January 2012
25 posts
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Some Final(ish) Thoughts
The great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright built a house in my home state of Virginia called the Pope Leighy house. It is small and wood and you enter through a low door into a dark narrow hallway with cabinets and drawers in the walls. Then you see some stone stairs that go down into a tall living room, windowed on all sides with a huge fireplace in the middle, large and welcoming. Stepping...
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Gentium
The Latin word “gentium” means “of the nations”, and it is the appropriate name for a beautiful serif font that I found by happy accident and have used obsessively over the past week. Designed ten years ago by Victor Gaultney, this font is meant to provide a readable font that is comprensive and consistently styled across three alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek. In...
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Learning Photoshop: Clone Tool
In a reprint of my collage (see Expectation & Aspiration below) on high quality photo paper, I reevaluated my design and realized some mistakes:
A horrible water line
Some floating bikini women who were messing up the perceived scale of the photo
A floating palm tree head.
Luckily, I have people around who are more expert at Photoshop than me, and they told me that all these...
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ATLAS Fail
Recently, during a globally televised address to the most brilliant, well-respected physicists in the world, researchers from the ATLAS experiment presented their most recent (and fairly groundbreaking) results from something that uses the most advanced technology in the world, that could make or break the theory of standard model physics. It was hyped up in the media and watched by so many that...
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Expectation & Aspiration
The way that good design frames things fascinates me. A design can convince people, can make them understand, can make them stand in awe. Good design is transparent: it communicates its message rather than drawing attention to itself.
This is my aspiration for design: to frame things worth communicating in a way that is so clear and perfect that you don’t even notice. One of these things...
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Hybridity in Design
The hallmark of design in the Gulf region, UAE artist Salem al-Qassimi said tonight in a panel on Emirati design, is “hybridity.” Hybridity describes design that speaks to two worlds, design that comes from multiple places, design that is multilingual but never simply translated. This is a new kind of design, difficult and risky, requiring deep understanding of multiple cultures,...
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“Brand is a set of ideas that a company stands for in people’s minds,...”
– Wolff Olins lecture on branding
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Michael Johnson
Although Wolff Olins called him “a suit that could draw” and he spent his twenties “getting fired” from various jobs, designer Michael Johnson has turned out to make a name for himself, literally: his small (seven people) but successful design firm is called johnson banks.
Johnson/johnson’s designs are said to be marked by an aesthetic that “eschews typical solutions and favors ideas.” Projects...
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Heartbrand
“The Heartbrand was launched in 1998 (and slightly modified in 2003) as an effort to increase international brand awareness and promote cross-border synergies in manufacturing and marketing (“centralisation”). It is present in more than 40 countries. Although the logo is common worldwide, each country retained the local brand so as to keep the familiarity built over the years,...
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Bell Centennial
(see post below for the story of it)
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Font Story: Bell Centennial
Today I learned what an “ink trap” is: a feature in some typefaces where the corners are excessively notched, to compensate for ink spreading when the type is printed. It has more importance than you might think.
In the mid-1970’s, AT&T had just switched from printing their phonebooks on expensive letterpresses to the much newer and faster method of Cathode Ray Typesetting (CRT), with the...
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Designing Abu Dhabi
In January, we students at NYUAD have a really interesting learning opportunity: the chance to take an intensive, single-discipline class by itself for three weeks. Some people use this to travel, others use it to get distasteful requirements out of the way, and others use it as a chance to learn something they normally wouldn’t.
This month, I get to take my first class in something...
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(Desert Stars, my personal tumblr) →
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