Books  

Timothy Samara's book, Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual, available in print and on Kindle is simply the most compact and lucid handbook available outlining the basic design principles of layout, typography, color usage, and space.

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 The Design Surgery  

The London design agency, Design Surgery has completed a series of designs for reports that provide companies and organisations with an effective, informative and powerful communications platform for Raconteur Media.

This series of urban cityscapes, landscapes and conceptual cover illustrations were made by The Design Surgery for special interest media company Raconteur and The Times newspaper.

Each cover visualizes a detailed scene to demonstrate the themes covered throughout the report. The Design Surgery's use of detail, curves and simplified shapes build a cohesive brand image for Raconteur Media.

Illustrated and designed by London design agency, these reports provides companies and organisations with an effective, informative and powerful communications platform that allows them to directly reach their core audience. Raconteur brings together content and sponsors in a credible package of quality journalism and cutting-edge design.

The Design Sugery is a creative agency that thrives on contemporary design. "We are graphical surgeons, passionate problem solvers, emotionally and ethically driven," states their website.

The company prides itself on their in-depth knowledge of visual communication, brand awareness and targeted design. "We examine the boundaries of our clients requirements, revealing a brand's purpose and personality. By identifying the role in which a brand should play, we are able to grasp an accurate understanding of the links between business, brand and consumer."

 Design  

The iconic American industrial designer, Niels Diffrient has passed away at the age of 84.  Diffrient will be remembered for his bringing ergonomics to the fore in design and for his famous Freedom Chair.

N iels Diffrient was a pioneer of ergonomic design -- taking the radical approach of examining the human body as it interacts with furniture, and asking, Is there a better way to sit?

The iconic American designer has passed away at the age of 84.

  Scott Robertson  

Continuing from his boyhood obsession with soap-box racers, Scott Robertson has for years instructed artists and designers the 'drawthrough' method and continues to work in the transporation and entertainment industries developing exciting concept art and design.

Born in Oregeon, concept designer and artist, Scott Robertson grew up in the country. When he was a child, his artist father, Richard, taught him how to draw and design the toys in his imagination.

After two and a half years at Oregon State University, Scott transferred to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1986, California where his father had studied illustration.

Robertson graduated in 1990 with honors and a B.S. in Transportation Design. He then opened a consulting firm in San Francisco, where he designed a variety of consumer products, the majority being durable medical goods and sporting goods. In 1995, he began teaching at Art Center, first with a year-and-a-half stint at Art Center Europe in Vevey, Switzerland (now closed), and then in Pasadena, California.

 Design  

The Art of Product Design by Hardi Meybaum explains the rise of Open Engineering, a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes.

Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group of internal "experts" for new ideas. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Madeexplains the rise of "Open Engineering," a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes.

The book helps explain how to establish open flows of information inside and outside an organization, increasing the quality and frequency of input from different groups and stakeholders.

  Open Source Design  

Industrial designer Tom Dixon and Dassault Systèmes have teamed up to create the first open design competition based on a modular concept. Dixon will give participants access to the design files of new products, and challenge them to re-configure and remix into different functional objects.

Industrial designer Tom Dixon and Dassault Systèmes have teamed up to create the first open design competition based on a modular concept.

In a bold move, Dixon will give participants access to the design files of new products, and challenge them to re-configure and remix into different functional objects.

This new modular rapid manufacture concept leverages 3D printing technology to create junctions, which will then be combined and assembled with aluminum tubes to complete truss-like structures.

3D printing, which was previously limited to small parts, can now be used to create real life products - such as furnitures for instance. This concept will lead to unique and innovative objects.

Tom Dixon

"Disrupt being the theme of the MOST Salone 2013, this design hacking contest is a natural way to go! Thanks to online social 3D Experiences, anyone can be a designer today and express creativity," said Dixon.


The concept is also relying on the fact that the various parts and "joints", may be 3D printed to give life to the final creation. The contest will start on April, 8th and we will accept submissions until June, 30. The winner will be chosen by the jury on July, 31st. —

The winning entry, chosen by a jury including Tom Dixon, will receive an iPad, his concept 3D printed and assembled and featured at the Maison & Object trade show in Paris.


