Visual Design, Special Effects and Story Telling

Among my many interests of late; what can special effects do if used to tell us part of the story, as opposed to merely looking cool? And more to the point, what does this sequence tell us about Kato, from The Green Hornet? 



They're calling it, "Kato Vision." I'd love to see how something like this is actually made - how much work had to go into it, how much thought, who was involved. . . Apart, that is, from Green Hornet director Michel Gondry.

Namesakes

I stumbled, quite by accident, on something rather extraordinary today. Someone with my name is already out there in the world of design, and what's more striking, I actually like his writing.

Jonathan Baldwin is an instructor at the University of Dundee, where he teaches design - though he doesn't like to tell his hairdresser that, evidently.

"If I make the mistake of saying what I teach, well I might as well grab the scissors and do it myself because "design" is universally misunderstood. "Oh I wanted to be a designer" is a common reply but that's okay. "My ten year old brother does that" is slightly less acceptable. "Is that where you make stuff all day?" they might say, confusing me with their school Craft, Technology and Design teacher (or whatever they're called now) who looked after all the thick kids who couldn't quite manage the complexities of more demanding subjects such as, well, anything."

The quote above is taken from his presentation on Teaching Excellence, and it's well worth reading through. The presentation can be found here. Of particular note are his thoughts on The Bauhaus - and his goal of Designing Education, rather than merely teaching design. Reminds me of another instructor I could name. . . his insights are well worth noting, and I'm not saying that merely because of our suspiciously similar names. 

Kinetic Typography: Speak with Conviction

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Just found this example of Kinetic Typography, and thought it was worth sharing. I hope you find it as inspiring as I have; whether as a designer, or as a person.

Why Doesn't This Exist #1: Adventures in Design Thinking

Okay, it's time for a testimonial. I haven't been writing for awhile, but this morning I simply had to. A thought struck me that was accelerating about 9.98 m/s/s, roughly the same speed as the box of beads that hit the ground this morning when I casually walked past it. Luckily it wasn't fatal. Ideas can hurt when they travel that fast, but this one didn't have far to fall. 

Image courtesy of the Texas Bead Store.
Please note that this isn't the specific bead box that
gave me so much trouble; but they all follow similar
design conventions, in my experience. Apologies to
the Texas Bead Store if yours works perfectly.
This is not libel. Please do not sue me.

Naturally, it (the box of beads) snapped open on impact and scattered beads everywhere, which I then spent the next 15 minutes picking up one at a time, because that's how you pick beads up when they scatter all over the ground like cockroaches fleeing a light bulb. At about 2 minutes in, I got to thinking: why? 

Why hasn't someone built a better bead box? Forget the better mousetrap, the one we have works fine. Why do bead boxes always fly open and scatter beads everywhere if you drop them? Why do they have those plastic breakaway hinges that just make things worse? Is it a requirement? Is it a limitation of the clear plastics that are used? Or have we just accepted this blindly and failed to demand a better bead box?

I can't possibly be the first person to ask this question, can I? Can anyone show me a bead box that stays shut and doesn't break if you drop it? 

So I'm asking myself why this didn't come up in testing at some point, and it hits me (at about 9.98 meters/second/second, again - hooray for physics humor) that the reason it probably doesn't come up in testing is that the designer - whoever they were - never bothered to drop it when it's full of beads. The reason being simple: No one wants to pick up beads one at a time, even if it will eventually result in a better bead box (I mentioned this to my mother, and she pointed out that they'd just hire someone to do it for minimum wage and be done with it, and that they wouldn't run off to write blog entries about why someone didn't design a better bead box). 

As one might gather from the title, this is intended to become a regular feature here at Destiny Follows Design, to be released approximatively, "whenever I am struck by inspiration or by someone else's lack thereof."  

Design is Dangerous: 1971 Ford Pinto

The Ford Pinto made Time Magazine's list of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time. Not for the normal reasons people dislike a car; oddly, not because it was an especially bad car.

