The Cosmonauts

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.