, but it's my turn to be cantankerous. I can't fucking stand it when people say "oh well, they shouldn't have built their houses there, DUH!" You're gosh damned fucking right they shouldn't have built their houses there! Just like no human should be able to live in Chicago or Minnesota or Rochester, NY or Pheonix or much of Russia or the Amazon or MANY MANY PLACES ALL OVER THE FUCKING EARTH. We require just as much human engineering to be able to inhabit the midwest of America, beta. I hate to be a bitch but how in the heck can you sit in your toasty heated-up minnesota house and criticize those who choose to fortify *their* houses in order to live in California? I was in New Orleans last weekend and struck again by the idiocy of those who were quick to point the finger at city residents and say "well they got what they deserved, living down there in that swamp; they should have known better than to build there!" Oh yeah? Well in that case all human beings should be scattered through the meditteranean and coastal equatorial regions, because there's nowhere else on earth we are suited to live without building massive support systems. Me being here in Chicago is dependedent on reversing the flow of the Chicago river. That's a hell of a lot harder than clearing out some chaparrel from your building site and building a floating slab on sand. I don't disagree that it's silly to live in areas where humans clearly aren't wanted; but the solution to that is a) severely restricting the human population (by killing off millions of people) and b) putting a global development strategy in place that limits human development to very very narrow areas where the environment is 100% hospitable to them (if that even exists, which it doesn't). It doesn't get much more hospitable than CA.
Also, people around here seem to have forgotten THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, which wiped out way more people and structures and nobody seems to think it was a bad idea to rebuild HERE!
I'm really sorry to choose you to pick on, you're one of the smartest and most interesting people on here, but I just can't abide that line of thinking. It's simplistic and reactionary and I've been hearing it all day, and it's driving me nuts.
Thread Central
still alive.
I have to assign a reading to the rest of my grad seminar today.... I'm still mulling it over. Somehow last night I'd convinced myself that Loos' "Crime and Ornament" was the thing to go with, because it always evokes a very strong reaction from people one way or another, they won't have read it before (graphic designers), and we've been talking a lot about manifestos. But then I woke up this morning feeling like maybe I should stop drawing attention to my archi-nerdiness by doing things like that, and should just assign my backup, which is a rant by George Lois on why there aren't good editorial concept magazine covers anymore. Everyone will know who Lois is, some may have read the article before, and everyone will come to the same conclusion, but it will be a solid reading and discussion.
Anyone have an opinion?
I think if people want to operate as well-educated creators in any part of the design world they need to have a familiarity with Ornament and Crime.
You should give them your archi-nerdy reading as long as you feel confident with the reading I guess, and I'm sure you are. What matters is to have your own self interpretation of the text and to feel that the text chosen makes a point in itself; and if it says something about you, it's even better cause you can discover firends you would never have found otherwise. I guess.
ornament and crime would be great.
embrace your archi-nerdiness!
I suspected you guys would say as much, just needed a little validation. LB is right, it is 'Ornament and Crime'- dyslexia strikes again. The library on campus had their only copy checked out, but fortunately one of my housemates saved her history readings, so I think I'll go for it. But isn't it something of a crime that a school of 40,000 people only has a single copy of this?
you mean you don't have it yourself?!
95% of my architecture books have been lost by the US postal service. I highly doubt that I'll ever get them back. = ( This is especially sad, because while I can buy more books, I had one signed by Pierre Koenig, and he won't be signing any more books.
beta,
more about pixel on TED
sorry to hear that rationalist. you sound like you've taken it in stride, i guess. my books (architecture and other - 60 boxes or so last time i moved) are so much a part of my identity that if i lost them i'd certainly have to undergo some sort of counseling.
(i guess you already knew that...)
This was only two very big boxes. Somehow my graphic design stuff, the smallest of the arch books, and all my fluff reading made it, but the heavy architecture stuff did not. I miss it enough that I'm considering getting a holiday job at Crate & Barrell or Barnes & Noble to pay for replacements, as USPS doesn't seem very forthcoming with the cash.
That totally sucks Rationalist. I still have quite a few history books from my first degree, all of them are not only relatively expensive but have to be special ordered. I'd be sick if ever they were ever lost. Were the boxes insured?
Rationalist, I have had a similar experience with a lost book and the Post Office. Mine was signed by Oscar Neimeyer, guess it is now someones coffee table book and it was in Portugese to boot.
sorry to hear about your book loss rationalist... like steven, my books are wholly a part of me... didn't they kill your microwave too?
i'd definitely go with the loos reading... it would be interesting to get some graphic designers' takes on it...