See, the Ford Pinto was best known for having a particularly volatile gas tank. It had a tendency to burst into flames when rear-ended. Now, this sounds like a rather severe design flaw - the gas tank was located in the rear of the car, and wasn't sufficiently protected from impact. 

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Lawsuits in 1977 alleged that Ford was aware of the design flaw, and released the car to the public without correcting it on the grounds that it was more cost effective. The infamous Ford Pinto Memo contained a Cost-Benefit Analysis in which someone - ostensibly Ford - weighed the cost of repairs against the monetary value of a human life, and decided it would be cheaper to pay for possible lawsuits arising from deaths. 

It was later revealed that the memo in question may not have actually originated from within the Ford Motor Company, and that the location of the gas tank - behind the axle - was actually fairly common for the day. The 27 deaths which evidently occurred out of some 2 million vehicles built were not actually significantly higher than the norm. So, was Ford responsible, or not?

The truth is murky, but there are still lessons to be learned. 

If Ford was aware that the design of the Pinto posed a significant risk to the public and chose not to correct the flaw, they clearly needed an ethics adjustment. The government should not pass laws they are not willing to be subject to; the designer should not, in good conscience, release to the public something that she would not personally use.

Is this ethical? Is it safe? Is it usable? Does it solve the problem at hand? These are all questions a designer should be asking, along with the more esoteric concerns. Is it beautiful? Is it simple? Is it cost effective?

The designer must ask; would I want to be remembered for this?

I'm looking at you, Ford.

Design in Society: Utopian Design

A design is Utopian if it purposely aims to improve society.

Some of the best examples of this can be found on the website for the James Dyson Award, targeting the field of engineering design. The terms of entry are simple for qualifying participants: design something that solves a problem. And really, that's what practical design is about. Solving problems.

This year's winner is a project dubbed Longreach. Longreach is a portable device designed for rapid deployment of emergency buoyancy devices - Life Preservers - which are composed of a highly compressed foam compound that's activated by water. When the capsules hit the water, they expand almost instantly to form a fully useful floatation device. These floatation devices are supposed to keep the drowning victim alive until emergency personnel can prepare an appropriate response. 

Every year, hundreds of people drown while rescue personnel are present, unable to get to them in time. Longreach could solve that problem. The expanding foam floatation rings are relatively cheap to manufacture. As such, Longreach could be put into use in a wide array of circumstances, replacing the conventional life ring with something capable of launching a rescue tool much further and quicker than the human arm can throw it. It's currently in the prototyping and testing phase, but it shows a lot of promise. 

Color Transforms:

Color transforms what it touches. 

Take the Starbucks logo. The classic logo, and the temporary “retro” logo, are brown; the iconic logo that everyone recognizes now, the iconic logo, is green. Each evokes different responses. Green is generally perceived as a friendly color, making one think of spring, or renewal - or the word, "go." It stands out, vividly, attracting attention and keeping it. 

Brown, admittedly, is the color of coffee – but it’s a much more bland, understated color. Professional, maybe – a color associated with business. It speaks of a more reserved sensibility, appealing most to the older generation who might remember the original logo. It can suggest a certain different kind of warmth, but time will tell if it is effective here.

Would Superman’s costume be as effective in a different color scheme? Cut any of the component primary colors, and it loses much of what makes it bold and powerful. Without the yellow backdrop to the iconic shield, he’s almost sinister; without the red trunks, the blue becomes overwhelming and almost melancholy, off center and unbalanced.

The Starbucks logo, in green, is similarly bold. It’s simple, yet effective, and it demonstrates the difference a choice of colors can make very easily. It's a subjective judgement, but I think it has the "Superman" quality - that certain "it" that a design needs in order to take off on its own power. Josef Albers would argue that color is always subjective, and there's a good deal of truth in that.

Of course, if the logo didn't have "it," would there be a Starbucks in every airport in America? Would there be a Starbucks in London charging five pounds for a cup of coffee just up the street from a local shop charging one?

Probably not.