In between the two beach towns I visited while in Brazil, I squeezed an afternoon in Salvador. The Pelourinho neighbourhood (historical center of town) is as charming as it is scary, because of some of its inhabitants. Even with all the police presence, I didn’t feel very safe. Still, I managed to take some nice pictures of the place with my cellphone. Enjoy.
Ah, Pipa… what a beautiful place. Will I ever come across beaches like this again? I don’t typically post on this blog unless the topic is design related, but this place was so stunning that I feel like sharing. Hopefully the images do it justice.
This small beach town which I visited for a week in January, is located near Natal, in the northern state of Pernambuco, in Brazil. It has some of the most scenic coastlines I’ve ever seen.
Walking distance from the town, the closest beaches are Praia do Amor (great surfing spot), Praia das Minas (completely deserted, sometimes visited by marine turtles), Praia dos Golfinhos (no waves, visited by dolphins!), and Praia do Madeiro (it has some waves, and is also visited by dolphins). Nearby, by van or boogie, one can access lagoons (one with water the colour of Coca Cola!), an ecological sanctuary, cliffs… the list goes on.
I stayed at the Pousada Pomar da Pipa owned by a great paulista named Mario, and became friends with some cool Brazilians who were also staying there. At night, while the bar scene was very small, the culinary choices were quite varied, considering the size of the town. We tried lots of different restaurants, and even grilled some meat on the last night of our stay.
It’s a place I definitely want to visit again!
During my recent trip to Brazil, one of the highlights was a day at Inhotim, the open-air museum and botanical garden in Minas Gerais. If you’ve never heard of it before, you are not alone. I first read about this 3,000-acre ranch a few months ago in an article from The Guardian:
Located in Brumadinho, a sleepy mining town around 40 miles from the state capital Belo Horizonte, Inhotim began life in the 1980s when Paz bought a 3,000-acre ranch with part of his fortune. He transformed the site into a stunning botanical garden with the help of his friend Roberto Burle Marx, a landscape architect.
In the late 1990s Paz began building galleries at Inhotim to house his growing art collection. In 2006 it opened to the public, rapidly becoming a reference point for the arts in South America: 300,000 people visited this year.
A cross between Tate Modern and Kew Gardens, Inhotim is home to nearly two dozen art “pavilions”, housing work by giants of the Brazilian arts scene such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meirelles and Vik Muniz and international names including Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Steve McQueen.
Getting there was no picnic. I had planned on staying three days at Belo Horizonte, so I could visit Inhotim one or two days (it’s located 1.5 hours away by bus). Unfortunately, for many days prior to my arrival, torrential rains had soaked Minas Gerais. Many towns were covered by floods. So much so that Inhotim didn’t open to the public the first two days I was in Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, the last day I was there it opened, and I got to visit!
The photos in the slideshow should give you an idea of the place, the botanical gardens, sculptures and pavilions. The buildings contain the private art collection of Brazilian magnate Bernardo Paz, the man behind Inhotim. The sculptures are in-situ installations, specially commissioned for the space.
Thanks to the useful circuit suggested at the Vambora blog, I was able to see everything in one day. Some of the highlights for me were:
The institute’s website has photos of the artworks created by the different artists. While many of the pieces are interactive (sounds installations abound at Inhotim), they will help you get an idea of what you’d encounter.
If you love modern art, visiting Inhotim is a must. To me, it was as unique an experience as going to the Venice Biennale for the first time. Only that instead of canals, I was surrounded by Brazilian tropical gardens!
Earlier this year I submitted the above illustration to Hamburg-based firm EIGA Design to be considered for inclusion in their Eat! 2012 calendar. I received a copy of the calendar recently and it’s a nicely printed piece. It features 54 artists, illustrators, designers and architects, and it’s full of inspiring art and design on the topic of food.
Find out more about the project by reading reviews on Centurion Magazine or by Nadine Roßa (in German).
