Exoatmospheric

exoatmospheric

On February 21, 2008, Christine and I cancelled our satellite television service in attempt to sober up from our “collective bender”. Admittedly, there was a few days of gnawing withdrawal; however, there is so much more time for scholarly pursuits!

John Maeda of MIT is leading an effort called the Simplicity Design Workshop. As quoted by Jessie Scanlon in the New York Times, Maeda says that "simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, and it is time to break free from technology's intimidating complexity."

Along with several other designers, Maeda has formulated a list of the fundamental tenets of using simplicity as a way to design technological solutions:

I've come to realize that much of my dialog with design involves the art of storytelling. In effort to become both a better listener and teller of stories, I've referenced a modern-day master: Mr. Ira Glass.

Frutiger, recounting his involvement in the process of creating Univers: “I was completely immersed in this stage of inventing, the way only a young man can be. I thought round and round it incessantly, day and night. This was such an intensive time that sometimes I actually trembled.”

— Deiter Rams

“As artists, science is a really rich field of activity for reference, and it's provided us with conceptual hooks that, I think, have let people be curious about science, by way of listening to this music.”

Jennifer Sterling: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design
Posted: June 28, 2005

How many of my fellow graduates of the class of 1998 did this woman influence? Hundreds? Thousands? I hope to meet her someday--anybody have a connection? 7 degrees is OK!

“Sterling combines the most ambitious aims of twentieth-century graphic design with its simplest components. Her large-scale compositions draw on the bombastic traditions of Russian, German, and American propaganda posters created between the two World Wars. Her emphasis on small type and the fragmentation of words demand that the reader actively engage in the work, as design theorists of the late 1970s insisted. She does not use images or color, but only the monochromatic building blocks of communication: type, lines, and blocks of text.

Sterling's work is a snapshot of the continual process of recombination that marks our modern world. She takes individual letters and manipulates them, distorting their size and composing them into highly unstable constellations. Always pushing toward the very big and the very small, she makes the reader move back or peer in. She slides the letters out to the edges of the page, and even pulls the page itself apart into layers that each contain bits and pieces of the message, implicating the reader in the act of composition.

Though it is not always easy, or possible, to read Sterling's work at a single glance, it is always worth the effort. The reward is a highly crafted object in which each element, freed from the dead weight of "correct" graphic design (a single page, a static and "reasonably" scaled poster), is free to be its own point of attraction.”

“To design is to create images which communicate specific ideas in purely visual terms and utter statements whose form graphically embodies or enhances the essential nature of the notions to be communicated.”