"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A 'DESIGN WRITER?'"

Top Searches Google Pillow 2010 via Elodie Blanchard on Etsy

From rewatching Disney’s Pocahontas today, I learned that:
1. Native Americans learned English in 5 seconds by closing their eyes and listening to their hearts.
2. If neon-colored leaves start flying around, Englishmen won’t feel like shooting Native Americans anymore.
3. Trees are inhabited by the spirit of old ladies who have a metaphor for literally every life problem.
4. Native Americans and Englishmen were pretty chill for the most part.
5. If John Smith pioneered anything, it was the mullet + bangs look.

“We have more outlets than ever to share our opinions about design. This is empowering for the public, but potentially disastrous for a designer who doesn’t effectively explain his or her work. With the ultimate success of a logo, building or product now hinging upon public criticism, we’ve witnessed plenty of juicy design controversies; Tropicana, Gap and the University of California are just a few of the companies and institutions whose proposed redesigns crashed and burned due to public backlash. All of this adds up to one major conclusion: the way we talk about design matters. So how do we begin more meaningful conversations?”

—Description of a lecture I delivered to the design students at the University of Illinois on April 5, 2013

The GIFs of Polly Dedman are unlike anything I’ve seen before.

We can’t seem to get over our obsession with the caveman, who has appeared on screen since at least 1912. In fact, anthropologist Judith Berman has written that a new caveman character has been introduced into pop culture every year since World War II.

DreamWorks’ The Croods, directed by Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco, presents the most recent version of prehistoric man; Grug, is a responsible father facing such dad-like issues as a teenage daughter who just wants to be her own person. He transcends the behavior expected of a typical caveman, but his character design doesn’t evolve past a stereotype that is largely of our own making.

We’ve distilled an entire subspecies of human down to a single iconic image, one that is perpetuated year after year through film, animation, comic art and bad Halloween costumes. The caveman is always brutish, dressed in some type of fur loin cloth and possessing limited intelligence. Some stereotypes of prehistoric humans are certainly based on archeological facts: the structure of the skull, anatomical proportions and pelt-based wardrobe. But other stereotypes, such as wielding clubs, communing with dinosaurs and pulling women by the hair, are our own projections of prehistoric behavior.

The iconic caveman image we know today was already established by the 1930s, seen in the comic strip Alley Oop. He carried a stone axe, manhandled women and rode a dinosaur named Dinny. Alley Oop, along with the Fleischer’s Stone Age Cartoons series, was a response to western society grappling with what it meant to be modern. The simple world of the caveman was a nostalgic comfort to those who feared progress.

Alley Oop was the pop culture bookend of a caveman fiction trend that began in the 19th century. One of the earliest examples is Paris Before Man, a novel written by Pierre Boitard in 1861. The frontispiece print (above) shows a club-wielding caveman, protecting his mate. As the genre developed, the caveman became more brutish and ill-mannered—an 1886 short story written by Andrew Lang describes a marriage custom in which women are “knocked on the head and dragged home.” By the 1920s, numerous newspaper headlines used “caveman” and “neanderthal” as adjectives to describe senseless male brutality.

The mid-century resurgence of cavemen in film (The Neanderthal Man, Monster on Campus), comics (B.C.) and television (The Flintstones) can partly be blamed on World War II rhetoric. Newscasters sang the praises of atomic power while warning of its devastating potential to send us back to a new Stone Age. To help us deal with these fears, the caveman was domesticated; The Flintstones showed that, even as the worst case scenario, the Stone Age wasn’t so bad. Even cavemen could wear neckties and accomplish an honest day’s work.

Over time, films and TV shows have moved away from the wife-clubbing caveman of the 19th century to fit G-rated expectations of civilized society. In fact, The Croods has pushed the caveman to the opposite end of the spectrum, with a father figure that seems like he could handle modern-day discussions of co-parenting and all-terrain strollers. No longer a commentary on uncivilized man or our fears of the future, the caveman and his era presented in The Croodsis merely a backdrop ideal for contrasting our modern reality of iPods and WiFi.

Retro repackaging of Ivory Soap via

Title card for Girls, Season 2, Episode 9

One of the greatest forgotten Saturday Night Live sketches is called “Virtual Reality Books.” In the faux-informercial, a spokesman dons a virtual reality headset and glove, while Phil Hartman narrates: “In an age of fiber optics and laser technology, books have just been left behind. That is, till now.” We see that the spokesman has been virtually transported into a suburban living room, where a copy of Moby Dick rests on a table. “Welcome to the ultimate reading experience,” Hartman continues. “It’s like reading a book in your living room—only better!”