SOURCE  Disrupt Design

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 Creative Intelligence  

Having only recently declared the death of design thinking, author and educator Bruce Nussbaum is soon to release a new book entitled, Creative Intelligence.  The book focuses on developing 'CQ' and applying it to real-world problems.

Author Bruce Nussbaum blogs, tweets, and writes on innovation, design thinking, and creativity. The former assistant managing editor for Business Week, he is Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design.

Nussbaum is also the founder of the Innovation & Design online channel; founder of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly innovation supplement; and author of the forthcoming book, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire, which will be available next month.

A year-and-a-half ago, Nussbaum famously declared that design thinking was dead.  Now with  Creative Intelligence, he explores a new form of cultural literacy and a method for driving innovation and sparking start-up capitalism.

According to Nussbaum, the world is quickly changing in ways we find hard to comprehend. Conventional methods of dealing with problems have become outmoded. To be successful, one can't just be good; one must also be a creator, a maker, and a doer.

 Urban Art  

PEACHBEACH is an art- and design collective from Berlin, made up of designers and illustrators Attila Szamosi and Lars Wunderlich.

PEACHBEACH is the collaborative project by the two designers and illustrators Attila Szamosi also known as Vidam and Lars Wunderlich a.k.a. Look. Together they realize loads of different projects in the field of urban art, illustration, graffiti, and design. —

Wunderlich is from a small town in the north-east of Germany where time runs a bit slower than the rest of the country. Drawing since he was yound, Wunderlich crashed into graffiti in his youth. Then he studied art in a small town up north. After this he started studies again, this time in Berlin and it was graphic design.

Szamosi was born in Budapest, and raised in a small town near Cologne in the west of Germany. He started drawing also really early and was always fascinated by comics and electronic dance music. After school he came to Berlin during his design internship and also to study graphic design.

 Alexander Lervik  

One of the top designers in Sweden has a new limited-edition chair inspired by a rainy trip to the Philippines   Alexander Lervik's Spike Chair is as mush about sculpture as it is about seating.

Alexander Lervik is one of Sweden's most well known designers, collaborating with a number of national and international producers, including Moroso, Dark and Johansson Design.

Though his main focus is lighting, furniture and product design, he also creates concepts for hotel and restaurant interiors and collaborate with fashion brands. Throughout the years, Lervik has received a number of awards, amongst them Best of The Best at 100% Design, +1 Best in show at Stockholm Furniture fair, Utmärkt Svensk Form and the prestigious award Design S. he is represented at Nasjonalmuseum in Oslo, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the design museum Rhösska in Gothenburg, Sweden. —

Lervik's Spike chair is unique in shape. The seat and seat back are fashioned from a number of rods, like a bed of nails, which collectively mimic the curve of a body. The base of the chair is made of tubular steel, welded together with a three-millimetre steel base plate. The upper section is made of turned ash components.

 Industrial Design  

Apple will soon be reporting its first profit drop in many years. According to Peter Cohan this outcome brings into clearer focus the biggest challenge facing Apple’s board: Is Tim Cook the person for the CEO job and if not, who would be better?  Cohan points his finger directly at Jonathan Ive.

In a interesting article Forbes contributor Peter Cohan, an author, former management consultant and former venture capitalist, has suggested that Apple's Tim Cook should step down to make way for Jonathan Ive.

"Now it's time," Cohan writes, "for Apple's board to put the person with design skill in the CEO job."

Ive's impact on Apple has been considerable since Steve Jobs returned to helm the company in 1997.  At that time, Jobs refocused the company to once again become a design-first leader in the industry.

With the iMac and the iPod to the iPad and iPhone, Jobs and Ive in tandem brought the company to soaring heights and the design to new levels of simplicity and ubiquity.

 Graphic Design  

Tasty Placement's infographic provides some good food for thought if you’ve hit a roadblock on your latest logo design.

Tasty Placement took a look at the world’s top 100 brands to determine which fonts, colors and formats were the most popular choices.

