Tiny Gigantic

So if you like new music, or make new music, or wanna take part in new music, or simply need some newness all by itself, you should check out our homies at Tough Customer. They know more about the music biz than anyone in the whole world ever times a million plus two. Read, listen, and spread.

“The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick,” said the Witch, “so you cannot miss it.”

Morgan Bell makes amazing fractals, including a set that sends you off to see the wizard.

Also check out mr. velocipede’s handmade fractals:

Seriously. Just go to Red Nose Studio and watch the moving pictures. Then oggle the illustrations. Then sigh in awe and wonder, hoping that one day you’ll be this good.

I’ve been chewing on this dilemma for a while: we should buy environmentally sustainable stuff because it’s good for the planet and makes us feel better about the amount of waste we produce. But does it really do much good? When it comes right down to it, sustainable goods still need to be produced, and sometimes that production creates more waste than that of their old non-recyclable counterpart. Here’s an essay that articulates the problem nicely.

Few of us will deny that this is a time of consumer excess and that the cycle of bloated consumption and grievous waste is part of our national profile. But as individuals, we are unwilling to cop to our own participation in it. The health of our economy might depend upon our constant consumption of goods, but it’s not an identity we much like. It implicates us in something—not exactly a conspiracy, but at least a kind of collusion between voracious consumer appetite and the marketers who depend upon it. As the writer and conservationist Wendell Berry describes the situation: “It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it.”

What do you think?

This is Comcast’s latest bad campaign. Forget the fact that invented words made of smushed together real words got played out a while ago. Forget that it didn’t work that well then either. What bothers me about this campaign is that its a bad rip off of an under-appreciated, super-fucking cool bit of design candy (see the photo below), by Knock Knock, a super cool design candy company.

You’d think the fine folks in Comcast’s marketing department would have a big enough budget to hire a some smart designers who–I don’t know–might have the skillz to do something of their own. Or at least who might have the talent to cover up their plagiarism a little better.

These days, we’re so mired in graffiti stuff that it’s all I seem to see. This graffiti project by Edina Tokodi uses natural elements to disrupt the urban environment. Pretty sweet.

Found here.

So there’s this person named Hannah Simpson. And she knits. And while I know knitting’s been the Thing for a while now, she’s done something amazing: she has knitted (knit?) the characters from the Dawn of the Dead. I know. Crazy. She’s even staged some major scenes from the movie. And there’s yarn blood too!

Last week, someone poured a shitload of red dye in the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Beautiful.

Link.

We’re two weeks away from finishing our graffiti book and we’ve been working madly to get it done on deadline. We’ll get back to giving you the good stuff very soon.

(And yer gonna love the book when it comes out early next year!)

…in real life, I often experience genuine acts of Good Samaritanism as obstacles.

Bill Shannon has the remnants of Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease, a bilateral leg deformity. It forces him to use crutches when he walks. It has also taught him to become more adept at moving through a city than any us. Wow. Fucking wow.

Um, watch this.

I’d been searching for cool robot stuff, and found this instead. It’s not the kind of robot I usually obsess over, but it’s really fucking cool. This thing, Hektor, is a Spray Paint Output Device that connects to your laptop and accurately (yes, accurately!) spray paints your design on the wall.

So, um, what exactly is in this “soup,” anyway?

Link.

Pacita’s comment to the post below reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about lately: sometimes the only way to do really good work is to stop “working”, and to stop thinking about whatever it is you call work. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most of us were raised to believe that merely doing things—any things–is a way towards progress. And we’ve attached our perception of ourselves, our self-worth, to how much we get done. So that if we’re spending some time not doing, we begin to feel useless, and less worthy. We start to berate ourselves for wasting time. Which—while it may work as a tool for self-motivation—can really fuck up your relationship with your work. Because the more guilt you put on yourself, the more you tell yourself you’re no good unless, the more your work–whatever it may be—becomes something you have to do, instead of something you want to do. And there’s no question about which of way of working produces better stuff.

