THE COSMONAUTS

Here’s a good way to fresh-start from vacation: finding that this little gem arrived home while you were away and awaits for a relaxed reading:

It’s a first edition of Design This Day by Walter Dorwin Teague, one of the first industrial designers and founder of a design firm that’s still out there after 80 years keeping a no-nonsense approach focused on creating quality products.

The difference between product design and architecture is in human scale and that has to do with political power.

There is something subduing in the creation of structures we humans inhabit or use in any way, something about those structures condioning our moves and behaviors. Architecture and (even more) urbanism have that powerful quality.

Architects project their structures to influence in the way we feel and behave. They manage flows of people, they regulate our exposition to daylight to condition our feelings or they make us feel free and empowered through space and height. They make structures that manipulate us.

Architecture and urbanism could be the use of power though means of space. That could explain why politicians have always flirted with architecture, and dictators love to have scale models of their dreamt cities.

Designers instead, have never been that interesting for the powerful (with some interesting exceptions). Their work is usually not that influencing. Designers make things that tend to be smaller than humans. Their structures may condition but don’t force us to do anything. It’s not the space which conditions the individual but the individual who manipulates the object.

I made a personal update to the Schematic Chart of Ideological and Design Changes from the 60s to the 80s by Massimo Vignelli. I decided to add a column named “internet times” suggesting that the internet is bringing a set of values to the way we understand creation, specifically designing and more specifically designing for the internet.

Mine is a personal interpretation of what that fourth column should be, if there should be a fourth column. I encourage you to make your interpretation too, filling the blanks with what you consider more appropiate. I’m sure there will be some common points.

Here is the original Schematic Chart of Ideological and Design Changes from the 60s to the 80s by Vignelli:

And here’s my interpretation. It’s a Fireworks PNG file for your editing convenience:

Now come and do yours, or at least help me out with rows 1 and 3.

This is what future cars looked like in May 1948:

A few quotes on design by our admired Massimo Vignelli:

I don’t think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write ‘dog’ it should bark.

Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.

There are no hierarchies when it comes to quality. Quality is there or is not there, and if is not there we have lost our time.

Any color works if you push it to the extreme.

There is no design without discipline, there is no discipline without intelligence.

We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.

I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, pragmatically understandable.

I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless.

It’s not important to develop your own style but your own approach.

And finally a couple of videos of him, one explaining his hated/admired NYC Subway map of 1972 and the second one on his appearance on Helvetica (with Spanish subtitles):

Craig Ferguson on how youngsters ended up being the main target of marketers and all the collateral damage (funny as hell):

(seen at feroxlogos)

If you, like us, happen to love Braun designs from the 50′s to the 80′s (you know, those by Dieter Rams, Hans Gugelot, etc.), I suggest you suscribe to Braun’s group on Flickr. From time to time you’ll find rare beauties like this one:

About this picture (by galessa’s plastics):

This transistor radio is considered to be one of the first contributions of functionalist Ulm Design School (HfG Ulm), Germany, to Braun, although the actual designers are never mentioned. This radio was meant for foreign markets and is oddly marked only as “foreign”. It seems that Ulm functionalists could cope with some color after all. Made of white and tan injected Polystyrene; the strap is Vinyl. It is 17,5 cm wide.

This collection of all the Apple.com hompages is an amazing lesson on how to use color, space, type, photography and -what’s even more important- how to focus on what matters when designing a website. Worth spending an hour on it:

Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Steven Spielberg. It’s short and it’s worth watching, really:

This just deserves to be posted:

In 1954 the first transistor radio was released. It was the Regency TR-1, a small piece of equipment very advanced for its time. Sony followed quickly and one year after that they launched the TR-55 branded as a “pocket transistor radio”. By that time Japanese engineers were not as good at miniaturization as they are today, that radio was way bigger than the Regency and by no means fitted inside a shirt pocket.

¿What did Sony do about it? Well, they took the easy way and made a new shirt for their sellers where the transistor could easily fit. As we say in Spanish, if Muhammad does not go to the mountain, the mountain will go to Muhammad.

And all this is just an excuse to introduce Michael Jack and his freakin’ amazing collection of transistor radios.

All of them are pictured there, on his flickr account. It’s like… unbelievable.