Design:Related List of Lists for 2009

I hope you have some time to read. I mean read. Design:Related has a List of Design Lists for 2009. What does that mean? It means that right on that page, you’ll find a wealth of interesting Design reading. They have gathered over 100 lists in the following categories:

• Architecture
• Blogs
• Books, Comics, and Magazines
• Fashion
• Food
• General Design
• General News
• Green/Sustainability
• Movies, TV, Animation, and Video
• Music
• Photography
• Strange/Weird/Funny
• Technology
• Tutorials and Resources
• Video Games

My head is spinning. Yes, we’re in May 2010. These lists also cover the decade. And, it’s good to know these lists are here to come back and catch up with on a holiday. Not all categories appeal to everyone–I know I have my priorities of what I want to read. And there is still a lot to catch up with.

AIGA Design Archives Online

Love to look at what others are doing? Looking for inspiration? Love to look at excellent design? Head on over to the AIGA Design Archives, which feature selection from AIGA’s Annual Design Competitions. Covering everything from Brand and Identity Systems Design to Book Design, you’ll find a wealth of resources. With a sleek interface that’s easy to figure out and navigate, it’s a pleasure to browse through. Excellent design? Check. Inspiring? Check.

Works on the archive are selected from these AIGA competitions:

• About 365: AIGA Annual Design Competition
• About 50 Books/50 Covers competition
• Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism
• Worldstudio AIGA Scholarships
• INDEX: | AIGA Aspen Design Challenge
• Regional AIGA competitions

I flip through these when I get them in print form every year as part of my AIGA membership, and it’s always a celebration of good design. Not just good looking, but good design. Good design looks good most of the time, but really isn’t it just doing it’s job? It makes us comfortable looking at the information, even inviting us sometimes. Making us feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) with the message. One of my professors told us once that Design is a logical sequence of events. And I agree with him. There’s an audience, a context, and a purpose. These are considered and evaluated, research has focuses our options, and execution and refinement have polish the project to a degree which makes the design exceptional.

Of course, good design often looks easy, and that’s part of the appeal. It looks easy because it’s relating to the viewer. The viewer feels almost like they could have thought of it themselves. And that’s a very good thing if you want to get your message across.

Neiman Marcus print ad

One of my favorite things about design is typography. One can do so much with it–and yet so many pay little attention to it. John Berry’s Dot Font column on Creativepro.com is a great source for those of us who love typography. This particular article shows great examples of how type and type alone can be used to compose a great design. I like that he opens with a piece by Herb Lubalin, who I think is great. he looked at type like nobody else did before or after.

Examples from newspapers, books, advertising, and fine art show amazing uses of expressive typography. In these examples it’s hard to imagine the type placed anywhere else or doing something else. Expressive typography can inject meaning to the design, offer visual puns, be used as texture, reinforce the meaning of the words in the design, or simply exist as art.

Although there is no specific standard to using type in an expressive way, the result looks like it was very easy to do because it looks so natural. This is not the case. Designs that use type in an expressive way can range from requiring a modest assessment of the purpose of the design in order to take a direction with the expressive type–to requiring extensive research and experimentation to meet the goals of the design. It can be a lot of fun too. Expressive type allows us to use (sometimes) type in ways that type is traditionally not used. We can use principles like repetition, anomaly, placement, and kerning.

Sample courtesy of Creativepro.com.

Rocky IV movie poster

Head back over to Designer Daily for a different collection of Cold War propaganda. This time the focus is on pro-america. All the examples are from post World War II. It also covers literature and comic books, media and advertising, and movies. Note how much more commercial the types of media that are covered. The nature of the west or a product of the post-WWII boom, or both?

I can’t help but notice how much more emphasis this collection puts on making the other side a villain. I also don’t think it’s mere coincidence and that the folks that gathered these had anything like this in mind when they put these together. As a mid-thirties Gen-Xer I clearly remember how the east was portrayed everywhere in the media up until the end of the Cold War–and even after. Rocky IV is still one of my favorite movies of all time despite all of this.

Another thing that I noticed, is that the commercial nature of many of the samples in this collection–and therefore the lofty goal of reaching vast audiences, takes away from the designs and leaves and they fall short of greatness. They don’t even evoke any nostalgia. Hm.

Sample courtesy of Designer Daily.