Mere retinal art Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity. Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses A set of potential photographs architectureimagesadvertisingpsychology
Designer + Developer Workflow An Article by Dan Mall danmall.me The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy. The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this: “Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.” Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us? collaborationmakingholismadvertisingcreativity
Hacking is the opposite of marketing An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game. The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends. All sorts of ways to use the machineIn ways you didn't anticipateStretching the product toolsadvertisingcreativityutility
Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested Development An Essay by Khoi Vinh www.fastcompany.com [Designer News] is good, useful content, but most of it is written by designers themselves. Taken as a whole, it’s also a useful illustration of something vital that our industry lacks: balanced, insightful, independent writing that critically evaluates the profession. Starved for good journalism and criticismThe allure of clicks Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital DesignOne Designer's Response to Khoi Vinh's Complaint designcritique
Starved for good journalism and criticism Imagine for a moment if Kimmelman–or any architecture critic–was also a practicing architect, building enormous commissions for corporations at the same time he writes his columns. If this were the case, you’d probably come to one of two conclusions: either the writer in question was not a serious critic, or that the art form itself is not very serious. You might also stop to think how much poorer we would be without the contributions of his independent voice to the discussion of the craft. That is exactly the situation that the design profession finds itself in today. We are lucky to have designers actively sharing knowledge, but we’re starved for good journalism and criticism. architecturecritiquedesign
The allure of clicks If more of us, as designers, approach what we encounter on design aggregators every day in this way, perhaps we can begin to effect some structural change. By and large these sites are just as susceptible to the allure of clicks as the craft of design. But if we are more selective about what we consume, we may be able to encourage design publications to follow that lead by applying editorial judgment to what gets shared every day. consumption