The sketch aired in 1994, at the tail end of a technological era when virtual reality was the thought to be the next frontier. Huge sums of money poured into computer hardware during the late 1980s, resulting in a slew of wearable goggles, headsets, and other accessories intended to introduce virtual reality to popular culture. Yet as evidenced by the SNL sketch, virtual reality was more of a curiosity that was never taken entirely seriously by most consumers. 

Now, with Google announcing plans to deliver 3G and 4G-connected data display glasses, it’s clear that interest in virtual reality has not waned completely. According to an article in The New York Times, Google’s new eyeglasses will “be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.” While the design of the product is still under wraps, those who have seen the glasses report they will have a built-in camera that senses what the wearer is viewing and returns graphics and information in the wearer’s field of view.

Despite various hardware companies’ attempts to popularize virtual reality over the years, the idea of wearing special glasses never caught on. With their huge price tag and bulky, impractical design, virtual reality headsets never found their way to consumer electronic shelves, save for a few toy versions marketed to kids, like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. Now, Google is taking a gamble with an already critical consumer base; if people raise such a stink about the glasses they wear in 90 minutes of darkness while watching a 3-D movie, imagine the skepticism that will arise once Google’s glasses are finally unveiled. Today, it isn’t enough that our gadgets work well—they have to look good too.

Yet human fascination with virtual reality goggles—or head-mounted displays, as they are officially known—goes as far back as the Victorian era, when physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope to explain human binocular vision. The stereoscope was a handheld viewer that fit over the eyes, containing two side-by-side images of the same object photographed at a slightly different angles. Human eyes automatically combine the two, resulting in a 3D photograph that captivated children and adults alike. 

Interest in virtual reality truly exploded in the late 1980s, when California-based tech company VPL Research created the Eyephones, bulky headgear containing a crystal display for each eye. The Eyephones and a connected glove worn on the user’s hand transported the user into a virtual reality environment created through a database of polygons. The Eyephones could sense the position of the user’s head and adjust the virtual environment accordingly, while the glove detected the user’s hand, allowing her to manipulate objects in the virtual realm.

The initial problem with the Eyephones stemmed from the limitations of 1980s technology; a 1990 article in InfoWorld explains the headset could only generate five or six frames per second, vastly slower than the 30 frames per second generated by common television sets at the time. The price was also a major deterrent to continued experimentation—the entire Eyephones system, including the computers required to run it, cost upwards of $250,000. Beyond the pricetag, the bulkiness of the Eyephones didn’t make sense on a consumer level; they weren’t comfortable to wear and they looked as silly as they felt. Though “virtual reality” remained the buzzword of computer technology through the early 1990s, these limitations caused investors to lose interest and move onto the then-burgeoning field of mobile technology.

The latest effort at virtual reality comes in part from people’s need to feed their addictions to their mobile devices while keeping their eyes on what matters. In moving toward a Minority Report-type society in which data is displayed seemingly out of thin air in front of viewers’ eyes, the Google goggles seem to be an interim step. If the product makes it to market, it requires consumers to don eyewear for the sake of seamlessly integrating cellphones into their lives—an assumption previous forays have contradicted time and time again. Whether the glasses are designed to look like a sleek pair of Oakley shades or retro-styled horn-rims, it doesn’t matter. Until Google develops an option that doesn’t compromise our fashion sense, we will keep looking down, bumping into pedestrians as we check messages on our smartphones.

This article was originally published on GOOD about one year ago.

The Guardian just launched its first US-aimed ad campaign with these posters by graphic artist Norma Bar. When inverted, the posters reveal the opposing argument of a major political issue. Ad campaigns have tried these sorts of tricks before, but I don’t think anyone has done it quite so successfully. More on NYT.

I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that I will be writing for Cartoon Brew, the leading go-to site for animation news. Until now, Cartoon Brew was administered by Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi. Now, with sole ownership, Amid is taking on a select group of contributors to move the site in an exciting new direction.

I met Amid while I was studying design criticism at SVA. One of my classmates, the talented Alan Rapp, had previously edited Amid’s fantastic book Cartoon Modern. Reading that book cover-to-cover cemented my respect for Amid and his work. Over the years, we’ve kept in touch, hoping for an opportunity to work with one another.

Now that the time has come, I can’t wait to see what this experience brings. For Cartoon Brew, I plan to write about topics that address the juncture of animation and design: motion graphics, gifs, character design, background design, and even how animation is presented in galleries and exhibitions. It’s my belief that all designers should study animation and vice versa—I hope to write more about this in the coming months. 

This is a real full-circle moment in my life; in 2008, I was accepted to USC where I planned to study animation history. But my design roots were too strong, and I chose SVA, knowing that animation would always be there when I was ready to approach it. When Amid asked if I would come aboard, he said that he thought I would add a thoughtful critical voice that animation sorely needs. I hope I can be all that and more. I encourage you to check out Cartoon Brew, and please contact me if you have topics or suggestions concerning animation and design. I can’t wait to start this conversation.

