Archive

It’s been a crazy and hard few weeks. Between work, film projects, family coming into town (and crashing on our floor) and the passing of my Grandmother, my mentor and my closest friend, I’ve hardly been keeping my head above water. But this week ushers in an event we have all been looking forward to all year. Yes, it’s that time again. An Event Apart 2008, sails in to San Francisco Monday.

This years line up is chalked full of interesting topics and top notch speakers. In particular, I’m looking forward to Better User Experience Through Microformats, by Tantek Çelik, who is one of the founders of microformats.org. Tantek will discuss “proper use of microformats (in addition to those Elements of Meaningful HTML that you know by heart) [and how this] can improve the usability of several common interactive design scenarios.”

In addition, there is an entire arsenal of compelling sessions, including presentations by Luke Wroblewski, Jeff Veen and Kelly Goto.

I look forward to seeing everyone there.

It’s not too late, you can still get tickets.

It is the pride and honor of every designer to have the opportunity to work on something that is truly profound. Such opportunities, like designing the Jüdisches Museum, Berlin or the Tube Map for London’s Underground, seldom grace the life of a designer. But, the opportunity to design a country, is one that almost never happens.

That is, until Dutch designer Daniel van der Velden was commissioned in 2003, to design money, passports and stamps for the abandoned water fortress off the British coast, proclaimed to be the independent micro-nation of The Principality of Sealand.

As disputed and controversial as this nation status may be, the project to conceive Sealand’s visual identity was not without complexity. Part and parcel to ‘The Sealand Identity Project’ and the uniqueness of this man-made, self-proclaimed nation, was the internet, as global archive.

In a press release in 2003, Van der Velden is quoted as saying:

The consequences of the internet’s daily usage, its universal vastness and its potential to blur the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, will be key operators in the design methods employed.nettimes.org

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It’s a lazy Saturday morning. I woke up, brewed some coffee (helping myself to some more right now), sat down at my computer and started browsing through my RSS feeds. That’s when I came across an article by Adrian Shaughnessy, on Design Observer, Look and Feel / Nip and Tuck.

It’s kind of a silly thing to write a follow up on, at least at first glance. I set out for a languid read and then found myself involved. So the question, to unjustly reduce the article to a sound bite is this.

Today, the term [”Look and Feel”] has seeped into everyday usage, and it has become widely used by commissioners of graphic design. Why?

The speculation goes on to consider its’ increase use, on the importance of usability in modern design, to referencing overall branding within design. Needless to say, “look and feel”, as a term to describe anything, is vague at best (unless of course you are talking about a car, and even then, it begs for articulation).

In scanning through some of the responses to Brian’s article, one jumped out at me with a poignant questions:
Are we trying to keep this shit a secret?

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