a girl named fred » food for thought

12 paradoxes of graphic design

a girl named fred — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:14:35 +0000

Feeling inspired after a design lecture by the legendary English designer Adrian Shaughnessy, design student Tobias Bergdahl took the advice he heard and turned it into a wonderful visual study. Here are the images that resonate the most strongly with me and my own philosophy of design and the client-designer relationship.

You can see the rest of the series on Tobias’ own blog, Design Cove. First seen on HOW.

George Sand on happiness

a girl named fred — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:21:13 +0000

“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the necessary ingredients of happiness – simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.”

— George Sand

picture it

a girl named fred — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:54:38 +0000

time waits for no [wo]man

a girl named fred — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:05:28 +0000

because it’s Monday

a girl named fred — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:57:16 +0000

Artwork found here. Happy to credit the artist if you know who it is!

words of wisdom: wednesday edition

a girl named fred — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:31:10 +0000

artwork by katie daisy.

on intelligent design

a girl named fred — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:52:52 +0000

today i very much enjoyed reading this interview with pentragram’s dj stout. on the heels of paula scher telling pr*ttysh*tty she thinks graphic design is kind of going to hell in a hand basket (“Mostly, I feel like I am witnessing the total abandonment of graphic design. It’s as if the whole industry is yelling out we’re poor, we’re scared and we’re stupid.”), dj stout shares a similar view: “There’s still a lot of horrible design out there. I can’t believe how much bad design there is actually.”

is this just pentagram arrogance talking? i don’t think so. read a little further into the interviews and you’ll see both ms. scher and mr. stout are concerned about trendiness and surface design. you know, people making design decisions based solely on what they see others doing.

here is mr. stout on the whole grunge/crazy type/visual cacophony design style originated by david carson.

… when [Carson] came up with that original look that he came up with the solution to a problem… he was working at a magazine where he didn’t have a very good art budget, so he was given all these crummy photographs. He was like, well I’m not going to sit here and do bad design, I’m going to sit here and do something with my intelligence and come up with something more interesting. He’d take a photo and crop it in an interesting way. And then he started doing stuff with typography because those were the tools that he had.

… There’s this whole period where there were all these David Carson imitators, but they were all these young kids going after a particular look. They had no idea why they were doing it. They were just copying what everyone was doing at the time. There was some really bad design around that period because there were all these young designers that were just imitating, but they weren’t doing it in an intelligent way.

i agree. design without intelligence, without forethought, without purpose… that’s just bad design. i simply don’t see the point of being on trend if it doesn’t suit the challenge at hand. graphic design is not art; it’s not fashion. it’s a communication tool.