Friday, January 14, 2011

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.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

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. 

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

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."