When I moved from CA to Boston, my one lone box that held all my notes and mementos and sketches from living and working in France never showed up. Everything else was fine, all the sox and undies were accounted for, but no record of my life abroad. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to go do it all over again. (ha!)
I'd go with the Loos b/c I know as an architect that I love it when people expose me to thought-provoking material from other fields--like painting, biology, psychology, astronomy, whatever. So if I were a graphic designer I'd love to hear about something from a slightly different universe than the one I was already thinking in.
the apocalypse?
The Lede
California Wildfires Have Burned 666 Square Miles
By MIKE NIZZA 56 minutes ago
The latest updates on the wildfires burning across Southern California:
maybe it is going to stick to people's minds as 666 fires. and a movie to follow. amazing thing is, almost no human loss. i wish i could say the samething for the flora and fauna. well, let the smoke clear before you act on the figures. maybe they will revise 666 sq. mi.
maybe the movie is going to be flora and fauna going to come back and kick human butt. all this in scary holloween movie genre...
los angeles is covered with thick fire air to a degree of catostrophic eeriness. it is highlighted by intense light, broken and filtered through the tickness of the firesmoke of plastics, chemicals in building materials, furniture and other consumer items you name it. add to that intense heat.
these fires in barely safe distances away from city proper, must have caused much more loss than what it is assessed now. it always is.
governor came through as a strong leader in the peoples eyes via cameras and captured the stage in a seemingly thoughtful ways. as strange as it might sound, i am beginning to like arnold as a govern'r since he came out and pushing for a health insurance plan for californians. i think his accent improved too. he is easier to understand. as a person with strong accent i relate to the issue.
on another note, i get to start a small but nice project detached from a known house with owners aware of architecture. this is my second project this year. the business is fun but slow.
perhaps it's the cynic in me, but i am having a hard time mustering any feeling for the cali-fires. now before you knock my dick in the dirt just know i am not typically a heartless prick. i think it's just when this disaster or that disaster happens, some part of this great country we live in goes, why should i care, why should i pay to help bail you out just because you live where you live...well cali, it's your turn, and i just bought a house, so i ask you; will i have to bail you out? if i do, then when the canadians drop the big one, and you know those fucking cannucks will, will you come bail me out and rebuild my hacienda?
here's another thought.
why is it i get this sense that the world is collectively holding its breath? why won't it just exhale slowly, and not run the risk of some bully coming along and punching it in the gut? it just feels like the end is near and no one is acknowledging that...
beta, I felt similarly this morning when I heard about a big mortgage bailout by Countrywide, who also holds the mortgage on our house. I turned to Brian and said "So we signed a contract for this house - think Countrywide is gonna show up and reduce our payments too?"
I feel for people who might lose their home because they can't afford it any longer, it is a terrifying feeling with which I'm familiar. But what about responsibility?
As for losing things in a fire, that's another kind of terror. It does break my heart to see these flattened charred outlines where someone's home used to be. I hope most of them were able to save the important things before they had to leave.
the bail out, if it happens is perverse. it isn't to help the little people. it is only to ensure that capital is available for the rich people to do their investments with. nothing more nothing less. if you could show them how your mortgage should be reduced in a way that would seem to be in their interests, LB, i am quite sure you could get the fat cats to fight on your behalf for just such a move. til then...meh.
losing a home to fire sucks. ditto for losing to flood. i have no idea if people are living in places prone to disaster or not. if that is the case then maybe they should not be allowed to live there...but it still sucks.
rationalist, why architecture sources? something frm outside your own field might be more educational, for you anyway. we did that for grad school seminar self directed course (we made the course ourselves ), with only rule being that we had to do one book a week and it couldn't be directly about architecture, then we discussed and wrote reports. was quite good for all involved cuz we had to find intelligent books to read without falling back on previous knowledge. learned a lot.
great essay though (loos' i mean)
jump, I think for next time I want to branch out into some french existentialism, specifically some of the stuff regarding authenticity, but I haven't actually read it before, and I only got two days' notice that I needed to assign a reading today. I do agree in general that we can learn a lot from outside sources we don't know about yet, which is why I shyed away from the Lois rant that I thought everyone would know of and agree with, and would only serve to demonstrate that I know about him too.
