Empathy and Design

"Design almost always entails looking; moreover it demands that the designer actually see what he or she is looking at. In other words, looking, as a design activity, means noticing, which, among human beings, tends to imply caring. It is a risky business, possibly leading to what a politician recently identified as “a slippery slope”: empathy."

--Ralph Caplan, in an article in AIGA Voice, The Empathetic Fallacy

A+GD Has a Friend in High Places!

Debbie Millman is the new president of AIGA, the professional organization for designers. At last year's portfolio show, she was one of our guest judges and the featured keynote speaker of the evening.

This fall, we are starting CPCC's first student chapter of AIGA. More details to come.

Design Thinking for Innovation

From an interview with Tom Kelley, IDEO:

"Part of a successful innovation is that people understand what something is and how it works. As a starting threshold, people must understand what you are offering and how to use it."

Read all about it here!

Tip o' the hat to InnovationConnection.com.

Marian Bantjes on Inspiration

"Inspiration is that unexpected moment of discovery when the mind leaps to a new place triggered by something interesting. That something interesting can be a thing you’ve read, or seen on the street, or in a book or gallery, or a piece of music, or something really great or something really awful. For me it is often unrelated to my work and is completely unpredictable.

"Influence is when you see something you like, usually work that is related to the work you do, and you absorb whatever it is you like about it and either consciously or subconsciously emulate it or somehow incorporate something of it into your own work.

"Reference material is when you look at something specific and try to make something like that."

Excerpted from Marian Bantjes: Student Questions

CROP Hunger Walk 2009

Congratulations to Becky Kobsik! Her design was chosen for the 2009 Charlotte CROP Hunger Walk T-shirt. Charlotte has the largest CROP Walk on the planet and Becky's design will be seen on t-shirts worn by several thousand walkers.

Follow A+GD on Facebook

Keep up with the latest news for A+GD students and alumni on our Facebook Group page!

Typekit Offers a New Approach to Fonts on the Web

The Internet was abuzz today with the news of Typekit, an upcoming product from user experience guru Jeff Veen set to launch this summer.

Basically, Typekit will offer a way for designers to license fonts for use on web pages, which is a big deal because of a CSS feature that is soon to be supported in most major browsers that will allow designers to reference fonts installed on the server and render them as fonts (rather than Flash or images) for users.

In other words, the web is about to get a whole lot more accessible and indexable even while it gets prettier. The problem, says Veen, is that most web fonts aren’t licensed for CSS linking or use on web pages. Even free fonts are generally not licensed for that type of use. That’s where Typekit comes in.

Read all about it here!

How to Be a Graphic Design Student Online

1. Flickr
2. Blogging
3. Tumblr
4. Twitter
5. Facebook
6. Delicious
7. RSS Reader

Read all about it here!

Tip o' the hat to Noisy Decent Graphics.

Be the Creative Director Sweepstakes

“Do you have what it takes to be a Creative Director? Find out now for your chance to win a Creative Director's Prize Package, including a $50,000 bonus check and an iMac computer.”

Check it out: bethecreativedirector.com

The 10000 Year Clock

“The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine scenarios issue. Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long term thinking would be far more focused, and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth. Two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.”

Read all about it here.

100 Great Resources for Design Inspiration

Look for design inspiration? Check out this list from Mashable.com!

Graphic Designers: North Carolina

www.careerinfonet.org

Little Red Riding Hood

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

The Legendary Bill Bernbach Shares His Thoughts About Twitter

“Every few years I pick up the Bill Bernbach Book and re-read quotes from the inspirational founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach. For over 40 years Bill’s ideas have rung true and stayed relevant. In fact, take his exact thoughts, word for word and apply them to questions about Twitter, and they not only make perfect sense, they enlighten us with wisdom. Here then is an imaginary interview with Bill Bernbach. His words are exactly that. His words. Verbatim.”

Read all about it here!

Tip o’ of the hat to Creativity Unbound.

Sheep and Dogs make Art

Typographic Trees

Just What is Design Thinking

“Design thinking deals with wicked problems. Because no single objective can be identified in advance, design thinking is aimed at drawing on and synthesizing a wide range of knowledge and influences rather than at optimizing (Huang; Saffer; Owen). For the same reason, it is viewed as interpretive (Lombardi), holistic and integrative (Lombardi; Owen). Both how the problem is framed and how to evaluate possible solutions must be devised as part of the designing process.”

Read all about it here!

Tip o’ the hat to Fast Company.

Ken Robinson -- Finding Your Element

Tip o’ the hat to elearningpost.com.

Quick, Henry, the Flit!

“Before Theodore Seuss Geisel found fame as a children's book author, the primary outlet for his creative efforts was magazines. His first steady job after he left Oxford was as a cartoonist for Judge, a New York City publication. In 1927 one of these cartoons opened the way to a more profitable career, as well as greater public exposure, as an advertising illustrator.”

Read all about it here!

Tip o’ the hat to University of California at San Diego. UC San Diego’s Mandeville Special Collections Library is the main repository in the nation for the original works of Dr. Seuss. The approximately 10,000 items in the Dr. Seuss collection, which includes original drawings, manuscript drafts, books, notebooks, photographs and memorabilia, document the full range of Geisel’s creative achievements, beginning in 1919 in high school and ending with his death in 1991.

Two Elements of a Great Presenter

“1. Respect (from the audience)

“2. Love (to the audience)

“There are no doubt important evolutionary reasons why this is true, but in my experience, every great presenter earns the respect of the audience (through her appearance, reputation, posture, voice, slides, introduction, etc.) and captures the attention of the audience by sending them love.”

Read all about it here!

Tip o’ the hat to Seth Godin.

Type in the Landscape: CREATE

Typography I students CREATE big type on the Harper Campus.

Understanding Comics

Design Thinking

Did You Know?

Branding Overload in Your (Clock) Face

“We’re bombarded with branding. No news there. But how bad is it, really? That’s what design student Tanner Woodford (Arizona State) wanted to figure out. During the course of 24 hours, he meticulously recorded all the brands that flitted past his line of vision. He then took his observations one step further, visualizing the results on a clock face.”

Read All About It Here!

Tip o’ the hat to FastCompany.com.