Reading Things
Yup. I still read books. My night table groans with several reassuring stacks of books - old, new, read, unread, re-read. There is so much that is comforting about cracking open a book - maybe one I haven’t opened for years - and finding something new, or forgotten, or worth reading for the tenth time. If you still read books, and have an interest in graphic design, or sustainability, or critical thinking, here are a few excerpts for you...
The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom, compiled and edited by sara bader
“I read once about the concepts of the lateral idea and the vertical idea. If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help. The lateral idea is when you skip over and dig someplace else.”
Seymour Chwast
The Hannover Principles, william mcdonough and michael braungart
Number 8. Understand the Limitations of Design. No human creation lasts forever, and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and a mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
TEn things i’ve learned (part of an aiga talk in london), Milton Glaser
Number 3. Some People are Toxic. Avoid Them. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards each other. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner, or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
looking closer four: critical writings on graphic design, edited by michael bierut, william drenttel & steven heller
an incomplete manifesto for growth, bruce mau
Number 1. Allow Events to Change You. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
Number 6. Capture Accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
Number 16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight and vast creative potential.
a communicator’s guide to the neuroscience of touch / haptic brain, haptic brand, a project of sappi north america
Tome Two: Haptic Brand
Studies show that wine drunk from a wine glass is perceived as being of better quality than wine drunk from a plastic cup – which seems pretty obvious. It also stands to reason that the world of wine glasses encompasses a wide range of quality. In her classic 1955 essay, Beatrice Warde equates wine to ideas and good typography to a crystal goblet, pointing out that the finest glass is not the one wrought of solid gold but the one that’s “clear, thin as a bubble and as transparent… calculated to reveal the beautiful thing which it is meant to contain.” The main job of communicators is to identify what is unique, and good, about a brand and create a program that reveals it clearly.
Thanks, and happy reading.