I’ve read, edited and written several architecture and design PR releases. With every year, I learn more about this kind of writing, and have slowly built a personal list of do’s and don’t’s. I think it’s easy to overlook PR writing since it often feels disingenuous due to its sales pitch tone. But the way design is communicated to the greater public can have make-or-break consequences in many cases, therefore it’s worth analyzing.

This PR release for a newly designed set of theater seats by Zaha Hadid exemplifies some of the issues I see over and over again. You can read the original (and see the images) here.

1. Behind any forward thinking architectural structure, there is a scientific or mathematic philosophy. Rarely do renowned architects create a building “just ‘cuz.” But the choice to reveal the ideological underpinning to the public is sticky. You have to stop just short of highfalutin so that the design maintains an approachable level of theoretical-based authority. If revealing this philosophy doesn’t give the reader a greater understanding of the design as a whole, you are probably doing it for the wrong reasons. So don’t.

2. If you want to stylize the copy—i.e. short. choppy. sentences.—think carefully. Are you just creating vapid drama? Or does this style of writing truly echo the design in question?

3. Two things here. a.) I didn’t know that the “monotony” of theater seats was a problem that needed addressing. I stumbled over this so much, that, as a reader, I had trouble recovering. This is what I refer to as a landmine—a hidden phrase that catches the reader off guard. While monotonous seating might be the concern of the designer, the phrase sticks out like a sore thumb to the average reader. You could potentially lose them here. b.) When writing about a new design, it’s natural to want to characterize its predecessors as old and busted. Resist the urge; people respond so much better to positivity. Rewrite the sentence so that there is no trace of negativity, while pointing out the reasons this design is a game changer. Old theater seats work just fine, so calling them boring is silly. Instead, focus on why Hadid’s design is meaningful for theaters today. 

4. The phrase “self-contained space” doesn’t even make sense. This is why architecture writing is so hazardous; many of its descriptors are meaningless. Massive, container, box, space, volume—use these words with care.

An Etsy trend I will never understand: soap that looks like food.

Tony Bennett, Glen Campbell and film starlets would visit the home. A big buffet would be laid out on the terraced patio, including Mrs. Hope’s famous antipasto salad, which she insisted on mixing herself, adding the vinegar and oil by eye. A clear tent was put up on part of the terrace to keep out the cold while still allowing guests to take in the spectacular nighttime view. “The whole desert was at your feet,” Linda Hope said.

Bob Hope Estate in Palm Springs is for sale at $50 million. Designed by John Lautner. via NYT

Professor and blogger Michael Leddy points out something interesting: within the past few months, there’s been at least five different stories about the dying art of shoe repair, each centered around different shoe repairmen who feel their profession is dwindling. More than just a bizarre, heightened interest in cobbling, Leddy’s observation shows the media’s love for stories about an art’s waning days.

Today, practically anything can be a dying art; apparently, stick-shift driving and noodle making are going the way of the dinosaurs. What else is dying according to the news over the past month? Butchering, jazz, calligraphy, barbering, navajo sheep shearing, gem polishing, fruit and vegetable carving, sausage making, Ukrainian egg art, chair caning, car chasing, organ playing, grammar, letter writing, agriculture, memorization, courtroom sketching are all on the death watch. It’s difficult to know the truth behind these morbid pronouncements. How can we tell if an art is truly dying or if we are just caught up in our own nostalgia-skewed perceptions?

When the modern realities of today get us down, we have a bad habit of mythologizing the past. In an article for NPR, jazz musician Keith Ellenberger notes our tendency to forget the bad and only remember the good: “Beethoven had money problems, Mozart died broke… [and there were] incredibly talented and influential jazz musicians of the last 75 years who needed benefit concerts to pay for medical care and funeral expenses as they entered middle and old age.”

Some crafts undoubtedly suffer as times and tastes change. But there’s no reason to assume that the art of today will never be as good as what came before. In his own profession, Ellenberger points out that because of improvements in digital music distribution, there have never been so many new and rich jazz recordings available, created by extremely talented, promising musicians. The challenge for today’s artist and craftsman is to figure out how to adapt his or her skill to the modern-day needs of a highly digital society.

Publications will continue to eulogize various dying artforms, because they give writers a chance to make sensational assertions about society. Today, the art of conversation is dying. But according to The New York Times, the funeral began in 1961. With so many eulogies, it’s hard to keep up.

This post was originally published on Etsy on June 13, 2012.

The best thing I’ve stumbled upon all month.

Fröken Detektiv - A Collection of Norwegian Nancy Drew Covers

Containers - Limited Edition print by Jeremy Miranda on Etsy

On the Failure of Hypercolor via The Smithsonian’s Threaded

nevver:

Movie Poster of the Week

These posters shame so many current-day attempts.