MetaFilter posts tagged with design

15 Mistakes Designers Make

divabat — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:23:26 -0800

15 awful mistakes made by designers in the music and apparel industries - such as not charging enough, ignoring typography, and unprofessional behaviour.

Closer to Disney than punk

Artw — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:09:20 -0800

"I haven’t figured out whether cracking open your computer, attaching it to an Underwood typewriter, then inserting it into a combination Victorian mantel clock/desk and calling it “The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine” is some sort of daft wit or evidence of a pedantry bordering on the pathological. " - Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design, design writer Randy Nakamura takes a look at the Steampunk phenomenon.

Fowler Museum of Cultural History

Kattullus — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:36:23 -0800

The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History has an extensive, searchable online collection. It focuse on material art and household items and has objects from all over the world. The website can be browsed either by geographic orgin: Africa, Asia, North and Central America, Pacific, South America, or through its two exhibits, Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and Fowler in Focus. Some of my favorite objects (but really, everything is entrancing) are The Blind Scholar (a Taiwanese handpuppet), Chikunga (a Zambian mask) and a stirrup spout bottle which looks like a puma eating a piglet (Peruvian). All items have accompanying descriptions and some have short texts or audioguides with further information.

Art Deco

Kattullus — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:59:33 -0800

Art Deco was the dominant style of the interwar era, coming out of Paris in the 1920's and ruling the roost until World War II broke out. Randy Juster's Decopix - The Art Deco Resource has enough pictures of Art Deco architecture to send one hurtling into The Gernsback Continuum. If that's not enough then there's always the 11000+ images of the Flickr Art Deco Pool. But Art Deco wasn't just about architecture. On the Victoria and Albert Musem's Art Deco site one can view Art Deco objects in great detail, rotating them and listening to audio lectures on each object. But before Art Deco was a design aesthetic it was an art-style. Illustrations for the Art Deco Book in France has more than 170 images from the proponents of that then-new style (some images are not safe for work, especially in the George Barbier section).

Tiled Background Designer

Dave Faris — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:38:05 -0800

Tiled Background Designer is just a small, useful tool to create patterns. Experiment with pictures, colors, textures and transparency to get best result.

Information Design + Politics = WIN! (Hopefully)

piedrasyluz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:31:12 -0800

Sean Tevis Takes On Intelligent Designer with Some Intelligent Design of His Own... Sean Tevis is running for State Representative in Kansas, against an opponent he describes as a proponent of intelligent design. Short on name recognition (and campaign funds) he took it upon himself to use his skills as an information designer to connect to his "constituents" - could he be the first true candidate for a generation that grew up on the Internet? Very clever xkcd-style infographic deployed against the agents of doom... (I donated, couldn't help myself) via BoingBoing

Rumplo' and behold!

defenestration — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:50:59 -0800

Rumplo will help you waste even more of your hard-earned cash on artist and designer created T-Shirts. You can submit shirts you've found anywhere online, as well as comment on and favorite other people's findings. Thanks to user-submitted tags, you can browse by c o l o r, type ('boys', 'girls', 'kids'), and many other attributes. If you get bored of browsing aimlessly, you can always check out what's popular.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

infini — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:41:31 -0800

Today is R. Buckminster Fuller's 113th birthday. Visionary, designer, inventor, engineer - 'Bucky' continues to inspire us. Known as the grandfather of sustainability, even today we discover that we've barely scratched the surface of his thinking and still have far to go and much to learn about managing Spaceship Earth. [ previously]

Fantastic, whimsical wooden furniture from Judson Beaumont

Ufez Jones — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:54:33 -0800

Inspired by such diverse influences as Pee-Wee's Playhouse to Frank Gehry and Warner Brothers Cartoons to Philippe Starck, Vancouver, BC based woodworker Judson Beaumont's furniture is whimsical yet fully functional and is suited for children and adults alike. Judson's official website, Stright Line Designs, can be found here. Unfortunately, it's entirely flash-based, so I can't link you to anything in particular. However, it's definitely worth clicking around. I highly recommend the Sketchbook (which can be found under "What We Do"), and of course, the Gallery section.

Gerd Arntz and the origins of the stick figure

mediareport — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:35:09 -0800

The Gerd Arntz Web Archive collects graphics from the career of the man who - in creating over 4000 Isotypes for social scientist Otto Neurath in 1930s Red Vienna - can make a serious claim to be the inventor of the modern stick figure. He attacked the corruption of German society as the Nazis rose to power, then joined Neurath in an attempt to create a transnational visual language that bore later fruit in Otl Aicher's 1972 Olympic pictograms and the AIGA passenger/pedestrian symbol signs. [via Mark Larson and Austin Kleon]