I usually teach at a college level, but was asked to teach a 3 1/2 day course in “interactive advertising” to high school students between quarters. I wasn’t sure what skill levels I’d have, and there was a mix of interest between advertising strategy and production across the seven students. We decided to create a mock interactivity agency and that path took us through discussions of branding, technology and a few hours spent looking at what other agencies were doing.
I’d like to share what a group of very clever high school students can do in a half-week with a bit of technical help, project management and scheduling support.
Old watches are a hobby of mine. The gears that are precision-made to turn the hands at coordinated rates of speed are the original computer programming, and the incredible craftsmanship that went into designing and machining the mechanisms reflects on the high standards and the aesthetic tastes of the day. Contemporary watches that aspire to the standards of mass-produced watches from the post-Civil War era through the 1940s cost many thousands of dollars today.
I’ll save a larger treatise on watch aesthetics for a different article, but as an admirer of the “under the hood” aspect of watches, I’ve always appreciated a great skeleton watch. There are plenty of cheap-o skeleton watches around, but good ones require a very careful and precise modification of the mechanism so that it remains functional but provides a cutaway view of the timepiece’s inner workings.
When I encountered this eBay Listing For a Skeleton Watch, I became intrigued until I realized that the design work simply didn’t match the item description. It was the graphic design that first attracted me to the watch, but also ultimately led me to do some research that suggests it’s a fake.
The New US Passports are here and they look like a catalog for Republican clip-art. Now we get to show the world what great taste we Americans have. There are a variety of excerpts from patriotic speeches set in centered type along with the obligatory stars and stripes, an eagle, the liberty bell and Mount Rushmore images all composited together in a sort of 1990s Photoshop montage. Of course, there’s also an embedded microchip the capabilities of which I will leave for conspiracy theorists to speculate on.
The passport images are available in highly-compressed and washed out animated form on the US State Department website (though it offers little in the way of explanation for the design). See also Michael Currie Schaffer’s comments at The New Republic.
There are some delightful paralells between design and music. Historically, idioms such as expressionism have found their roots in both music and art. However, instrument design has been firmly mired in the tar pits of tradition until recent times, in spite of the fact that it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate point for the worlds of art and music to converge.
Guitars have been icons of tradition with their fairly standard range of feminine body shapes, six strings, and central sound hole in the middle of the top - until recently. Though the traditional design certainly works well, it has its liabilities. Wood is essentially a plastic material and when you put 150 pounds of string tension on it, it will slowly deform as the decades go by. Fundamentally, the traditional acoustic guitar begins a slow process of folding in half from the day it’s first strung up. Placing the sound hole in the middle of the top creates a weak area right in the center of that “fold” that exacerbates the problem. Very few guitars live to be 50 without some sort of surgical intervention to adjust for the creeping of the wood.
This one’s a bit long, but pokes fun at a lot of design clichés. I think most designers have had clients who think along the lines of what these gag products are promoting.
Throughout history, skilled designers and craftsmen have ended up in the soup line when a sudden technology change (like the linotype machine followed by phototypesetting) explodes onto the scene. I always encourage design students to keep their eye on the technology ball and do what they can to land in the right place.
I’ve been guessing at Adobe’s strategy from the day they bought Macromedia. It only makes sense that Flash and Acrobat - two plug-in dependent technologies - would ultimately be combined into a Universal Document Format (flacrobat?).
Want another prediction? In one or two product generations of iPhone, Apple will roll iPod and iPhone into a single product. It may have to do with flash memory finally getting cheap enough to build a device with 100GB storage capacity and no moving parts. At any rate, there are plenty of people interested in iPhone (including myself) who are holding out for a third or fourth generation machine. When will we “waiters” jump in? Probably when our original iPods die and the only available replacement is an iPhone for a just a few hundred bucks more. (Like you, it wasn’t so long ago that I thought I’d never need an iPod).
That’s a great product strategy for Apple if I’m right, but more importantly, it could mean that 100 million people will have pocket macs in the next 3-5 years. Sounds like content creators who jump into this arena may have a soft place to land. And the technology being positioned to create this content? Well, read the article.
Check out http://www.girlbrand.com for some clever and fun approaches to one of the most simple, classic and lovable guitar designs, the telecaster (introduced in the 1940’s ). Artist Chris Larsen is producing an eclectic array of whimsical instruments. Plenty of samples on his site.
