applied fantastic
posts about everything by firzb • archive • blues • mindless quotings • project stella
"I look in vain for the big idea, for that one theme or slogan that says it all, that can be played back by the average consumer after one viewing. If you can’t describe the big idea in one sentence or in three or four words, you don’t have a big idea. Quick cuts and animation and computer graphics are techniques, and ephemeral techniques, at best. None of these devices is an idea… A great verbal idea can survive even terrible graphics."
George Lois
"[…] Whether Trolls, Grey Vampires, or Fans, the domain of blog commentators is collectively coalescing into a picture of sorts. It is that of a nebulous, but nonetheless highly reactive, popular front, a digital chorus of anonymously signed or pseudonymic opinion that exerts a kind of peer pressure on those who publish online. It may be a chimera, but it’s an intimidating one. Filmmaker Adam Curtis identified its curious power when he described bloggers as ‘the new sensors’: writers now second-guess responses, they self-police themselves for fear that their biases, elisions, or inclusions will be shot down in flames by the invisible inquisition. Writing becomes an act done while looking over your shoulder."
Dan Fox
"A large part of the western world manages well without design. Go into a shopping centre in any town, and look at the signs announcing ‘sale’: they will be off-the-peg notices, used by jewellers as well as clothes shops …. Any Japanese tourist walking by knows at once what is going on here. No ‘design’ can ever beat this …. We designers are working more for ourselves -typography for typographers- than we like to admit, or, even less, to contemplate. There is a world going on outside where we are not wanted, and where we couldn’t help anyway."
Fred Smeijers
"[…] Το έγκυρο γέλιο είναι αυτό που λέει ο Γκόγκολ στον «Επιθεωρητή» του, απευθυνόμενος στο κοινό: «Με τον εαυτό σας γελάτε». Αυτή είναι η ύψιστη βαθμίδα της ικανότητας να γελάς. Η ικανότητα να γελάς με το οικείο κακό, το οικείο πάθος."
"There are features about advertising -some kinds of advertising- that are empathetically not points in a gentleman’s game. The major part of the activity is honorable merchandising, without taint. But there are projects that undertake to exploit the meaner side of the human animal - that make their appeal to social snobbishness, shame, fear, envy, greed. The advertising leverage that these campaigns use is a kind of leverage that no person with a rudimentary sense of social values is willing to help apply…"
W.A. Dwiggins, Layout in advertising, 1928
There was a time when the only art I had on my walls was by Peter Saville
"Λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳ οσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών"
"1. Readers come first, second and third. Designing is not done for peer approval or prizes.
2. Readers are neither ‘target audiences’ nor clichés: they bring their own purposes and questions to every encounter with text.
3. ‘Reading’ is not one-dimensional: there are many reading acts.
4. Content matters: design nothing that is not worth reading.
5. Stand by meaning.
6. Embrace the big picture.
7. Attend to details.
8. Looking good is better than looking different.
9. Looking good is worthless without making sense.
10. Designing and making is collective work: many brains and hands involved. The designer must not be credited unless all other workers are also credited."
2. Readers are neither ‘target audiences’ nor clichés: they bring their own purposes and questions to every encounter with text.
3. ‘Reading’ is not one-dimensional: there are many reading acts.
4. Content matters: design nothing that is not worth reading.
5. Stand by meaning.
6. Embrace the big picture.
7. Attend to details.
8. Looking good is better than looking different.
9. Looking good is worthless without making sense.
10. Designing and making is collective work: many brains and hands involved. The designer must not be credited unless all other workers are also credited."
Paul Stiff, 1999
"[…] One of the things I remember saying to you was ‘I’ve been coming to the conclusion that graphic design doesn’t exist’, and you replying ‘That’s a good theory’. But what did I mean? I THINK I meant that graphic design only exists when other subjects exist first. It isn’t an A PRIORI discipline, but a GHOST; both a gray area and a meeting point - a contradiction in terms - or a node made visible only by plotting it through the lines of connections. […]"
Stuart Baily
"The easiest, and so the most frequent and most spectacular way to ‘shock the bourgeois’ … is done by conferring aesthetic status on objects or ways of representing them that are excluded by the dominant aesthetic of the time."