If you’re interested in purchasing a copy (for yourself or as a holiday present for the artsy-foodies in your family), it is available through the publisher NBVD.
Below are a few images courtesy of EIGA’s Flickr page.
Is the brand the logo? Is the logo the brand? Is a logo also a logotype? Is a logo a symbol? Is the wordmark the brandname? Is the mark the wordmark? Is the brand the corporate signature?
Confused? Unless your company is called Brand, answers to those questions don’t come easy. If you’ve heard those terms before but aren’t sure what their exact meanings are, you’re not alone.
The reality is that there’s no consensus as to what the above terms mean, or what is the proper nomenclature for the things we create. For an industry that considers problem-solving a key objective, design has created a confusing array of terms to describe its end products.
Unfortunately, the discrepancies in assigning the same meaning to those words is not just between professionals and clients, or professionals and the general public. It happens even among professionals! This is a problem, because it creates barriers in the exchange and discussion of ideas. A recent post by designer Andrew Sabatier serves as a perfect example. In the course of making excellent observations on the merits and viability of companies dropping their names and just using symbols, he has to go into great detail explaining what he means with every term he uses.
How did we designers get to this point? Do other professions share the same problem? Do musicians debate the meaning of “song” as much as we do with “logo”? Do mathematicians do the same with “number”?
I remember going through college and not getting a straight answer. Instructors used different terms. As I began working I noticed that studios were more coherent in their use of nomenclature. As confusion can result in extra work, the description of deliverables in contracts tended to be very specific.
In time, I adopted the language used by my peers at Landor, which I find very straightforward:
And logo?
What about brand?
A logo is only visual. A brand is not just visual. Why all the confusion between logo and brand then? Maybe because a logo acts as a reductive visual reference to a brand, and when a consumer sees a logo, it can trigger some of those thoughts and feelings for the brand it is referring to.
Sadly, I don’t see an effort by the industry to simplify and consolidate terminology. We are all after the new thing. I was surprised how various speakers at this year’s Brand New Conference argued that logos where not very important, it was “stories” that mattered. The most memorable slide of the day said that “branding is for cows, stories are for people.”
Topic for another post.
We have been bombarded lately with Steve Jobs’ quotes and stories of how his company’s products have changed people’s lives or even the world, as the media reacts to his recent death with a predictable eulogization into sainthood.
One of the most interesting trends I’ve noticed is how design and attention to detail are being identified as chief reasons for his success. It’s surprising to me, because there are plenty of designers with attention to detail out there who would make lousy business leaders.
Like any visionary that got things done, he was a complex character with a variety of skills that made him successful. I don’t buy the idea that he was a designer first and a CEO second. But it’s undeniable that he considered design to be very valuable to create relevant differentiation.
In a great interview conducted by Fortune back in 2000, when asked if his obsession with design was a born instinct, since what has always distinguished the products of the companies he’d led was the design aesthetic, he replied:
We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn’t drone all the time. That was not just “Steve’s decision” to pull out the fan; it required an enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.
This is what customers pay us for—to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, “Oh my God, that’s great!”
I don’t see enough innovation like that in our industry. My position coming back to Apple was that our industry was in a coma. It reminded me of Detroit in the ’70s, when American cars were boats on wheels.
To be able to instill into his employees the idea that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation” requires a lot more than attention to detail.
I wonder if his ascendancy into sainthood will ultimately help or harm the cause for better design. Everyone wants to become the next Apple, and the current over-simplification of what made him successful could be counterproductive.
Will it end up bringing a commoditization of design, in which objects look pleasant but lack soul? Because soul… you won’t find it by looking at the space between letters.
Design and programming are becoming interrelated, thanks to tools such as Processing and Scriptographer. Unlike standard off-the-shelf solutions like the Adobe Suite, these programs let designers to arrive at very unique creations, especially in the realm of data visualization.
