On a scale of emotional temperatures, it doesn’t get any hotter than the 2019 Indian election did. And with the summer comes another TV war, in the shape of the 2019 World Cup. The two offer similar opportunities to reflect, or riff, from a spot in the shade. On how we experience them as emotional or social beings,… Continue reading Everything That Counts
Category: deep design
Signal to message ratio
The landscape of urban modernity, or the world that our grandparents grew up in, is defined by the volume and density of verbal and pictorial communication. Entire industries centre on it: news, marketing and advertising, and much of design. Yet a vast amount of communications may well be entirely wasted, or at least measured with… Continue reading Signal to message ratio
How’s the Josh?
Indian campaigns aren’t really designed in the usual sense, unlike in the US: logos, typefaces and imagery, thoughtfully created and effectively orchestrated. But widen the window of design to view communication, and the effectiveness of Indian campaigns pops into focus. Consider the campaign as a totality of impressions: actions, statements, media reports, symbolism, and the… Continue reading How’s the Josh?
Emotion Trumps Reason
There simply isn’t a good reason for the designer to take note of the Indian elections. And even less reason to call it and venture to guess the result. Apart from the obvious risks, the design lens seems too underpowered to bring an election into its focus. If one sees design as a primarily visual… Continue reading Emotion Trumps Reason
Now Trending
Every year, in late December, as the solstices approach—winter or summer, depending on your hemisphere—the design-trends-for-the-next-year articles appear, as if to beat the new year deadline. This false urgency exaggerates their significance: these aren’t catastrophic, black-swan events (wholly unpredictable—until they happen!) but slow processes already in motion. These ‘trends’ are tendentious and exist only in… Continue reading Now Trending
Sans and Sensibility
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
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
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