The Ten Faces of Innovation

I finished this book awhile back and finally had the chance to post something on the blog. Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation” talks about IDEO’s design methodology by breaking it up into easy to understand archetypes. The book essentially explains how the company is big on user research (the anthropologist), rapid prototypes (the experimenter) and collaboration (collaborator). For the most part, this book is chock full of good info on how the company functions and is a good read for those interested in design thinking.

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Muppet Rhapsody

You know it’s a hit when the Muppets sing everyone’s favorite song.

But here are other Muppet performances that you might have missed.

More Typography

I realize it’s easy for me to download cool typographic illustrations but it’s a total pain in the ass to upload them. With my slow wi-fi, I have to upload each picture, wait, upload some more, find links, find the damn artist’s name, do spell check, pray my links work and link to the right websites, do some proof reading, blah, blah, blah.

Anyways, here are a bunch of type illustrations that I’ve been meaning to upload but never got the chance to.

Things you can do with bubble wrap

I was doing research on my Design 101 final project and somehow, I thought that maybe I could use bubble wrap for my project. After changing my concept several times, I realized that bubble wrap wasn’t going to work. Nevertheless, I did find some interesting things that people have done with it and wanted to share with you all.

People have used bubble wrap to create texture effects while painting.

A company has turned bubble wrap into a calendar. Rather than crossing out calendar dates, you can simply pop it. I wish I came up with it.

Marshall Dines did this piece by individually painting each bubble. He has mad painting skills.

Bubble wrap in the shape of things that it is supposed to protect. By Todo Design.

Volkswagen has an ad featuring bubble wrap. I can’t remember how old this ad is but I think it’s brilliant.

Designing with Type 5th Edition

I just finished reading this book in just a couple of hours. Actually I power skimmed it since I”m familiar with the majority of the concepts covered in the book. So what do I think of Designing with Type? Well it’s a book for beginners and an excellent reference for those who are a bit rusty with typography. As a matter of fact, I think this is one of the best books on introductory typography out there in the market. And on Amazon, it’s only $16.47!

The book is easy reading and can be finished in a couple of days. The book covers all the important basics of typography such as type terminology, historical classification systems, designing with text type and designing with display type.

What makes this book so great is that they when describing the historical classifications, the authors provide a specimen sheet for each of the historical categories. Thus, it’s nice to be able to compare the difference between an old style typeface like Garamond to a modern typeface like Bodoni. Other bonuses in this book is section on type projects and a short but useful type specimen sheet. The only thing I would complain about this book are the chapters on color and traditional skills like copyfitting. Granted the subject matter for these chapters aren’t normally covered in an introductory type book, but still, it would have been nice to have a bit more in-depth coverage on the subject matter. But aside from these minor negatives, this books is full of typographic goodness.

Typography Tuesday: Mrs Eaves

I haven’t posted an entry for typography Tuesday for a while. Sorry about that bloggers. Anyways, today typeface of the day is Zuzana Licko’s Mrs Eaves, a transitional serif typeface that is contemporary revival of John Baskerville’s work. Like most transitional typefaces based on Baskerville, Mrs Eaves has medium contrast in stroke weight, vertical stress and excellent proportions. If set correctly, Mrs Eaves is perfectly legible, readable and has an elegant appearance.

Don Suggs

OMG, Don Suggs was my freshman painting instructor at UCLA. Back then I knew nothing (well very little) about art and did some got awful work. Luckily Don was understanding about that. I remember he wanted me to use more brown/neutrals in my work. I hated that idea at that time…I just wanted to make things look happy. According to my friend, it was “Yay” art.

He’s a great guy and a great instructor. He was very hands off (as is most contemporary painting instructors) and let you paint whatever you want. I remember spending my Saturdays in the studio painting all day and crying over how I couldn’t hammer in a stretcher bar. It was his painting class (since it was the only art class I took) that made me fall in love with the practice of art making.

As for Don’s work, I actually never got the chance to see it when he showed it in lecture since I overslept that class (hey it was an 8 in the morning class). I never realized how colorful his stuff is.

Akzidenz Grotesk

I just found a little catchy song on one of my favorite typefaces, Akzidenz Grotesk (aka the grandaddy of Helvetica).

Bokeh Type

I just found this flash site that allows you to input letter forms and it recreates it for you in little glowing dots. Looks fancy and fun.

Christopher Kurtz

Another artist affiliated with Martin Puryear; this time Christopher Kurtz was supposedly Puryear’s shop assistant. Kurtz’s work is similar to Puryear and can be described as organic minimalism. It seems a lot of his work is based on organic curves and nature imagery.