I just got back from an AMAZING LECTURE! I finally feel like I belong here and I know that the things I want can be successful.
french existentialism? wow.
that and Art Chantry are interesting combo.
actually i have a question for you, how is art chantry so different from others in the industry? to me as outsider to the field it looks more like a different style in the same old venue than a real break from the norm. i assume that i am wrong, but the work looks as seductive as anything by more traditional designers. his work seems as purposeful, only more rough.... ?
I think that part of my impression is one of him as a person- he was tattooed, wearing a really terrible plaid shirt, and just seemed like a regular person who admitted his own likes and dislikes, and didn't need everything to have a meaning. I was as much impressed by the fact that his wasn't giving up who he is as I was by his actual work. I've been feeling a little boxed in by Swiss people lately, so he was just a breath of fresh air in that respect. As for why is work is different, from my blog entry:
"Why shoot a TV and then take a picture of it, when you can take a picture of it and shoot the picture? Why put flames on a poster, when you can set the poster on fire?" Several of his pieces use devices like these and are more tactile, more unique, and to me simply more real than much of what you see that is simply ink on paper. I certainly wasn't excited by every single piece he showed, but there was a certain branch of his work that really struck a chord with me.
That's sort of where the french existentialism comes in for me to, in the concept of 'the real' and authenticity. It's something I've been searching for, for a long time, and I finally feel like it's almost within my grasp. So this seems like an appropriate time to revisit those sorts of texts, to see if they mean more to me now, can help me unlock that last bit of idea that's sort of glimmering below the surface, still undefined.
also, the other thing about Chantry's work is that you have to remember that it has looked like it does for a very long time. He was speaking to us of a poster that he designed for a band where every single copy got ripped to shreads, literally, within an hour, because people were actually offended by how it looked. So it's the aspect of doing something because it represented you and represented your client despite it being almost universally detested at the time, and coming later on to enjoy the commotion of it. Anyway, while it doesn't look like anything particularly original now, that's because it was part of the beginning of that look, not because it joined into an existing look.
yeah i got that vibe. he seems like someone who was there at cgbg before it was really hip to be there. i suppose the link to his work online doesn't do it justice.
in a documentary called the pursuaders a critic of pr and design as natural progression of psychoanalysis (beginning with feud's nephew working for pres. wilson during the war, etc, etc, am sure you know the story) suggests that graphic artists and others in the industry are part of a crazy machine that requires more and more extreme actions to catch the attention of regular folk, simply because we have become desensitised to trad commercial fare and tend to tune it out...
Interestingly one of the things they mention in the documentary is how to do work that feels authentic, cuz people are turned off by the fake...so the best designers are the ones who can use authenticity for commercial purposes...apparently a rare breed. What that all means, i am not certain. my favorite paranoid documentarian, adam curtis, did a nice series called "the trap" that examines similar ideas. He is really interested in how people are controlled by media so you get a negative view of the biz, but is still worth a viewing.
anyway, i found chantrys work quite nice. sorta like banksy's work somehow (reactionary in interesting way). thanks for pointing it out for us here!
dear thread central,
please euthanize me if i ever agree to create a presentation in adobe flash.
thanks.
ratio, i am with you on "authenticity" the only problem i am trying cross the chasm of being "authentic" and trying to get paid...does anyone care that i am authentic, i want to get a "sleeve" tattoo, but will anyone take a 40 year old seriously with a sleeve? i am by nature crass and un-apologetic, but will that fly, who are my clients, can i survive, do i care, will going down in flames be as fun as it sounds???
help?!
perhaps a poll function on the v3 release?
Orhan, I'm glad you have a potentially fun new project but I'm shocked that it's only your second of the year. Why is it that the most talented people always have the hardest time getting work?
On authenticity:
I know I've posted this image before:
I was completely taken by the graphic design of this book cover when I first saw it, and still think it is exceptional. But I think part of why I loved it so much is that at the time I was at Cranbrook, surrounded by graphic designers doing work that looked like this:
The Dewey cover looked so un-self-consciously designed; it looked like a solution not a "design", if that makes sense. I realize there is absolutely nothing "inauthentic" about the second example, and authenticity is a very slippery concept to try to explain.
Aww crap what happened...
is the cult of individuality authentic? camus wouldn't have thought so.
lb, I likey too. My current seminar prof would rip it apart though- she hates when the negative spaces get 'trapped'. Maybe it's an architectural thing that we find that attractive? I like to look at the shapes made by the trapped spaces.
