- Surviving with less paper
43 Folders has an excellent article on the love/hate relationship with paper that many of us seem to have, while making this key observation:…the key is to recognize that paper is all about process, whereas digital media are all about information and retrieval. One mustn’t be afraid to whip out a scrap of paper when it’s time to scribble impromptu notes, mark a manuscript for edits, or do some visual thinking. Equally, one must not hesitate to scan or transcribe and then throw away a piece of paper that has value only in the potential future usefulness of the information it represents, once the drafting and scribbling are done. Embracing paperless reference filing is not the same thing as rejecting paper’s important role in your work.
- Trademarking a color
This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard–T-Mobile claims to “own” the color magenta. Never mind the fact that that’s like Boeing saying it “owns” the sky or Coca-Cola saying it “owns” carbonated water–it’s so oddly non-specific as to be a pointless claim. Colors vary so widely even from one computer screen to the next that unless they were to try and claim a specific Pantone shade and/or hexadecimal color setting (which they haven’t, apparently), there’d be no way to enforce it. Utterly inane. - Mission patches reveal glimpses of the military’s strange inner workings
A new book entitled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World shows images of some of the military’s strangest mission patches that only hint at what, exactly, these research groups might be up to. Some feature aliens, others have dragons… and so forth. From a design perspective these are fascinating–there’s a stark dichotomy at work here (the need to identify groups while also keeping their missions secret). - Choosing a typeface: Considerations
Should there be more to selecting a typeface for a project than just simply “liking” it? At what point should design history come into play? Jessica Helfand takes a look at that question and concludes that “at a certain point in the evolution of a visual idea, a certain amount of judgment intervenes, and appropriateness is questioned—even though appropriateness can be boring.”
11.09.2007
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