Corinna Sherman

I am in design school, but I am not a designer. As I plow through stacks of assigned readings, my non-designerly brain is straining to distill erudite works into comprehensible nuggets. And entertain itself late at night. Here goes…

Reading #1:
The Design Way
Chapter 1: The First Tradition

Everything kickass in human history that someone did on purpose should be considered design. And the geniuses who achieved these things should be called designers but probably weren’t because the world has never fully appreciated the awesomeness that is design. (Note to future-designer self: Create an experienced reality to fix this!)

Imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, then make it: that’s design.

Designers can’t know the full impact of their creations ahead of time. They’re not God, duh. But their creations can still have large-scale impact, either good or bad.

Why do we design? To survive, to improve, to develop, to create. And because we can. Designing gives us a sense of control over our lives and an opportunity to move closer ourselves to perfection.

Back in Plato’s day, thought was hot, and manual labor was not. This situation didn’t bode well for design, which unites thinking and making. The situation today isn’t much better. Consider: we still distinguish between blue-collar and white-collar work. Does maintaining this distinction serve us?

The pre-Socratic era had the idea of design broken down into useful chunks, but by the middle ages, it had become oversimplified to the point where people mostly abandoned design as an answer as they struggled to deal with the changes taking place around them.

Nowadays, people react to problems in their lives by trying to solve them. But some problems cannot be effectively solved with a problem-focused mindset. They are part of a larger system that cannot be optimized by ignoring all but one or two of the revelant variables.

Design wisdom combines reason with observation, reflection, imagination, action, and production. Being design-wise means you can shift from an analog experience of life, to a digital or analytic perspective of the world, and back again.

Agents of change: chance, necessity, and (design buzzword…) intention.

“Design utilizes a process of composition, which pulls a variety of elements into relationship with one another, forming a functional assembly that can serve the purposes and intentions of diverse populations of human beings.” (pulled verbatim because this sentence did interesting things to my brain)

A designer should critically analyze the nature of design. Think and practice with intention. Spread the word.

My favorite in the 50 Strange Buildings collection is #30: Erwin Wurm: House Attack (Vienna, Austria). The name alone won me over, but the visual is priceless. What’s your pick of the bunch?

http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/

via threadless.com

I found this t-shirt design online and love it:
“I Am Shy But You Can Reach Me” – Abstract, Nature T-shirt by Sarah Musi

Plus, I thought it would be a good way to test out my new Posterous bookmarklet button.

Posted via web from corinna’s posterous

From the people who brought us HanGawi comes a vegan Korean tea house on Park Avenue called Franchia. Situated across the street from Norman Thomas High School in Murray Hill, Franchia offers a wide range of green and herbal teas. The menu also includes my favorites dishes from HanGawi, as well as a prix fixe Royal Tea Tray for people who like an assortment of savories and sweets to nibble with their tea.

I, however, was not there to mess around with such nonsense. I went to a tea house, and I wanted tea straight up, no dumplings. Franchia has three levels of seating: a ground floor with a tea bar where you can get tea takeout, a mezzanine level that overlooks the bar area, and an upper level with a full-blown traditional Korean tea room enclosed by carved wooden sliding doors. I sat at one of the square wooden tables in front of the tea bar and, as I waited for my persimmon leaf tea to arrive, contemplated the repeating turquoise pattern above my head that was reminiscent of a Buddhist temple ceiling.

The tea leaves came in a simple, white ceramic infuser set in a matching cup. In contrast, the hot water came in a tall stainless steel vacuum jug with a black rubberized handle. As good as the tea was, this jug stayed at the back of my mind long after my cup was empty. A little research revealed that it was made by Danish company Eva Solo and apparently “designed by Tools.” Self-deprecating they may be, but they make one sexy jug.

Vacuum jug designed by Tools for Eva Solo

If you’ve ever smiled at the little brass men in the 14th St subway station or admired the colorful tilework at City Hall station in New York City, I think you’ll agree that this subway ceiling taken inside a Taiwan station blows all that out of the water. Standing underneath it, I really felt like I was looking up from beneath the ocean surface. Beautiful. The rest of the subway was impressively clean and pleasant as well, despite the crowds.

The Newseum web site shows front pages from daily newspapers every single day. As such, it showcases a wide range of design choices, from typography to spread layout to use of color in graphics and photos, as well as editorial choices pertaining to content.

For instance, here is today’s front page of a paper from President-Elect Obama’s state. And here’s one from McCain’s state, Arizona.

The Arizona Daily Star went with a bright red graphic and oversized headline about diet disasters above the banner that instantly draws the eye. A Veterans Day story follows directly below the banner, but the dominating element on the front page is a large color photo of Bush and Obama conversing in the Oval Office. The editorial choice to insert the word ‘Friendly’ in quotes in the story’s headline amused me, but I think it says more about the headline editor than either of the men in the photo.