Take for instance the September 11 Memorial. The Rundown blog from Newshour recently explained how Local Projects and Jer Thorp used Processing to deal with the complex task of ordering the 2,982 names that appear in the memorial, since there was a need to organize the names by affinity instead of chronologically or alphabetically.
Jer talks about the project in more detail in his blog, and Scientific American has an article on the subject too.
If like most designers (myself included) you are not well-versed in programming and Processing in particular, you may want to visit the YouTube channel of Abe Pazos. He has been uploading ten-minute tutorials where he teaches the basics of coding in Processing. The episodes are easy to follow and should go a long way into making programming more common among us designers. There’s also a lot of bibliography on Processing, including the official book by the creators of the language.
It’s a skill I’m hoping to pick up, since as I wrote on an earlier post about where identity might be heading, branding is another area where we can increasingly see programming playing a big role.
Below are three exciting examples that offer an idea of what’s possible: the COP15 identity by okdeluxe, the MIT Media Lab identity by TheGreenEyl/E Roon Kang, and the onedotzero event design by Wielden+Kennedy/Karsten Schmidt.
Yesterday the DiaTipo DF conference was held in Brasilia, Brazil. Thanks to Twitter (where I found out about it) and Livestream (where I caught the live online video), I was able to follow it.
During a roundtable discussion, there was an interesting exchange between Fabio Lopez and Fabio Haag left me thinking. It happened towards the end of the video I embedded at the bottom of this post. Here is my (approximate) translation of Fabio Lopez’s question:
Those who have analyzed corporate identity and institutional communications historically throughout the decades have noticed that in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the message and objective was neutrality. Companies wanted to present themselves as being neutral.
Moving on to the 90s and the first decade of this millennium, the message was that of being modern, of showing how advances in technology was changing all aspects of business.
And now it seems that the message is to be informal, approachable, friendly. These days, very company is informal and friendly. It is thanks to the talent of designers that within this common objective that companies share, a lot of diversity exists.
But it’s true that every time a new client arrives with the need for a new identity, they ask to be simple, informal. Even though they are big companies with millions in revenue, they want to appear to be simple and approachable.
How to survive this, and what is the way forward for identity? In 2020 and beyond… what will companies want their identities to be?
This certainly got me thinking. It is very true that now everyone is friendly and approachable. He missed innovative, another overused word. All corporations think they are contemporary Leonardo da Vincis.
But the big question, which I hadn’t considered until I heard it in the video, is what will the next decades bring for identity? Where is it heading?
The answer from Fabio Haag was instructive, if not all-encompassing:
More and more, the definition of a brand is coming from the users. Because of the internet and social media, people are less and less buying wholesale the message coming from the top.
It’s true that in the past, these messages felt very corporate and distant, whereas today the attempt is to appear to be near. But it seems that as time goes by, the message (advertising and identity) is less valuable, and it is how a company behaves that becomes more important.
Actions and attitude, in the practice. True actions that have a real impact in people’s lives shape a brand more than any verbal or visual message.
Identity is escaping companies hands, and it is consumers that are beginning to take charge of the relationship.
While this is true (and it has already began), I found the answer lacking because a visual and verbal message will still have to be created in the 20s, 30s and beyond.
The big trend I see moving forward is the collision between the extremely adaptable, and the extremely personal.
More and more we are seeing generative identities, ever-changing and reactive whether manually or through the programing power of Processing and the like. Examples abound: MIT Media Lab, Casa da Música, Aol, Google’s doodles and many others.
But thirty years from now, these will not look timeless. They will probably feel dated and rudimentary. Massive amounts of data are being collected from tracking our online habits (what we do and see on the web, smartphone, etc.), and in time it could give corporations the power to personalize not just their message, but why not all the way to their identity when they talk to each of us.
Maybe in the future, each screen will adapt to the individual user in ways that affect even the identity of the company communication. Screens could even replace packaging labels, which powered by LED or e-Ink displays could show a different design to each person looking at them.
