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.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year)

The screening @ the Walker will include a Q&A with Gary Hustwit, the director.

Doesn’t look like this is on the Walker’s calendar yet. I’ll update this post with the time, when I hear.

Helvetica is now on the Walker Art Calendar, $8, 7pm.

Chuck Close as an artist has quite a bit to give our community. He works from photographs he has taken of large heads of people that he knows.These photos include many of himself. In fact, that is what the exhibition is about. Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005.

He recreates these heads in endless mediums and at different levels of abstraction. He uses the same source material to create endless variations in multiple manifestations. He said something about this in the talk that resonated strongly with me about how we need to do our work. He said, ‘the process will set you free.’

He is creative within his constraints. In fact, the constraints allow the creation to flow out. That seems like a key message for interactive practicioners. The process can set us free.

I encountered this at my last job when I first started with the company. A process was defined that allowed us to approach work in a repeatable manner. Parts were already defined for us so we were free to fill in the blanks regarding the specific needs of the specific work. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel around what we were going to do just as Chuck Close didn’t reinvent the wheel as to what he was going to create. Source material.

He said something else that I found to be most relevant for us. If you wait around for inspiration it might never come. Just get to work is the message he conveyed.

The new Walker Art Center is very cool looking. As I walked by this afternoon, I saw a maintenance person weed whacking the twenty or so perfect circles of grass.

Yes, the green dots contrast nicely to the square, pale sidewalk and the other architectural elements. Seriously, though, making something cool shouldn’t make it more of a hassle.

This may have existed before, but you can find lectures webcast at channel.walker.org.

Blu Dot designs and manufactures modern furniture and furnishings. Its founding partners, John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor—whose backgrounds range from architecture and art to marketing—created the company in Minneapolis with the desire to make quality modern design available to everyday people. Their humanist and populist approach to modern furnishings dovetailed with the democratization of design begun in the 1990s and seen in the success of mass-market retailing, design-oriented publishing, domestic-enrichment programs, and home-improvement schemes. Blu Dot has produced several lines of furniture, such as its Chicago line of shelving, the Modulicous collection of bedroom furnishings, or the more recent Buttercup lounge chairs, which are sold in small retail shops and by major retailers nationwide. It also creates furnishings for special projects such as the dormitories of a new student housing complex at MIT designed by Steven Holl, or a recent commission for retail fixtures for Gap Kids stores. They have created and cultivated a brand—including a series of film shorts for nontraditional marketing—that has merged humor and wit with products that balance form and function—without sacrificing one of the basic tenants of modernism: good design./blockquote>

Tuesday, May 24, 2005 7:00 pm
$20 ($10 Walker and AIGA members; full-time students)

More Info at walkerart.org

After a few unsatisfying stints designing for others, Paul Sahre established his own design studio, first in Baltimore and then in New York, where he has been since 1995. Consciously maintaining a small office, he has nevertheless established a large presence in American graphic design. The balance he strikes, whether between commercial and personal projects or in his own design process, is evident in such things as the physical layout of his office—part design studio, part silkscreen lab where he prints projects for himself—or in his desire “for equal parts logic and intuition” in the work. His silkscreened posters for the Fells Point Corner Theatre in Baltimore provided him a much-needed creative outlet and garnered him early professional visibility with their rough-edged, expressive typography. His more recent work, such as book covers for author Rick Moody’s novels Demonology and The Ice Storm or his design of the book American Photography 19, exhibit a crisper, more refined typographic and photographic approach, and point to a more editorial or authorial direction. In fact, in 2003, he coauthored with Danny Gregory Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio, a book based on a collection of QSL cards, which amateur radio enthusiasts exchange after communication with other operators around the world.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 7:00 pm
$20 ($10 Walker and AIGA members; full-time students)

More Info at walkerart.org

Daniel van der Velden is a graphic designer and writer based in Amsterdam who, since 1998, has been collaborating with Maureen Mooren on a variety of design and editorial projects. Among a new generation of influential Dutch graphic designers, they have developed a reputation for work that engages and challenges its readers by making aspects of writing, editing, and authorship commensurate with designing. This approach can be seen in their design of Archis, a magazine about architecture, culture, and urbanism, which appropriates and thus recontextualizes the stylistic conventions and typographic formats of various other magazines. They are particularly interested in the relationship and possibilities of fiction within the realm of information and in the reconsideration of preexisting graphic forms, whether a newspaper, advertisement, letter, diary, and so on. For instance, their series of invitations for exhibitions at the art gallery Room recycles the formats and contents of letters, conveying practical information within a more compelling story. As van der Velden notes, “The instability that occurs with this strategy is one that is, I think, always happening when something ‘boring’ like some dates and names is uploaded with something thrilling, or playful.” Since 2003 he has directed the Meta Haven project, a comprehensive national identity system for the Principality of Sealand, the world’s smallest “micronation.” Founded in the late 1960s and located on a formerly abandoned World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, Sealand garnered recent worldwide publicity with the establishment of HavenCo, a data-hosting services company. It’s a kind of data haven, or safe harbor for information, that claims to be the world’s first and only true market environment for Web business free from security and regulatory issues of conventional nation-states.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 7:00 pm
$20 ($10 Walker and AIGA members; full-time students)

More Info at walkerart.org