Posts tagged "news"
Quipsologies
Starting today, I'll be a regular contributor at Quipsologies, a fantastic design resource by the talented folks at UnderConsideration.
That means I'll be poking around the far corners of the web on their behalf, searching for tasty visuals and links to share on a weekly basis. I'll be looking out for inspiring design ephemera — typography, branding and imagery that might otherwise go unseen. So if you've got a quip you'd like me to consider, drop me a line (or tweet)!
They just relaunched after a beautiful Typekit-powered redesign and as co-founder Armin Vit put it, it's hot. It really is. Come on by.
Coralie
Modern Zoo, part 2. I skipped B for Berthe the bat, because I love Coralie so much (le serpent corail). One by one, I'm re-drawing Lou Klein's alphabetical origami zoo.
Lou contacted me via this site when I made the original post, and I asked him to write back and tell me about his life, since I couldn't find anything about him online. Here's what Lou wrote:
Since creating "Animals to Fold" (that was the name of the English language edition) quite a few years have elapsed and I've had a varied career in design, education and publishing in the USA and England. I taught at The School of Visual Arts in NYC, lectured in many art colleges in Great Britain but especially The Royal College of Art (5 years as a senior lecturer and 5 years as head of graphic design). During that period I also spent a semester at Yale as visiting professor and acting head of graphics.
In London I was creative director at Grey Advertising followed by establishing my own design group. During that period I created the "pencil" award which is the "Oscar" that's given out by the British Design & Art Direction Association for design, advertising, etc. in various categories (I won 5 of them myself in the "best Direct Mail" category).
I was also consultant to Time Life Books in London and set up a design department for their British Empire Magazine project with the BBC. Eventually I was appointed Director of Design for Time Life Books in the USA. There I worked on new product development (mostly book series). All of my personal work has preceded computers and none has been digitised. The bulk of my work remains out of reach as slides and print samples in cardboard boxes in London. However, if you'd like to see some recent work. which is mostly 3 dimensional, my daughter created this web site.
Let me know what you think.
Lou Klein
l'Avventura
Things will be a bit quiet here at Soulellis.com for the next few weeks, while I go find out what it's like to be a student again. I'll be one of 15 in SVA's Masters Workshop in Italy with Louise Fili and Steven Heller. We'll be looking at typography, theory and design history and creating self-defined book design projects in Venice and Rome.
Why am I doing this? After many years designing in front of a computer screen, I feel like it's time for me to go back out into the world and give my eyes (and sketching hands) a good two-week workout. I'm giving myself over to the kind of old-fashioned creative stimulation that comes from walking, seeing, sketching, absorbing. Cultural immersion, in situ. (Which should include, hopefully, lots of prosecco. And gelato.)
I'll try to share the adventure here.
Don't worry, Soulellis Studio is still open for business, with Erik and Alison at the wheel! And I'm back to work Monday morning, June 14.
A presto,
Paul
Modern zoo.
I found this gem in a great old bookstore in Ithaca: le Zoo de Carton: un alphabet illustré à découper, d'après la méthode Origami (Louis P. Klein). It's from 1963, published by Editions du Pont Royal, Paris. Each letter of the alphabet names an animal and is accompanied by an exquisite "stencil" graphic for the origami. The reverse side of each diagram is blank, so the book was really meant to be cut up into an alphabetical menagerie.
Does anyone know anything about Louis P. Klein? As a series of 26 graphics (posters, cards, whatever) the collection is incredible — they remind me a lot of the posters of Enzo Mari. Even the dotted lines are beautiful. I've searched online and can't find a thing about this book, so I'm going to scan, trace and recreate each of the animals here, beginning with Alfred le singe.
Entire book set in Univers 55 & 65, btw.
Paul Shaw responds.
Paul Shaw responds to my write-up of the AIGA Subway event with Vignelli and Hertz.
Dear Paul,
Thanks for praising my book and writing up the AIGA NY Subway Event evening. But you should know that the only person on stage that night who worked for the MTA was Doris Halle. Michael Hertz has never been an MTA (or NYCTA) employee. He has run his own design studio since the early 1970s (or maybe it is late 1960s — he does not have a website for himself or his firm). He has designed maps not only for the New York subway system but for the Washington Metro system, the city of Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Atlanta Olympics and others. The current subway map is not his doing. It is indeed based on the 1979 map which he designed based on the desires of the map committee chaired by John Tauranac which included citizens, MTA staff, psychologists and others. The idea for the map was not Hertz's but members of the committee who disliked the Vignelli map from day one. This whole history will be made public in 2011 when Peter Lloyd and Mark Ovenden's book on the history of New York subway maps is published. The story is much more complicated than what I have said here or what you will read online. I do not even know all of the details, only what Peter has let slip.
