Where design and film meet. This is what I want and what I need to be doing. Sigh.
Where design and film meet. This is what I want and what I need to be doing. Sigh.
5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative, John Cleese
- Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)
- Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)
- Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
- Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)
- Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)
Kindred DESIGN Spirits
I wanted to put together a list of designers who remain relevant to my thinking and making. It will definitely be edited from time to time.
Stefan Sagmeister
Barbara Kruger
Pablo Ferro
Herbert Bayer
Matt Maust
David Carson
April Greiman
Gail Anderson
Ed Fella
Lester Beall
Bradbury Thompson
Neville Brody
Dan Friedman
Elliott Earls
P. Scott Makela
“extracting a meme from its context…”
I explored Internet memes and the term “meme” last year. This seems like an interesting concept. I’m not certain if this designer executed it correctly though. However, it is nice to stare at, and I’m a sucker for Don Draper.
Yacht and Semiotics
Love it so much!
Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck
- Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
- Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
- Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
- If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
- Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
- If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
‘Cannery Row’ is one of the best books, and ‘Of Mice & Men’ can make a grown man cry. Steinbeck was a legend. Also; the third point here is vital, stellar advice.
(via npr)
Speaking of film, here’s a video of Jim Jarmusch speaking about stuff that only makes sense to me.
Stumbling through a current project for my studio course, and this is the first piece of information to make actual sense. Now, to figure out if it’s useful or not in writing this theory/chapter on April Greiman.
The interesting thing about auteur theory is that film theorists, like designers, had to construct the notion of the author as a means of raising what was considered low entertainment to the plateau of fine art. The parallels between film direction and design practice are striking. Like the film director, the art director or designer is often distanced from his or her material and works collaboratively on it, directing the activity of a number of other creative people. In addition, over the course of a career both the film director and the designer work on a number of different projects with varying levels of creative potential. As a result, any inner meaning must come from aesthetic treatment as much as from content.
Saving this for viewing later.
With thesis work starting next semester, I’m starting to pull more from my interests, but I also want to study something that will leave/or has left an impact on our culture. DIY/Underground printing is fascinating to me. I was watching Shut Up Little Man the other day, and the fact that they were able to send out these recordings and establish a cult following based on audio voyeurism without the Internet is mind blowing to me.
I’m honestly starting to forget how I lived before the Internet, which leads me to question where my processes are heading. How does that impact my voice as a designer? Has the computer become more than a tool? Has it become part of me?
