This Post has Been Declared a Link-free Zone

"The signs are that many of us struggle these days to read in a concerted, attentive and linear fashion. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that we have become incredibly adept at flitting from one thing to another, filtering, selecting and absorbing little bursts of information as we go. The screen environment, with its many competing nodes of interest, encourages this kind of scanning and scavenging, and we readily embrace every kind of electronic information source, priding ourselves on our quicksilver modern ability to multi-task." Rick Poynor in This Post has Been Declared a Link-free Zone

I find that it is very difficult to read on a screen, concentration is constantly interrupted. It's like getting sucked into a wiki wormhole, jumping from one topic to another and never fully understanding anything. Twitter is the biggest example of this constant jumping, i couldn't be bothered reading a whole article most of the time, I feel like Karl Pilkington on the Ricky Gervais Show. It becomes dangerous when you just read the headlines, because sometimes you get the wrong end of the stick.

Design Indaba MASSIMO AND LELLA VIGNELLI 2007

Coming from a generation where architects designed everything and from a family of architects, design was a rather natural career path for both Massimo and Lella Vignelli. They talk about graphic design as an organisation of semantically correct information, and what makes visually powerful and intellectually elegant design.

video

Learning to Design Without Losing Your Soul

By FRANCISCO INCHAUSTE

um artigo interessante sobre a situação dos recém-licenciados em design.

The Shape of Design

Minimalist design lazy?

Ouchh

something to think about

Periodic Table of Typefaces

from Cam Wilde

The Importance of Typography Education

An article i found on the online edition of Communication Arts,

It's not how we teach typography,
it's how we learn typography
by Dr. Shelley Gruendler

http://www.commarts.com/columns/its-how-teach.html

I really feel that typography is a subject that is crucial to my education as a graphic designer, yet i know close to nothing of it and by the looks of it, won't have a chance to develop it during course at uni. shame...

perception and reality

There is a big difference between perception and reality. The way we understand our surroundings is so unique to us as fingerprints. What is real? Can we find reality in the earthly plane? What we see is what we believe, but what if what we see isn’t real?

When we wander the city streets, locked in our own bubble, we don’t see what goes on around us. We don’t perceive what we don’t find important, like the one legged beggar that greats us every morning or the women of the coffee shop that cleans the steps as we go by, we don’t see these things yet they exist and are more real then the music we listen to on our iPod that we know off by heart or the email we check on the train on our way to work. When we consider a subject as controversial as religion and spirituality, where what we see isn’t important, many of us don’t understand, but many follow it blindly. We believe in so many things that can’t materialize, why does spirituality baffle us so?

Living in a city is different from living anywhere else; we expect a certain kind of interaction with our surroundings and with the eclectic bunch of people that populate it. The first time a person is confronted with city life they or optimistic, they find great joy in the small details, as we grow accustomed we grow cold, we individualize, we surround ourselves with the artificial to be in contact with the world with out having to actually live the harsh reality. The city becomes a blur and we become alone.

We continuously circle the problem of reality, what is real? What do we perceive? Can there be a universal image of one place? And most importantly where are we going? What if the extreme artificiality finally consumes our life completely? Should we be scared?

Design Doubt

I have had doubt about my future profession, I felt that communication design could only perform as another tool for a consumer society.
But, I have come to understand that it could become something big. It could become a medium for communicating problems and new ways of thinking up solutions.
As a designer I can create an environment to induce a new way of thinking. I can create a space for collective participation in something meaningful. And this will be my goal...

O que é o Design?

De todas as reflexões que o design propõe a um estudante, este deveria ser o mais fácil e básico de responder. No entanto, com o tempo fui percebendo que é dos mais difíceis de entender. Podemos atribuir varias origens ao design como forma de pensamento, com diversos significados e propósitos A tortura de todos os estudantes é responder a esta simples pergunta sem certezas nem definições na ponta da língua. Na minha opinião, o Design é uma forma de pensar, é uma disciplina de projecto e processo que tenta solucionar os problemas que lhe são propostos. Exige as pessoas que o praticam que sejam criativos e perfeccionistas, que saibam olhar para uma folha branca como um espaço onde se desenvolve a comunicação.
É claro que podia procurar a definição desta disciplina em livros que já li e naqueles que ainda não li, mas ainda nenhum me conseguiu dar uma definição certa e definitiva a esta pergunta, mas de tantos autores que já se questionaram sobre o assunto consegui reter algumas ideias: Design nasce de uma necessidade de resolver um problema, através de uma metodologia, de um processo constrói-se um projecto.

Inamo Restaurant by Blacksheep

Um projecto interessante de interfaces interactivos, aplicado num menu de restaurante vejam aqui.

"We cannot not change the world"

Nestes últimos tempos tenho pensado bastante nos excessos, na ecologia e na nossa responsabilidade pela escassez dos recursos naturais. Existe uma frase que me vem constantemente à mente: "think more, Design Less" da Ellen Lupton, acho que não só se aplica ao Design mas a toda a sociedade dos excessos.

Precisamos urgentemente de voltar ao básico, mas isso não é assim tão fácil! Tudo que nós possuímos tem um prazo de validade cada vez mais curto, os produtos que adquirimos são feitos para serem substituídos num prazo de um ano ou dois. Já não se fazem objectos que duram a vida inteira, como os vários electrodomésticos que os meus avós ainda usam todos os dias.

Talvez não seja necessário voltar ao básico para sobrevivermos, mas sim minimizar os excessos da sociedade do consumo, através do re-design dos objectos importantes e indispensáveis para a nossa sobrevivência no mundo pós-moderno.

Claro que isto é tudo muito bonito, mas é uma utopia. A nossa sociedade depende do constante consumo, o emprego depende do constante consumo, até mudarmos o nosso sistema económico voltar ao básico e sermos menos consumistas nunca vai ser possível.

Deixo este site como sugestão para todos os interessados no Design Social, também foi o sítio onde tirei o vídeo

Vejam também o documentário Objectified e Human Footprint do National Geographic

E criei um wallpaper a propósito, podem ver e fazer o download aqui