But I say all of this not to defend the 1979 (even though it is much more functional than the Vignelli one) but to point out that Hertz is not some MTA bureaucrat or some hack designer. He and Vignelli have legitimate philosophical debates about what a map should do and how that should be done. But that is different from the debates over aesthetics that tend to colorize discussions of the two major New York subway maps.
I hope you are no longer depressed by the AIGA NY evening. The news that clients fuck up great design solutions is nothing new. What is new here is that the secret we all know is not only out in the open but that the process has, to an extent, been laid bare. And the good news is that great design often survives bad clients, even if it is no longer in its original pristine form.
Finally, about Massimo's lament that he was not asked to redesign his own work, I think there are several reasons: 1. he may have been too expensive, 2. since there were complaints about what he did it was unlikely he would be asked to fix his own work (and that if he was asked he would probably have been very defensive and turned down the offer since the MTA's views would have clashed with his), and 3. the bureaucrats may have totally forgotten who did the work originally (remember that there is turnover in such agencies and that the people are not design-oriented; Vignelli is not famous to them. All they know is the map or the signs or whatever.).
All the best and thanks for buying a copy of the book (and Jan's book as well).
Paul
Flavors.me
The barrier to creating a professional-looking presentation of your work/life has never been lower. You can do it in an hour, with zero budget. Flavors.me just launched and lets you stitch together already-existing content to create a good-looking online presence "hub." Minimal effort required, well-designed and super-flexible. It's kind of what I wanted Google Profiles to become, before the buzz.
How exciting it is to be stupid.
Richard Saul Wurman spoke to a crowded room at the New School last night about beginnings, learning, listening, remembering and being open to the unknown.
It was a brilliant conversation about his journey to zero, from a man who's been around the circle a few times. Richard commands the room with a wit that somehow manages to be both self-deprecating and larger than life, leaving me to wonder at times if he'd gone too far. (He sort of makes Sarah Silverman look sweet.) No, in the end I was in awe: someone genuinely curious and generous and willing to share. A crazy old man at 75 who is so enthusiastic about spreading what he's learned in life that he'll take over the room and turn the evening upside down with maximum storytelling.
Wurman is famous for his disdain of note-taking so I felt a bit self-conscious about scribbling during the talk. He says that writing something down is permission to forget, and that a better kind of learning occurs when you listen and make connections without the crutch. I don't always agree, but I love the sentiment. I also have a really bad memory.
So as an experiment I tried to jot down the concepts only, with the idea that I would make the connections later. This works for me. I need an artifact so I can put the narrative back together again, later on. Rather than try to tell Richard's story for you, I present my notes. Fragments of words and ideas that caught my attention during the talk. The connections are all there, between the words.
Click on the image for a larger, more legible version.
An archive, of sorts.
Dead trees alert: a Soulellis Studio book, organized chronologically, featuring everything on this site from 2007 until November 2009. 316 pages. Very limited edition. We'll make a few copies available soon, probably on Twitter.
Design blogs and self-publishing on the Kindle.
We've got a long way to go before the Kindle is a productive place for designers or anyone publishing an image-heavy blog. The graphics and typography are not great (terrible, even). Could be worse, but still — this is not yet a designer's tool. But I believe it's really important — critical, perhaps — to get on, and establish a presence. This isn't about making money (maybe, someday), but about a new ease in publishing. And understanding how technology is breaking down barriers, connecting us to our audiences and amplifying our stories.
For anyone interested in publishing your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, go here. It's easy, it takes about 2 minutes and it's free.
If anyone is actually inspired enough to subscribe to Soulellis.com for $1.99 / month, here you go.
More shots of Soulellis, Kindle Edition (and some of Antonio's AisleOne).
A nice discussion about typography and design on e-books going on here at Wired Magazine.
Speak Up
Hey, we were featured on Speak Up yesterday. Speak Up is a fantastic graphic design blog/community founded by Armin Vit — what an honor to appear here as one of his bookmark picks for American design, alongside some truly great work.
