Here’s the news from typography, for the world: little things can count for a lot. In the logo and fashion design commentariat, much press has been devoted to the recent and clear trend of established, iconic fashion companies rebranding themselves with plain, sans-serif lettering, moving away from the classic forms of Roman, serif letters. A… Continue reading Sans and Sensibility
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No name, no brand
This truism is fundamental to branding—names elicit emotions such as trust, affection or happiness (Coca-Cola) and awe (Apple). Names like Apple and Pepsi may seem arbitrary, but they are pregnant with suggestion. A name greets the customer before he meets the product, and in the end it is the name that rides off alone into… Continue reading No name, no brand
Gilt and Pleasure
Draw a flower, carefully unfurling its petals. Follow the line of its sinuous stem, adding tendrils to its flow, extending and multiplying their curves, sprouting a bud here and a leaf exactly there. Repeat, with loose wrist and elegant variation, and an ornament is born. Surely making and looking at them an innocent even natural,… Continue reading Gilt and Pleasure
Different strokes: Why we like calligraphy
Calligraphy is an enigma. Its enduring, popular appeal may let us take it for granted, obscuring the question of why, in the age of mechanical text, we revel so conspicuously in it. The first, easy answers heard most often—antiquity and beauty—are, by themselves, inadequate. Little of the antique survives in our consciousness. And simply quoting… Continue reading Different strokes: Why we like calligraphy
Specialists vs Generalists
A human being, wrote sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, should be able to fight, write poetry and die gallantly, among 18 more things. Specialisation, he famously said, is for insects. This is typical of the scorn for specialisation shown humanists. They romance generalism, specialisation’s antithetical shadow, extolling its unbounded roaming, its quest for wisdom, universality, and a… Continue reading Specialists vs Generalists
two golds at Digipub World 2018
Our work won two golds at Digipub World 2018, with Quint winning ‘Best website redesign’ and Re:Reader scooping up ‘Best innovation in publishing (english)’ See some images from the ceremony:
a talk on the convergence of technology and design at Pearl Academy
Itu joined Pearl Academy’s #ReinventDesign event organised by HP and IndieFolio Network He gave a lecture on the convergence of technology and design. He talked about building an ‘X-ray’— the habits and attitudes that help designers thrive with technology. Here are some images from the event
By My Own Hand
You see it everywhere, absolutely everywhere: rough-and-ready brush lettering or something like it. It’s proudly imperfect and knowingly naive. It’s bold and inkily raw; its voice can be raucous and assertive or tremulous and quivering. It’s on posters, packaging, banners and trademarks of food brands and political movements; on literary book covers, at conferences, and… Continue reading By My Own Hand
The vision-mission exercise
“We’re away on a mission-vision exercise,” said the client’s voice on the phone, speaking Hindi. ‘Vision’ sounded like what philologists call an echo word: a handy utterance meant to downplay the echoed word—mission, in this instance. Like we say ‘tax-vax’ or ‘college-shollege”. Mission-vission. That was two decades ago. These days, Deep Design often deals with… Continue reading The vision-mission exercise
The Business of Consulting
In the last decade, the more far-seeing set of mature, large businesses has been making hopeful approaches towards design. Their ardour comes from seeing design as a source of competitive advantage, and has been reported on widely. This column, too: we labelled Apple, Airbnb, Google and their increasing tribe as ‘digital darlings’. In their wake,… Continue reading The Business of Consulting