Their infographic provides some good food for thought if you’ve hit a roadblock on your latest logo design.


Tasty Placement based their research on the latest Forbes list of the world’s most powerful brands. Since brands frequently change or update their logos, our study reflects only the logos featured on the list. The color white was not included as a design feature if other colors were present. Apple’s white logo was the only exception.

The team found that most brands opt for a blue logo featuring the world’s most popular sans-serif font, Helvetica. Serif fonts ended up being the least used typeface, although it hasn’t stopped Google from being listed as the #5 top brand in the world.

 

SOURCE  Tasty Placement

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  The Creators Project  

As part of a part of a collaboration of SOFTlab with The Creators Project uses algorithms and 3D printing to create data visualizations of your Facebook relationships.

Crystalized is a unique 3D representation of your Facebook relationships , it is part of the collaboration of SOFTlab with The Creators Project to create data visualization that can actually be printed via Shapeways.

SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Michael Szivos shortly after receiving a graduate degree in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to immersive digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects, we began to focus less on the medium and style and more on ideas.

You can check it out here along with other projects done by Sticky Monster Lab and Sosolimited.

 Architecture  

Accelerating The Southern California Institute of Architecture into the 21st Century  the new SCI-Arc Robot House, initiated and designed by faculty members Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser, builds upon the school's strengths to create a next generation platform for experimentation and speculation on the future of architecture.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) course “Eye, Robot” focuses on the intersection of computation, robotic fabrication, and cinematography.

The course explores robotic motion control as a creative medium for designers, mainly through the use of the custom robotic animation software platform, designed specifically for the SCI-Arc Robot House.

Accelerating SCI-Arc's pace, already at the leading edge of digital design and rapid prototyping, the new SCI-Arc Robot House, initiated and designed by faculty members Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser, builds upon the school's strengths to create a next generation platform for experimentation and speculation on the future of architecture.

Situated conceptually and physically between studio and shop, academy and industry, the double-height 1,000-square-foot Robot House is a research space for hands-on collaborative experimentation, advanced multi-robotic platform, and exploration and architectural agency. Exploring opportunities outside of traditional digital production, our six state-of-the-art Staübli robotic systems offer a new design environment which focuses on Institute-approved research and coursework.

 Books  

In Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks, more than fifty of the world's leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a rare glimpse of their creative processes.

We are living in a golden age of data visualization, in which designers are responding to the information overload of our digital era with astonishing feats of visual thinking.

Using a wide variety of techniques, they transform complex ideas into clear, engaging, and memorable infographics. In recent years, books and websites have been collecting the field's best. While stimulating, these finished projects offer little insight into how visual solutions were reached, making them of limited use to designers wanting to produce work of their own.

In Infographics Designers' Sketchbooks, more than fifty of the world's leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a rare glimpse of their creative processes.

Emphasizing idea-generating methods—from doodles and drawings to three-dimensional and digital mock-ups—this revelatory collection is the first to go inside designers' studios to reveal the art and craft behind infographic design. —

Organized alphabetically by designer, Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks combines both breadth and depth in 352-pages. The topics span range from politics to science to pop culture to finance.

The book excels at showing how essentially dry, complex scientific information is brought to life by storybook-like infographic imagery embedded with raw data. Still, however polished the final product is and whatever data it represents, the common theme is a good old-fashioned sketch at the start.


It is incredibly interesting to go behind the scenes of a designer’s work process, through their sketches.

Author Steven Heller is the cochair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at NY's School of Visual Arts. He is the author of many books, including Graphic, Typography Sketchbooks, Scripts, and Shadow Type.

Co-author Rick Landers is founding partner and co-creative director of graphic design studio Landers Miller Design.

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  Casey Reas  

Artist Casey Reas uses software code to express his thoughts—starting with a sketch, composing it in code, and witnessing the imagery that it ultimately creates. Using the software he helped to create, Reas uses color to convey emotion and movement.

F or Casey Reas, software is the most natural medium to work with. He uses code to express his thoughts—starting with a sketch, composing it in code, and witnessing the imagery that it ultimately creates.

