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
Itu talks about ‘a place for design’ at H.Y.Sharada Prasad Memorial 2019
Itu’s lecture at the H.Y. Sharada Prasad Memorial 2019 makes a case for design to be amongst traditional learning disciplines. He takes us through the journey of design, how it might be located on the bookshelf of learning, what are the distinctions that set it apart from other fields of learning. And finally, can design… Continue reading Itu talks about ‘a place for design’ at H.Y.Sharada Prasad Memorial 2019
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
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