In such a world of extreme adaptability, where all messages can become local and personal, why would identity remain a universal constant? It’s hard for me to think that corporations will not find a way of “owning the relationship” once again.
Se você fala portugués, jump to 01:29:00 in the video to follow the exchange I transcribed above. Or watch the whole event here. Most of the presentations centered around typography, from creation to usage.
The roster of presenters was very interesting, and included Frederico Antunes from ChibaChiba, Fabio Lopez and Daniel Souza from Tátil Design (whose work includes the identity for the Rio 2016 Olympics), Fabio Haag (type designer at Dalton Maag, whose founder Bruno Maag run the workshop I attended in Urbino last month), Elaine Ramos (art director at Cosac Naify, a very cool Brazilian publishing house), Eduilson Coan (type designer from dooType), Dino dos Santos (type designer from DSType), and Alceu Nunes (art director for VIP magazine).
Today is one of those days when I count myself lucky to be a designer living in San Francisco. I attended a very interesting lecture and discussion on the work of Dieter Rams. The talk, held at the Goethe Institut in San Francisco, was called Less and More: German Design Reconsidered and was related to the Less and More exhibition opening this weekend at the SFMOMA.
There were three parts to the symposium. The event started with a presentation by Professor Klaus Klemp, Head of Exhibition at the Museum of Applied Art in Frankfurt and co-curator of the SFMOMA exhibition. He talked a lot about Dieter Rams’ time at Braun, and shared a thorough analysis of the characteristics found in the designs from that time. The title of this post comes from Klemp’s great way of describing what makes Rams’ designs so special.
He closed the presentation the famous Ten Principles for Good Design:
Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.Good design is long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.Good design is environmentally-friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity!
The second part of the event was a panel discussion among several German designers: Thomas Overthun (Associate Partner and Design Director at IDEO), Wilhelm Oehl (Partner at Eight Inc.), Daniel Hundt (Creative Director at One & Co.), Markus Diebel (Vice President of Design at Incase) and Moni Wolf (Principal Design Director at Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business).
Inevitably, at times the discussion would center around Apple and its approach to design. Maybe it was top-of-mind for people, especially with Steve Jobs announcing recently that he’s departing as CEO, or maybe because Apple is mentioned at every business meeting these days. In any case, during this talk it did seem appropriate, as one can find many influences from Dieter Rams aesthetics in the work that Jonathan Ive has been conducting at Apple. I wonder if decades from now people will talk about Ive the same way we revere Rams now.
And speaking of revering, during the Q&A session they had a surprise for us: Mr. Rams showed up to take some questions! He was very pointed in his disdain for “-isms”, in his belief that design should be centered around being “less but better”, in the challenges that design needs to consider as billions of people from the BRIC countries enter the marketplace in the upcoming years.
He also shed some light as to how he was able to get Braun to produce such high-level design products. Very simply, he credited those running the company (Erwin and Artur Braun) for wanting to achieve that high-level. According to Rams, shared goals and a close partnership between the head of the company and the designers are key. It happened at Braun because the Braun brothers cared. It could be seen later at Olivetti because his Adriano Olivetti was just as concerned about design. And it happened at Apple for the same reason. (He talked about this in greater detail in a Telegraph article earlier this year.)
Overall, a very inspiring night. Now I can barely wait to see the exhibition at the SFMOMA and maybe even get its catalog. In the meantime, here is a clip of him in Objectified:
The last stop of my trip through northern Italy was the city of Verona. I didn’t get to spend a lot time sightseeing, as I was on a mission to buy a nice pair of sneakers (mission accomplished). So you won’t find photos of Juliet’s house in the slideshow.
But I did get to enjoy one great final dinner, at the Osteria al Duomo. The regional spaghetti con sugo di asino (that’s right, donkey meat) was really delicious.
And with that, my trip came to an end! Italy, I miss you already…
I haven’t lost my head yet.