The photo in the Arizona Daily Star is nothing, however, compared to the nearly 2/3-page inexplicably high-contrast image on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Who appears to be leading whom on this White House tour? No “Double Chin Takeout” headline distracts from the main story, although the newspaper’s name in presidential blue Blackletter type hovers over the photo, surrounded in a white halo. Um…okay. Then there is an even smaller Veteran’s Day article on the Tribune front page than there is on the Daily Star’s, wedged at the bottom between the weather summary and a photo of “Elvis’ mystery woman.” I’ll give you one guess who the entire editorial staff voted for last Tuesday.

Compare your local paper to some others from other regions and see how they differ in presentation, scope of coverage, and visual emphasis. Then compare to your favorite online news source. Where do you get your daily news from most frequently? Why? If you only ponder these questions, that’s cool, but I’d love to see your opinions in the comments.

I just attended the first session of a course called Design: Past, Present, and Future. It is pretty much what it sounds like: a survey of design history from 15,000 BC to the present day, with speculation on future directions. Sitting through the instructor’s halting, verbatim reading of his slides was mostly an exercise in contained boredom, but the class finished with a thought-provoking, structured discussion of the evolution of design. We selected examples of design from the past, ranging from cave paintings to illuminated manuscripts to the Rococo style; identified modern-day analogues; and projected how the designs may continue to evolve. Plenty of my classmates came up with examples from the present, but I noticed that the two people in class who contributed almost all of the ideas in the future trends category were me and another person in class who, shall we say, skew nerdy. Take a look at a few of the ideas brainstormed:

Most of the conjectures for the future were inspired by things we’d read about or seen as emerging technologies that could one day be developed into commercially viable products. It seems extraordinarily difficult to come up with visions of the future that don’t stem from something familiar and present. What do you see coming down the pipe in the next 20-50 years?

I had no idea that the “what do you do?” question was so emotionally loaded until I ran across this post, and the slew of reader comments that follow, on the New York Times Freakonomics bleg. I confess, I don’t really get why people would get offended by ignorant questions about what they do for a living. Offended by malicious questions, sure. Condescending questions, of course. But we are all ignorant about other people’s specialties, and the person who makes an effort to dispel his own ignorance by asking someone more knowledgeable than himself, in my opinion, deserves some patience. After all, most people don’t feel comfortable revealing their ignorance in front of strangers. Asking questions can be scary! So, at my next meet-and-greet, I am going to do new acquaintances a favor and give them some unexpected tidbit of information that will make them appear well-informed the next time they meet someone in my field of expertise; I hope they will do the same for me. Hopefully it won’t go like this flowchart from http://www.monster-munch.com/

So What Do You Do?

Lately, I have been looking at web sites that appeal through the simplicity of their interfaces.

Answering the simple question: Do I need an umbrella today?
http://umbrellatoday.com/

The site promises simplicity, and it delivers. The only whistle to go with its single bell is that it offers a text service to notify you on days you’ll need an umbrella. Unfortunately, it can’t text you after you forget your umbrella in the bar after work.

To send and manage electronic invitations:
http://anyvite.com/home

Anyvite is definitely simpler to use than Evite. I was able to enter event details immediately (as opposed to wading through 500+ cheesy greeting card templates), and Anyvite imported my address book contacts seamlessly. One strange thing I noticed was this message, located at the bottom of the e-mail invitation I sent out, in light gray text on a white background (as though it were hiding from me, the little imp):

Note: Please do not forward this email. Doing so will give other people access to your Anyvite account.

Apparently, the recipient’s identity is included in the invitation’s View and RSVP links, so if Joe forwards the invitation to Schmoe, Anyvite updates Joe’s RSVP status if Schmoe clicks any of the e-mail’s links. Hrm. So instead, Joe needs to paste a special forwarding-friendly URL into a separate e-mail to his friends. The trade-off to this inconvenience is that the original recipients don’t need to register with the service in order to RSVP to the invitation. They just click the big ol’ YES or NO buttons in their e-mail, add an optional comment, and they’re done. Not totally effortless, but pretty close.

Remember the days when we had to handwrite invitations, wedge them into teeny, oddly shaped envelopes, address them individually, lick gross-tasting stamps and envelope edges, and physically mail them? And our guests had to go through a similar rigamarole to respond? That party had to be good to justify all the effort.

I spent a large part of today making compositions out of dots. Above is a digital reproduction of one of my creations for a studio course at NYU called 2D Design Principles. The course covers the basic principles of two-dimensional design as a foundation for future work in graphic and product design. Today we learned about fundamentals such as points, lines, shapes, visual relationships and symmetry, capped off with a bit about color theory. One of the exercises asked us to create compositions, using blank sheets of white paper and black and orange dot stickers, ranging from formal to informal and from symmetrical to asymmetrical. I already understood the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical, but the terms formal and informal were new to me. The instructor didn’t exactly spell out the difference between the terms, but from the analysis of examples he showed us, I got the sense that a composition with a high degree of regularity (e.g. evenly spaced elements, regular angles, and repetitive patterns) can be characterized as formal, while a composition with unevenly spaced elements, irregular angles, and few discernable patterns can be characterized as informal. Our challenge during the exercise was to use visual relationships among the elements on the page to create balanced compositions. You can judge for yourself whether I succeeded, but at the very least, I had an enjoyable and even theraputic experience. Given the ongoing insanity of the financial markets, a dedicated dot day was just what I needed.