Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Book Design: Fallout



One of my projects was to design a 100-page book on a scientific topic. While digging through some old papers from someone's attic at a garage sale, I came across an old Fallout Shelter manual from the 1940s. I thought it would be an interesting idea to create a modern-day version of it with scientific research on nuclear and biological warefare, along with sections for how to survive attacks of that nature. I made much of the style of the design to reference the old manual I found and the book turned out to be a pretty interesting compilation. See more pictures after the jump.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

What They Don't Teach in Design School:

I wanted this blog to not only be a log of what I have been working on, but also a place where I share my design inspirations.
Identityworks.com has a great new article up (written by Paula Scher, creator of the famous Citi logo) about what you learn and don't learn at Design School and what you don't learn from blogs. It is an interesting read, especially for someone like me who went and learned a lot from design school.

I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali. The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design.


Read the full article here on Identity Forum.