MNteractive

The Walker Art Center and AIGA is pairing up again to have their March graphic design lecture series. Insights usually host no surprises for me these days. You’ll have a mix of academia, hip, highly theoretical, and your dull lecturers. Normally I find my self saying, OK, ya, nice work. But it ends up feeling like an awkward meeting of two people who know the same people, but have nothing in common.

This often seems to happen for me when looking at print design again. I often wonder if we will ever get print designers on board. Last week Daniel Eatock gave a talk.

It was fresh for a change. Daniel Eatock is not necessarily a interactive designer. And i’ll say the first 6 minutes feel a bit staged to appear cutting edge, but the more I listened I appreciated the moto. Essentially a focus on fun and function, a reaction to the abundance of slick, overly produced work out there.

A few projects stripped away the excess of interactive design. His site is a good example.

In the end he recited a list of “no’s”. Amongst them “no flash”. As usual there were muffled murmurs. “no flash?” people whispered under their breath. Apparently the last hour didn’t stick… I can only hope that we as designers can remember that there is more than just aesthetics to design. I have to say thanks to Daniel. We need to be reminded once and a while that design is more than a visceral reaction. That concept and interaction can carry the weight of a message just as much as color and form.