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste
"[…] όταν προσπάθησα να μελετήσω τους δασκάλους της γραφιστικής ανά τον κόσμο, δεν κατάφερα να δω την δουλεία των Κ&Κ, όχι γιατί δεν μπορούσε να σταθεί αντίστοιχα δίπλα σε παραδείγματα μεγάλων σχεδιαστών όπως ο Alan Fletcher, ο Paul Rand και ο Wim Crouwel αλλά περισσότερο εξαιτίας της περιορισμένης προβολής των Ελλήνων δημιουργών παγκοσμίως.
Αναρωτιέμαι γιατί δεν υπάρχει μια ιστοσελίδα με αρχείο των εργασιών του Κάραμποττ και Κατζουράκη, γιατί οι εικονογραφήσεις της Αγνής Κατζουράκη δεν βρίσκονται στους τοίχους των σπιτιών μας και τελικά τι είναι αυτό που σταματά τους Έλληνες από το να προβάλλουν το αυτονόητο, την τόσο ολοκληρωμένη δουλειά των ανθρώπων που έδωσαν τις βάσεις για το σύγχρονο ελληνικό design."
Αναρωτιέμαι γιατί δεν υπάρχει μια ιστοσελίδα με αρχείο των εργασιών του Κάραμποττ και Κατζουράκη, γιατί οι εικονογραφήσεις της Αγνής Κατζουράκη δεν βρίσκονται στους τοίχους των σπιτιών μας και τελικά τι είναι αυτό που σταματά τους Έλληνες από το να προβάλλουν το αυτονόητο, την τόσο ολοκληρωμένη δουλειά των ανθρώπων που έδωσαν τις βάσεις για το σύγχρονο ελληνικό design."
hellopanos [everything design]
"[…] Βγαίνοντας στον πεζόδρομο βλέπω φουριόζους account executives και μπόλικο εκχυδαϊσμό να παραμονεύει. Όμως εγώ γελάω μόνος μου, επειδή σκέφτομαι τον μοναδικό κύριο Κάραμποττ, που αντί να πάει στην τελετή απονομής του δεύτερου διεθνούς διαγωνισμού τουριστικής αφίσας, στο Λιβόρνο της Ιταλίας στα μέσα του ‘60 (έχοντας πάρει τη δεύτερη θέση μετά τον… Πικάσο!), προτίμησε, φορώντας το φράκο του, το οποίο κάλυπτε ένα duffle coat, να πει στο ταξί να σταματήσει για να μπει τελικά σε ένα σινεμά όπου παιζόταν σε πρώτη προβολή ο «Λόρενς της Αραβίας». Τα πράγματα μοιάζουν πάντα αισιόδοξα όταν ξέρεις πως κάποιοι υπέροχοι πλακατζήδες και χαρισματικοί ονειροπόλοι σαν τον Μιχάλη και την Αγνή Κατζουράκη και τον Φρέντυ Κάραμποττ μας δείχνουν, ανοίγοντας την πόρτα του φέρετρου, τ’ αστέρια."
Δημήτρης Αρβανίτης
[πηγή]
"[…] a line of type slightly smaller than it ought to be; a contrast tried for but not quite achieved; an area of unwarranted overemphasis; a feeling that some aspect of the design hasn’t been as well articulated or resolved as it might have been; an air of probably unintentional strangeness in the choice of type, image, or the way they are brought together. Any, or all, of these things can result in a design that has about it the almost indefinable quality of animation that the British designer Paul Elliman, who teaches at Yale, describes as the ‘breath of life’."
Rick Poynor, 1999
[…] Spongebob, a tiny yellow sea sponge who lives in the submarine smalltown of Bikini Bottom, loves to unreservedly greet any new morning by exuberantly chanting: “I’m ready! I’m ready! I’m ready-eady-eady-eady-eady!” He then usually spends his day working in a dingy fast food joint, the Krusty Krab, where his remarkable talents at frying patties are shamelessly exploited by the owner, a Scrooge-like crab. This exploitation has no impact on Spongebob, however, since frying patties happens to be one of his most favorite pastimes. He effectively lives a free and happy life because, coincidentally, he does what he loves to do, and as such the idea that he may have reasons to feel alienated never dawns on him. His unassailable naiveté affords him the gift of an exuberance so contagious that the dire reality of his surroundings pales in the light of his optimism.
Jan Verwoert, Exhaustion & exuberance, Dot Dot Dot Fifteen