BTW, it just occurred to me that you might know one of my profs, depending on when you were at Cranbrook- were you there the same time as Annabelle Gould? I just ask, because that cover you posted seems rather Annabelle-ish.
oh, and beta, I know what you mean. My ink is hidden, only metal shows. That way if I ever had a job that was really, really worth it I could take them out or put in retainers and look 'normal'. I guess though that I don't necessarily mean tattooes and punk records though, but in general about producing work that is authentic to who you are. My type teacher is sooooo Swiss, but it really suits her. There's something technical about her, small but strong, and she really is Swiss to the core (despite being Japanese), so it works for her. But for every person like that there's another hundred doing it because just because that's the way they were educated, and they haven't bothered to think beyond it...
I think I do know her....let me verify with my husband, he'll remember design better than I; he hung out there a lot with his roommate Matt Owens (whose work you should know if you don't already - very influential). volumeone.com
makes me wanna watch beineix's "diva". one of the best films ever.
Oh and Cris: please return the favor and euthanize me if I ever do a text-only Power Point in which I type the sentence then read it out loud to my audience. gguuaaaaaahhhhhh......
Just for the record, firm partners shouldn't be allowed anywhere near AutoCAD, upon pain of death.
I'm currently working on a couple projects for a particular partner who insists on doing most of her own design work in AutoCAD before handing it off to me to clean up the drawing and "do the formatting".
First, wouldn't her billable time be better spent doing partner type stuff (whatever it is they do) instead of CAD monkey stuff that can be done by somebody with a much cheaper billing rate?
Secondly, it will take me longer to clean up all her sloppy drafting and non-standard layers than it would have taken for me to just draw the whole thing from scratch to begin with.
Arrrgh... Almost lunchtime. I need a cheeseburger.
Beta-
I hear you bro- there are no safe places in the world, so peeps better accept the risk or move to somewhere else where they feel safer. Floods, tornadoes, blizzards in the midwest; hurricanes, tsunami's, nor'easters, east coast; drought, fires, avalances in the rockies; and cali has earthquakes, volcanoes, mudslides, floods, and fires. Just that cali is the most beautiful state in the union, so I'd gladly take the risk and make the tradeoff for this frozen northwoods.
LB- the point of powerpoint is to not have to repeat the info on the slide, so you go girl!
Here in NYC, most of our disasters are man-made.
LiG- NYC is in a seismic zone, so get ready to rock-n-roll!
Taking one for the team....
And my car [in racing guise]:
lately archinect has been about this lame...
that's not lame, this is lame...
I'm sorry, but it's my turn to be cantankerous. I can't fucking stand it when people say "oh well, they shouldn't have built their houses there, DUH!" You're gosh damned fucking right they shouldn't have built their houses there! Just like no human should be able to live in Chicago or Minnesota or Rochester, NY or Pheonix or much of Russia or the Amazon or MANY MANY PLACES ALL OVER THE FUCKING EARTH. We require just as much human engineering to be able to inhabit the midwest of America, beta. I hate to be a bitch but how in the heck can you sit in your toasty heated-up minnesota house and criticize those who choose to fortify *their* houses in order to live in California? I was in New Orleans last weekend and struck again by the idiocy of those who were quick to point the finger at city residents and say "well they got what they deserved, living down there in that swamp; they should have known better than to build there!" Oh yeah? Well in that case all human beings should be scattered through the meditteranean and coastal equatorial regions, because there's nowhere else on earth we are suited to live without building massive support systems. Me being here in Chicago is dependedent on reversing the flow of the Chicago river. That's a hell of a lot harder than clearing out some chaparrel from your building site and building a floating slab on sand. I don't disagree that it's silly to live in areas where humans clearly aren't wanted; but the solution to that is a) severely restricting the human population (by killing off millions of people) and b) putting a global development strategy in place that limits human development to very very narrow areas where the environment is 100% hospitable to them (if that even exists, which it doesn't). It doesn't get much more hospitable than CA.
Also, people around here seem to have forgotten THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, which wiped out way more people and structures and nobody seems to think it was a bad idea to rebuild HERE!
I'm really sorry to choose you to pick on, you're one of the smartest and most interesting people on here, but I just can't abide that line of thinking. It's simplistic and reactionary and I've been hearing it all day, and it's driving me nuts.
hmph, it's been awhile since i've worked up a good rant.
agree or not, i really like it when myriam rants.
I'm really very pleasant in person, I swear!
I f$ing LOVE it when myriam rants! Especially when it's a very valid rant :o)
hell yeah, these boards can use some intelligent anger
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