One of the themes looked at in the Triennial is the rise of graphic design as a consumer product. It used to be that graphic design was strictly a business-to-business service. Now, everyday citizens have access to professional quality software, fonts, printing services, and more. It’s a whole new world out there. One example of...
The magazine Make, featured in Design Life Now, bills itself as a “mook,” a hybrid between a book and a magazine. The smallish paperback size recalls Popular Mechanics from the 1950s. The publishers of Make are using the same format concept for their new magazine Craft:. Why the book format? Nostalgia aside, these bookish little...
Recently released is The Word It Book, a collection of visual submissions to the blog Speak Up. “Word It” is one of SpeakUp’s most popular and original features. Each month, a different word is posted on the site, and anyone who so desires can submit a visual/verbal interpretation. (Selections from Word It are on view...
Triennial honoree Natalie Jerimijenko is featured on the cover of the current issue of GOOD magazine, the hip new eco/business/culture journal. On GOOD’s web site, you can see a video of Jerimijenko at work in her new Environmental Health Clinic, a floating desk and research station built from recycled soda bottles. Jermijenko reports that you...
The makers of Make, the techie-geek D.I.Y. magazine featured in the Triennial, have a new publication out, now in its third issue, called Craft:. This hip and beautiful little zine got me thinking about the craft revolution, which has reinvigorated the lives of design professionals as well as the lives of a vast and passionate...
Design writer Bruce Nussbaum delivered a speech at Parsons a few weeks ago whose controversial refrain was “designers suck.” Read the speech on his Business Week blog. Nussbaum claims that designers are slow to embrace the democratization of design. They still want to keep the “sandbox” to themselves, rather than inviting their clients, users, and...
When creating Design Life Now: National Design Triennial, the curators decided not to organize the exhibition by discipline (graphic design, product design, architecture, and so on), or by theme (green, social, formal, technological, etc). Instead, the show is more like life, where diverse objects and images sit beside each other in loose affiliations. Some rooms...
The phrase “Web 2.0” refers to the rise of social media over the past four or five years, in which users post their own content as well as shaping the way existing content is viewed through commenting, voting, rating, tagging, and other forms of interaction. Blogging is a big part of this. Most people are...
One of the themes running through Design Life Now is the opening up of media to everyday citizens. There’s been an explosion of “social media”—Web sites that allow people to build communities and talk with each other on-line. (Blogs like this are one example.) This communications revolution is affecting print as well digital media. Fueled...
