beansprouts – (pl. n.) tiny thoughts from the brain of a Tinabeans
This semester so far been a nonstop race to the finish for my MFA Thesis, but I realized my thoughts were getting stale. What I needed was to clear my head and think about a different problem for a change. So, this weekend I took part in the GOOD Magazine Design Hackathon challenge. (Yes that’s…
What do you do when, three weeks into your internship, you are given the task of redesigning a dropdown menu for a site that’s about to be launched? My knee-jerk reaction was to simply “jump on it.” “Jumping on it” was a term used copiously at my last job. What it meant was to dispatch…
Way to start New Year off, right? =) Actually, this is not so about me having an existential angst session about my chosen profession, as it is about some realizations that have come to pass over this recent holiday season. The main thing is this: design is not as important as designers think it is….
Finally, we visited the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design today (after two failed attempts). And admission was free! Apparently they have invented some sort of “National Design Week” to promote itself. And design. Well, it was pretty much as I expected. Very… institutional. But still worth a visit. The first floor was an exhibition titled “Design…
Building on the online design community’s shining tradition of making utterly massive lists of supposedly invaluable resources and things, I give you: 100 Design-Related Blog Posts With Lists of 100 Things Top 100 Best Fonts of All Time 100 Inspiring Character Designs 100 Great Blog Logso 100 Great Inspirational Resources for Designers 100 Extraordinary Examples…
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a completely worthwhile read. I was able to get through it really quickly by only briefly glancing at the many graphics. This either means I somehow didn’t notice Tufte’s resounding plea to appreciate graphics, or that it is…
Another great graphic designer talk from TED (they have oh so many). I like this one because Milton Glaser talks more about his process than about his higher overarching ideals. Also I enjoy his irreverant attitude. Many times I’ve felt that same urge to humorously pontificate the “meaning” of this or that design, mostly to…
In the last week or so, I blew through 2 design books – one called How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul and the other called Thinking with Type. The former I borrowed from my co-worker, a fresh-out-of-college designer like me who, unlike me, has a traditional design education tucked away in…
In my forever ongoing education as an artist/graphic designer, I made yet another realization today. I guess I’d known this for quite some time but hadn’t really articulated it. Basically, at some point in the last 5 years, I made the transition from spending the majority of my time experimenting and figuring out how to…