The truth is, setting some time aside to drift in whatever direction chance takes you is a kick-ass way to get real work done. At Language in Common, we’ve designated every Wednesday an activity day. So sometimes, we’ll set off in a direction and go walking through the city, or we’ll go surfing, or to the climbing gym. And often, when we’re back in the studio, we’ll find that we did some fantastic work that day. You get the idea: when your mind is unbound by whatever work constraints you’ve put on it, it works better.

Still, it’s really fucking hard to do nothing and feel productive about it. Sometimes we’ll be so paralyzed by having to figure out what to do with our activity day, that we simply go to the park, or a coffee shop and work from there. Just to get out of the studio.

So here’s the question: How do you do nothing? And how do you do it, so that it feels good and without pressure, while still making a regular practice of it?

I’ve been thinking lately about understanding. About how—since all understanding is subjective—we use our language(s) to create similar understandings in different minds. And this train of thought got me thinking about the how the word understand came to be.

Turns out, nobody’s quite sure. Its origins seem to come from the Olde English, understandan, to stand in the midst of. Pretty cool, but not quite clear enough for me. Then I found this from Morris’ Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins:

The ‘understander’, in circus slang, is the one whose shoulders carry the full weight of the acrobatic team”. The idea of standing under (understanding) seems similar in usage to the current idiom ‘wrapping one’s mind around’ a concept. In other words, getting close enough to distill the essentials from an idea .

I like this. To truly understand something you have to stand beneath the full weight of an idea and figure out a way to hold it up to the light so that others can see it too. Anyone else have any ideas about this?

Link.

Via Oomsa

“If people could stop looking at my boobs for just a second, they’d realize how smart I am.”

Maybe you’ve heard this, or something like it, from a beautiful girl in a bar. Problem is, she’s got really, really great boobs. And, sadly, she isn’t any smarter than the rest of us.

According to Michael Bierut, designers are kinda like this. Here’s a little snippet from his recent post in the Design Observer:

We want to be seen as more than mere stylists, we want to set the agenda, to be involved earlier in the strategic process, to be granted a place at the table. In short…we want to be taken seriously.

Like many designers, for years I used a tried-and-true tactic to hoist my way up the respect ladder, a technique I will here call Problem Definition Escalation. If you’ve listened carefully to the lyrics to “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story you already know how this works. The client asks you to design a business card. You respond that the problem is really the client’s logo. The client asks you to design a logo. You say the problem is the entire identity system. The client asks you to design the identity. You say that the problem is the client’s business plan. And so forth. One or two steps later, you can claim whole industries and vast historical forces as your purview. The problem isn’t making something look pretty, you fool, it’s world hunger!

Well said. He goes on to say that those who are blessed with the ability to make things look beautiful should embrace that. Absolutely. Do the thing you’re good at, and don’t do the thing you’re not good at. But we don’t think beauty is what design is all about.

Design is about making shit that really works. And depending on the project, beauty may or may not be required. The problem is that the people who hire designers get blinded by the beautiful surfaces of design and fail to appreciate the substance. And designers who stand up for the substance often frame it in a way that leads them out of their area of expertise (Business strategy! Brand strategy! Marketing strategy). In other words, when designers fight for a place at the big business table, they mostly end up sitting in the wrong seat, and someone with very little business experience winds up making big business decisions. Yikes!

What design really has to offer at that table is not a leadership role. It’s one of guidance. Designers are masters of the creative process. They’re able to approach problems from multiple points of view, to discover biases and blind spots, to question assumptions, and to find new ways of thinking about old problems. That’s some powerful shit.

So if you want people to appreciate you for your brains instead of your boobs, stay true to the thing you’re good at.

A sandwich shop called Erbert & Gerbert has tried a new kind of story telling: the human flipbook. Pretty fun to watch, and a nice way to use content instead of messaging, though I’m not convinced it’s gonna be super effective. And what’s gonna happen to all those t-shirts?