Archive for the ‘design’ Category
01
Sep
2010
The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game
Conceptual horizons, or why the time to judge a book by its cover may have just arrived.
In the 1920’s, a collective of Surrealists invented exquisite corpse, a game-like collaborative creation process wherein each contributor tacks on to a composition either by following a strict rule or by being only shown what the last person has contributed. Now, Brooklyn-based designers Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe have replicated the exquisite corpse idea in a brilliant collaborative illustration project that enlisted 100 of today’s most talented artist and designers to co-create a book by building on each other’s work. Today, the project comes to life as The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — an absolutely remarkable tome nearly two years in the making.
Here’s how it works: Each artist contributed one page to the book. The first five were given a few starter words to inspire their drawing, then each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded theirs and used images to build on the story. Besides this conceptual continuity, a more visual one — a horizontal line that starts on the left side of the page and ends on the right — drew the images together. Artsts were free to interpret the line ever which way they liked, which most did with incredible ingenuity.
The project is an instant piece of creative culture history, from the illustrated introduction by McSweeney’s Dave Eggers of 826 Valencia and Where The Wild Things Are fame, to the meticulous making of its cover, to the all-star roster of contributing artists. (Including many we’ve raved about previously — Lisa Congdon, Luke Ramsey, Meg Hunt and many, many more.)
Sample some of the goodness, then do yourself a favor and grab a copy of The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — we haven’t been this excited about an extracurricular art book since Pixar’s The Ancient Book of Sex & Science.
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04
Aug
2010
One Designer, Two Designer: Vintage Australian Animation
Tea cups, cavemen and why consumer research is doing design a disservice.
We have a soft spot for documentaries about design — from Gary Hustwit’s Objectified to the BBC’s The Genius of Design. And while industrial design may seem like a relatively newfound cultural obsession, the design of “things” has been on the minds of filmmakers for a long time.
Today, we look at an uncovered gem from the archive of the Design Council of Australia — One Designer, Two Designer, a wonderful animated short film circa 1978 comically exploring what makes good and bad design.
Style can be very easily confused with design and is very often substituted for that. A trendy hook to a product may be just that. To serve a popular style today is often to perform a disservice to the customer. The real function of the designer is to understand the function of the thing he is designing.
Despite the humorous tone, the film delves into the important misconceptions about design and designers’ role in society, emphasizing the need for developing a design sensibility to better and more critically evaluate the value of objects beyond what advertising slogans may promise.
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