Showing the Creative Process

What a great way to show the creative process from start to finish.

http://www.banditodesignco.com/

The Origin of Good Ideas

Cognitive Media has always created brilliantly illustrated real time studies, and this particular video (created for the release of Steve Johnson's new book "Where Good Ideas Come From") is no exception. The video tries to reveal the origin of great ideas by focusing the search from an environmental perspective.

Exploring what were historically places that birthed great ideas such as salons and tea rooms, Steve discusses how incubation and interaction are essential to the formation of a good idea. These social and interactive spaces allow for ideas to mingle, transform, and intertwine with each other to create said "good ideas." Also accepting that chance, divine timing and serendipity have there place in the formation of a sound idea, Steve closes the video with a strongly rooted, almost poetic statement: "chance favors the connected mind."

Original Article

Painting with Light

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Painting with light, once an idealistic notion to most is now possible thanks to the recently released device known popularly as the iPad. By using a combination of photography and animation Dentsu London is able control the luminosity of the iPad by making rapid multiple exposures of 3d templates that flash across its screen. Creating a truly beautiful and almost unbelievable result.

The Web Catches Up

This past tuesday, Monotype Imaging released a catalog of nearly 8,000 fonts for use on web pages, with more to come in the near future. Until now web designers have relied on exhausted combinations of the following...

-Use the small library of "Web-safe" fonts such as Arial

-Render text into graphics in the form of jpegs

The creation of web fonts is an exciting development in the realm of electronic media. With web/media design expanding through the creation of kindle, iPad, and applications for smart phones, a large library of web fonts allows designers to be more creative and flexible. One of its most important uses is amongst branding. Allowing companies to embrace and stay within the limits of an excepted aesthetic helps to maintain brand identity.

Collaborative Consumption

Rachel Botsman is a Social Innovator who is soon to release a book about the rise of collaborative consumption. This book: "What's Mine is Yours" discusses how the trend of social networking and social marketplaces is resulting in a reinvention of old market behaviors, that were lost at some point during Americas industrial and technological revolutions. These old market occurrences of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, swapping and so on can be correlated to sites such as craigslist, swaptree, bay. As well as rental services like Zip car and Relay rides.

This trend of collaborative consumption, also spurred by the financial crisis, is creating a smarter consumption, where a product obtains a longer, and more useful life span, with a product changing hands multiple times within its usable life. This collaborative exchange can also be implemented amongst less tangible items such as space, skills, and time.

Implementing a new collaborative lifestyle can help create a smarter more connected community, where goods both tangible and intangible have a more responsible life cycle and where humans interact in a more intimate, and natural manner.

Original Article

A New Design Frontier

In March the Parsons New School of Design and MoMA, in collaboration with IFF, Seed magazine, and Coty brought together scientists, designers, and artists in a one day collaborative effort to explore the potential applications of a new design medium. The medium of Scent.

To this point, the design of scent has been restricted within the perfume industry. Placed behind the spotlight of visual, tactile, and auditory senses, the term smell has been associated with bodily fluids, trash, and poverty. Discussing in reference to the enlightenment era and how it shaped our perceived notions of scent Eva Wisten comments: "We seem to still be shaped by that dichotomy and we therefore miss out on one of our great cognitive gifts."

We have, through societies influence, cultivated an acute understanding of taste, visual, and tactile perceptions. This heavy admiration and recognition has led to a large creative push within these senses and areas of design. Yet, "It’s interesting to look at the ways in which we have engineered scent out of our lives, and when we do try to reinsert it, it is in gaudy, obnoxious, or un-subtle ways. There’s very little room between unscented—and hence, olfactorily sterile—environments and those that are over-perfumed. It seems as if there is too little imagination or creativity when it comes to thinking through ways in which we can enhance our olfactory environment without overwhelming it."

This new initiative named Headspace is an exciting new exploration that can prove to be an extremely valuable tool to designers amongst all fields. Utilizing humans sense of smell in a new way can help us bridge the gap between scent being purely decorative and scent being utilized in a functional way.

"You can make an analogy between perfumers and typographers: Both are nearly invisible as designers; both create highly refined and nuanced products that are virtually unnoticed by the entire population; and both affect the texture and experience of our everyday lives in countless ways, despite their lack of recognition."

Sheet Cake Invoice

Last year Neil Berrett quit his job by presenting his resignation letter, which was piped onto a sheet cake. Last month People magazine featured Neil in an article called "Take This Job and Shove it!", an online article about unique ways of quitting.

Unfortunately People.com failed to obtain the licensing that would allow them to post the picture of Neil and his sheet cake resignation. Which, in turn, inspired Neil to send an invoice to People.com, charging them for the online usage of his photo. Of course Neil found it fitting to send the invoice on nothing other then a sheet cake.

Im sure there's some bitterness at the People magazine office towards Neil and his smug delivery of an invoice. Yet, at least they have sheet cake to take the edge off, and help sweeten up the situation.

Staying Connected

It can be difficult staying connected with family members when your separated by state lines and sometimes internationally. This was the case for Designer Nicole Ziegler whose immediate family is spread throughout three different countries. So in order to keep family better connected on each others lives she created the Ziegler Family Newsletter, officially called the Mushroom Gazette.

The entire production is done by Nicole using newsprint and printing on her color epson printer. She then uses a sewing machine to bind the pages together, a truly intuitive way to bind the family newsletter.

This inspiring project holds no high production costs or elaborate production methods and shows that a little ingenuity and a great idea can take you a long way.

For Print Only is a great blog that deals with print based design material. It includes valuable information such as production time, production costs, produced amount, paper used, printing methods, and a great description of each project.