Archived entries for design

Confessions of a design geek

“Katie is a genuine new voice in design writing. She does Q&A in a fresh and unaffected fashion, allowing her subjects the space (both literally and metaphorically) to develop ideas and points of view. Deceptively reverential, she poses unaggressive yet astute questions that extract new insights.”

Barbara Chandler, design writer for the London Evening Standard

Have you ever wondered how Max Fraser put together ‘The Joy of Living’ exhibition, what inspires Anthony Burrill’s slogans or even what is John Makepeace’s favourite colour. Well, Katie Treggiden created the blog Confessions of a Design Geek to answer these important questions.

confessions of a design geek cover

confessions of a design geek max fraser

Skip forward a few months and she won the mydeco.com Design Democracy Award for Best Interior Design Blog and more recently has committed her interview to paper with the release of ‘Interviews, volume 1‘ full of eighteen of her favourite interviews.

The book is the first in a series of books to be released from confessions of a design geek in a limited edition of 1,000 and is priced at £10 and even better that 50p from the sale of every copy is donated to Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.

confessions of a design geek javier mariscal

confessions of a design geek urbanised

Watch this short video to see behind the scenes of making her debut book…

“…[Katie] stands apart from other design writers… She turns designers into real people. [She] allows designers to speak in the same words as the people who use what they’ve made. There is something very democratic about [that].”

William Shaw, Web Editor for the London Design Festival

katie treggiden confessions design geek

Over at Heart Home, Kate Baxter spent some time talking to Katie. You can read her interview at Heart Home blog.

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#the50 things every creative should know

I love Twitter. It allows people to be really creative with the information that fills their heads. Not only can you share links but, and a nice big but, people have created specific ‘tweetable’ websites. How good an idea is this?

#the50 is the first fully-Tweetable primer for graduating creatives.

London-based Designer Jamie Wieck decided to write #The50 Things Every Creative Should Know when he realised he was not the first, nor the last student to fear the leap between art college and the creative industry. I recall the moment very well and actually ended up avoiding the ridicule of trying to be a designer in the traditional way.

Each piece of advice has been written within 140 characters and features a consistent hash-tag, making them easy to share across Twitter.

there is always someone better

I love ‘there is always someone better’. I held myself back for this very reason so many times. It is a fact that you can always find someone better than you, be it because you lack confidence or because someone has spent far longer in the industry than you have. Get over it and get on with working.

curate your work

Another fab one is ‘Never stop editing your portfolio. Three strong pieces are better than ten weak ones – nobody looks for quantity, just quality.’ I only realised this when I started to have people pitch to me… it’s the same as CVs, nobody reads them – they just look at your past experience and education. If that is good, I’ll read more but to this day I have never read a CV in full.

the100

And with over 1,000,000 visits and counting, #the50 has struck a chord with both students and established creatives across the world, inspiring many to submit their own advice for #the100 — an expansion of #the50.

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“What design means to me”

For more than 50 years the Prince Philip Designers Prize has celebrated how designers improve daily life by solving problems and turning ideas into commercially successful reality.

2011 saw the final year that HRH The Duke of Edinburgh delivered the Prize after stepping down from the Prize as he reduces his work-load and royal responsibilities in his 90th year. Quentin Blake, one of Britain’s best loved illustrators, won the 2011 Prince Philip Designers Prize.

quentin blake 2011 Prince Philip Designers Prize

“No-one can be in any doubt of the extraordinary dedication to promoting and celebrating design which has been shown by His Royal Highness during more than half a century of expert and insightful leadership of the Prince Philip Designers Prize. This year’s winner and nominees likewise demonstrate a dedication to creative excellence, but they are also exemplars of the international commercial success which springs from that creativity. Now more than ever, we must celebrate our world-leading designers, innovators and creatives, and their vital contribution to our economic future.”
David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council

To mark HRH The Duke of Edinburgh’s contribution to the promotion of UK design, the Design Council commissioned a one-off book of original artworks drawn by over forty of the Prizes’ previous winners, nominees and judges including Sir Terence Conran, Vivienne Westwood, Jeff Banks, Lord Norman Foster, Kenneth Grange and Sir Paul Smith.

 

Thanks to http://manufactureandindustry.blogspot.com for introducing me to this document.

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millimeter/milligram

MMMG, that is, Millimeter Milligram from Seoul create products that draw out the small details and sensibility of our daily lives bringing that all together to create a niche brand to coo over. Well, I cooed over it.

Korean stationery designers MMMG have become increasingly popular in the global market with retail points in Japan and Australia as well as Colette in Paris. They stock a colourful range of postcards, notepads, calendars, wallets, key holders and mugs.

mmmg collage

mmmg black pt case

mmmg calendar 2012

My friends at Crane.tv visited the MMMG head office in trendy Itaewon to chat with creative director Myoung Yu and designer Kyung Hwa Lee about their secret formula behind their success.

mmmg red pt case

mmmg pencil case

mmmg calendar 2012 macbook

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Castiglioni’s Toio

Achille Castiglioni brought an element of the surrealist ‘found object’ to furniture design. Already the designer of a stool based on a tractor seat, his Toio lamp was inspired by the unusual combination of a fishing rod with a car headlight.

Designed in 1962 by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos, to some this lamp is an ugly, crude, almost impolite object that stands over-confidently in the room, and to others (including myself) this lamp shows its true beauty by putting everything on show including the transformer which serves as a counterweight to stabilise the lamp.

achile-Castiglioni-Toio-detail

The mechanics are entirely exposed, as if you opened a car bonnet to peek inside, Castiglioni designed a lamp using a special 300-watt car headlight imported from the United States during the Sixties.

achile-Castiglioni-Toio-sketch

Toio’s light source suggests the type of lighting, and the lamp components determine its shape. Thus a floor lamp providing indirect light was born from assembling ready-made industrial objects, modifying their functions and giving them new applications.

A metal structure on the base functions both as handle and stem carrier and has a hexagonal chromed metal stem equipped with fishing rod loops to hold the external electrical leads; a fixing screw allows regulating the height of the stem; the remaining wire is rewound on two thin plates.

achile-Castiglioni-Toio-red

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300×65 Ampersands

I am a big fan of ampersands. There are few characters in the English language which allow for such an elaborate design to express its meaning.

A character to mean ‘et’ or ‘and’ if translated from Latin, many people choose to design this character with the ‘e’ and ‘t’ obviously present as it was often written originally, although I am never against simply designing it as the shape it has become known to us as.

ampersand

So, you can imagine my delight to discover one mans journey for one year through 365 ampersands. Known as 300×65 Ampersands, this Tumblr feed gave us a different ampersand for the entirety of 2010… with a link through to the font.

This is a fantastic idea for creating interest for a font, however it appeared to have no commercial reasoning to it but just one mans love for the ampersand.

It is also a great way to find interesting fonts, although don’t be too disappointed if you find that the ampersand is a misleading representation of the remainder of the font as I frequently did when browsing the collection.

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