In the video above, Reas is at work his studio where he uses color to convey emotion with his programming language Processing. —

Together with Ben Fry, he created the software while at MIT, and it is now used by thousands of artists and designers worldwide.

A former student of John Maeda, Reas is an artist whose conceptual and minimal works explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas’s software and images derive from short text instructions explaining processes that define networks.

Reas attributes his involvement in the creation of the programming language Processing to Maeda’s book, Design by Numbers however while Maeda tends to be considered a “digital” designer, he has consistently explored the boundaries—and possibilities—of varying expressive modes, from pencils to computers, and his reputation, until recently, was built on his penchant for innovative thinking and an insistence on making computation accessible to all.

 Gil Bruvel  

With the Flow series, Bruvel continues to celebrate the imaginative and the real, yet here his vision seems to penetrate the veil of material form. These striking, evocative sculptures, comprised of graceful sinuous ribbons of cast stainless steel, reveal an essential underlying fluidity that exists simultaneously within the physical, quantum, and metaphoric realms.

For his more than thirty-year career, artist Gil Bruvel has passionately followed an ever-changing, organic flow of artistic expression as it has moved through a series of mediums and forms.

Each one is a reflection of the artist’s aesthetic sensibility and thoughtful perspective at the time, while continuously remaining open to the inner nudges inherent in a truly creative life. In each approach—from his surrealist-inspired and fantastical imagery to three-dimensional functional and sculptural art, to the current Flow series—he has drawn on threads of creative stimulus and artistic mastery that began very early on.

Bruvel absorbed precision of hand and an eye for design from an early age watchin his cabinet maker father work. Studies in the fundamentals of drawing and sculpture began when he was nine. Later, apprenticeship in an art restoration workshop provided an excellent art history education with intimate, hands-on insight into techniques of the Old Masters as well as a fluency in 20th-century art.

By the time the young artist set up his own studio, he was combining these and other creative sources with a finely honed eye for recurring patterns and motifs in the natural world. In 1990 he settled in the United States and now lives near Austin, Texas.

 Graphic Design  

Graphic designer and illustrator YoAz has created “Electro Animals,” a collection of colorful animal illustrations made of geometric, electric circuit-like designs.

French graphic designer and illustrator YoAz has created “Electro Animals,” a collection of colorful animal illustrations made of geometric, electric circuit-like designs. More of the awesome designs as well as detailed closeups of the work can be viewed at YoAz’s Behance portfolio.

It was Philip K. Dick who asked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and while Yo Az doesn’t appear to be robot. the artist dreams up electric creatures from a few slightly different species.

 Andrew Lee McConnell  

Inspired by the spine of a whale, the Vertebrae Staircase by Andrew Lee McConnell is not simply mimicry of organic form but an exploration in shaping structure.

Inspired by the spine of a whale, the Vertebrae Staircase concept by University of Calgary educated, Andrew Lee McConnell is not simply mimicry of organic form but an exploration in shaping structure.

Much of the design work went into refining the single component, or vertebra, that mate with each other creating a unified spine running from floor plate to floor plate. These interlocking vertebrae create a rigid and self-supporting structure.

 The outer surface is composed of multiple layers of a durable composite fibre material while inside are the key structural elements. The vertebrae are mated using steel fittings and locked together with steel pins.

When all the connections are made, continuous structural spirals run through every vertebra at the hand rail and beside each step, reinforced by structural foam and a network of steel rods. Steel plates connected to the slightly modified base and top vertebrae are anchored to the floors.

Beyond this, there are no hidden supports as the Vertebrae Staircase is designed to act as one structural element, bearing the loads of its users and transferring these forces to the floor plates. And the pinned connections at the floor plates combined with the connections between vertebrae allow the staircase to successfully resist twisting and rotational forces that result from the cantilevered spiral and cantilevered steps.

 Step, banister and hand railing – McConnell could clearly see all these elements contained within a whale's vertebrae and spine. The Vertebrae Staircase is a reconfiguration of this familiar form resulting in a unique and functional design. —