The Shape of Design

We were impressed with designer, writer and teacher Frank Chimero and his kickstarter campaign last year to fund the book, The Shape of Design. Chimero wanted to create not another text-book, but rather a book that focuses on the Why instead of the How and to investigate the creative processes behind design. After many hours of labor, the book’s been released and the design world is abuzz. In his own words, Chimero describes his book:

What is the primary quality of great design? It moves. It moves us emotionally, travels from person to person, and takes us toward something better. Designers connect and build bridges that lead us to new places and expand what is possible. We tell productive untruths, then toil to make them reality. The practice shifts like a shadow and moves the target. When it does so, the products of design achieve a resonance. They get passed on like a story and turn into a gift.

Book Summary

Hi. My name's Frank Chimero. I've spent the better part of the last two years writing and speaking on design and thinking about the topics that orbit the practice: storytelling, concept, craft, and improvisation. I want to take all of the ideas I've had and connected these past few months and capture them in a book format.
I've been teaching for the past 5 years, and I've always been a bit frustrated that there isn't a nice, concise book that overviews the mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. For instance, many say that graphic design is visual communication. A cornerstone of communication is storytelling, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find any discussion of how to tell stories with design in any design book. This should be remedied.
There are new challenges in the world that need to be discussed, and I think design is a prime lens to consider these topics. As our world moves faster and as things become less stable, it becomes more important for individuals to embrace ambiguity, understand paradox, and realize that two things can conflict and still somehow both be true. We must realize that logic doesn't always work, and that sometimes nonsense is the best answer. These are the topics I intend to address in the book.
The Shape of Design isn't going to be a text book. The project will be focused on Why instead of How. We have enough How; it's time for a thoughtful analysis of our practice and its characteristics so we can better practice our craft. After reading the book, I want you to look at what you do in a whole new light. Design is more than working for clients.
But really, this book aims to look at the mindset and worldview that designing develops in order to answer one big, important question: How can we make things that help all of us live better?

The Dark knight rises

The spectacular, monolithic final movie in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is like a huge piece of industrial machinery: massive, grimly and brutally metallic, capable of lifting great weights and swinging the mightiest wrecking balls, but taking its time about it.

A slinky, sexy cat burglar, played by Anne Hathaway, shows up in disguise at a charity fundraiser at Wayne Manor with lawbreaking on her mind. But more scary still, a sinister super-villain, aptly called Bane, is planning to lead an insurrection of underground warriors to destroy the city and take on the Dark Knight. He is a muscular slab of a man with an evil hold on his many followers, and with a hideous facial disfigurement, concealed by a creepy leather respiration mask. As played by Tom Hardy, Bane has presence and force, no question about it. But Heath Ledger's Joker had more charisma, more style, a limber and nimble-footed wickedness. And the Joker had one particular demonic superpower that Bane does not have. You could make out what he was saying.The Batman (even after nearly a decade, no one in Gotham forgoes the definite article) has now been absent from the city for many years, and the city is happy with the specious explanation that the authorities have provided: namely, that the city's late District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) heroically gave his life fighting crime, and the Dark Knight, the arch-criminal, has slunk away. Billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne has gone into reclusive retirement: both are of course played with intelligence and no little charm by Christian Bale. But now two new subversive figures have burst on to the scene.

This movie is operatic, crepuscular, portentous, a vision of apocalyptic catastrophe – and there are some great things in it. Christian Bale himself brings an interesting kind of wounded maturity to the double role, and Nolan elicits from Bale a performance which gives both Bruce Wayne and Batman a new life, as separate entities, by investigating their vulnerabilities and paranoia. When the Dark Knight returns, astride his extraordinary fat-wheeled motorbike, it's really exciting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a terrific performance as the young, idealistic police officer, Detective Blake, and Michael Caine is a calm, shrewd, heartfelt Alfred. 

But the film is clotted and extended with tiring and sometimes baffling subplots concerning the frankly uninteresting shenanigans of the Wayne Enterprises Board: there is some manoeuvring and personal petitioning from one Miranda Tate, played by Marion Cotillard, who shows herself in later sequences to be not a natural action performer.

And I have to say I found Bane disappointing: his character promised much, but didn't quite deliver. The Joker's conflict with Batman was at least partly a cerebral affair, a matter of outsmarting and counter-outsmarting, and Bale raised his game in confrontation with Heath Ledger, who gave us a genuinely evil movie villain.

The Dark Knight Rises certainly confirms the weapons that Christopher Nolan can wield as a director: this is a big, brash, plausible movie on a self-consciously epic scale, a deafening superhero Bayreuth, taking place in a gloomy, almost physical smog of testosterone. It will certainly be a commercial smash, and you have to admire the confidence with which Christopher Nolan insists on the seriousness of the Batman mythology; he has thoroughly reinvented it, reauthored it and thought it through, in a way no other director has done with any other summer franchise.

Creativity

     Creativity is ability to imagine or invent something new. Human brain is separate into two side, left side is for logical thinking to manage analytic, probability, objective and verbal things. Right side is for creative thinking such as generative, possibility, subjective and visual things. So, creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learnt. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and where appropriate profits.
     why do we care? Harvey firestone said:"capital isn't so important in business. Experience isn't so important. You can get both things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn't any limit to what you can do whit you business and you life." Edward De Bono said:" there is no doubt that creativity most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns."
     Idea = performance = career, so allow us to experience more and appreciate all the things that are around us. If we do like that than our world will becomes much interesting and all the problem can solve easily and in a fun way.

Illustrator and Animator Lesley Barnes

Resource: http://lesleybarnes.co.uk/

I’ve been view the work of Glasgow based illustrator and animator Lesley Barnes for quite sometime now. Her illustrations continue to surprise and delight me in their bright colors, geometric shapes, and often magical and mythical subject matter. Her use of patterns and repetition is extraordinary, and is a true visual treat.

 


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