Check out the other featured designers:
Helen Yentus
TNOP
Rumors
Arlo (@arlo_design)
End Communications
Jessica Hische
NYC, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago, Brazil: coming soon.
The Inaugural Salon was a huge success. We raised $5,000 for City Year DC and enjoyed an afternoon of stimulating discussion, new and old friends and good food and wine. Chad Evans and I are moving forward and planning upcoming Salons in NYC, Vancouver, Atlanta, Chicago and Brazil. More about that soon.
I really loved giving my talk ("Telling stories in an age of information hysteria") and it generated a lot of conversation. I'll be posting it here this weekend.
The Washington Note
One of our speakers, Steve Clemons, made a really nice mention of The Inaugural Salon on his super-popular blog, The Washington Note.
Salon time!
Wow, we're so excited about being in Washington DC on Monday. AND Tuesday. Our final line-up for The Inaugural Salon on January 19 has really come together in a beautiful kind of way. There's still room, so please bring your friends and colleagues. You can still register at www.salon2009.com, but walk-in registration ($100) will also be welcomed.
12:45pm-1:15pm
Arrival and check-in at the House of Sweden (Google map).
Paul Soulellis/Soulellis Studio
Carrie Heinonen/Art Institute of Chicago
Kristen Shepherd Denner/Whitney Museum of American Art
Kwanza Hall/Atlanta City Council District 2
3pm
Break: coffee, networking, food
Amale Andraos and Dan Wood/Work Architecture Company
Michelle Moore/U.S. Green Building Council
Randall Kempner/The Aspen Institute
Steve Clemons/The New America Foundation
Jean-Phillipe Touffut/Centre Cournot, Paris
Jeff Franco/City Year DC
6pm
Cocktails!
Oh, and I'll be posting my talk here in the near future. ("Telling Stories in an Age of Information Hysteria.") Look out for it.
Come to DC
4 million people are descending upon Washington DC for the presidential inauguration. We're hoping that at least 60 of them will come to our conference: The Inaugural Salon: a gathering on the eve of change. Please join us on January 19, 2009. Chad Evans and I are bringing together brilliant and talented friends and colleagues to share aspirations, question assumptions and engage in conversations about the roles culture, politics, economics, sustainability and the built environment will play in shaping the coming years.
We're doing it at a gorgeous location on the Potomac -- the House of Sweden. All proceeds (registration is $100) will be donated (100%!) to City Year DC, in the spirit of community and grassroots giving we hope our event will inspire.
Join us in DC, and if you can't, please consider contributing to City Year DC at the Salon site. Thanks.
2009
Today, Erik is at The Center for Book Arts printing the Soulellis Studio holiday card on a Vandercook letterpress. He's using Crane's Lettra paper and Soulellis Studio red ink (Toyo 0113). If you don't get a card from us soon just ask and we'll send you one.
The Grid System
It is, as it says: "The ultimate resource in grid systems." Freshly launched, by Antonio Carusone, of AisleOne. Soulellis Studio is listed under "Inspiration." Thanks Antonio!
Graphis portfolio.
Graphis has been talking about a new website for a really long time, and it's finally here. It's ok (honestly, after this long wait, my expectations were too high). But one nice feature is the ability to create design portfolios on the fly. Of course, Soulellis Studio is now represented, and in good company.
"Is it possible to fix government?"
The first official conversation on NewTalk is happening right now (ending Thursday), featuring NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, City of Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Former US Senator Bill Bradley, and others. I'm on the edge of my seat!
3 new ways to find us.
1. Soulellis Studio on Facebook.
2. On designrelated.com
3. "Soulellis" on Skype.
Guilluame Jullian de la Fuente
I was very sad to learn today that Guilluame Jullian de la Fuente passed away recently. Jullian and his wife Ann Pendleton-Jullian were a tremendous influence on me in school — mentors, in fact. I have so many important memories of this man — designing the house for Carl Sagan, traveling through Spain and France, eating great meals — but what stands out most clearly for me is his generosity, his passion, his vision, his boundless spirit. He taught me how to see. I was fortunate to have known him when I did.
Jullian on the left, next to LeCorbusier, with the Hospital of Venice project on the wall behind them, 1965 (a few months before LeCorbusier's death).
