Journal 3: TED talks

So, last night I watched a few TED talks:

Stefan Sagmeister shares happy design

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

JJ Abram talks about the mystery box

Christopher McDougall asks the question: Are we born to run?

Steve Job's How to Live before you die

Rob Forbes on the way of seeing

And finally,

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience and memory

So basically, rather than writing up this journal entry at a reasonable hour, I ended up watching way more TED talks with my boyfriend and falling asleep wondering whether our experience self or our memory self have more influence in how happy we are as human beings. And caused me to wake up in a foul mood because I had gone to bed much later than I had intended.

But,

with that said, probably the best Sunday night ever. So, I'm just going to briefly talk about what stuck out most to me from all these TED talks:

Sagmeister talks about this Korean artist that has posted up hundreds of blank speech bubble stickers on random advertisements, photographs, anything in New York (I believe that was the city), and that there are three audiences that receive happiness from this interactive design. One, the artist herself. Two, the people writing quite hilarious messages in the bubbles. And three, the people reading these speech bubbles.

In art, it's easy to design what happiness looks like, but it's harder to design a happiness response from your audience. You can draw or paint a sunrise, but to create a room with a retractable ceiling for your viewer to experience the subtle colors of a sunrise or sunset is far more desirable.

Sir Robinson is one of the cutest english men ever. Old, yes. But thoughtful. He makes this great statement about how we as humans have tried to mine certain prized educational commodities, like the ability to solve math problems or the ability to perform well in science, rather than honing in on all of the possible education attributes a child is good at, whether that is more in dance, art, or music. He stresses that creativity is just as important as literacy within education and we have tried for too long to stifle creative growth.

JJ Abram has ADD and I had a difficult time distinguishing him from that Seinfield character. But, he talked about why he is so attracted to mystery boxes, or the concept of creating mystery and suspense in film or television, or whatnot. He talks about his grandfather who gave him he first camera a lot, and play some interesting scenes from Mission Impossible Three and Jaws. Not my favorite, but whatever.

McDougall is the shit. I read his book Born to Run this summer and it literally changed my life. Watching him speak made the book become more real for me and it was just as sassy and energetic as I thought he would be. He talks about how this group of indians in the Copper Canyons who chose flight over fight when the Spanish came to the Americas, and how they today are living the same way they have lived the past 400 years. They are peaceful, corn and mice eating, beer drinking, megamarathon running people who do not know poverty, heart disease, depression, warfare--any of the things that plagues our modern society. He talks about three mysteries of the world: How we evolved from a pea brain creature to this fat brained species and how for thousands of years we were hunting without the creation of man made tools, How women suck at sprinting but once you get her into a megamarathon setting (100+ miles), they are just as good as men and usually finish those races more, And another point that I've forgotten just now. Well, that'll be something to look forward to if you watch this TED talk, because it's that good. Anyways, so he is basically advocating for us to return to our roots, that the one thing that ties all these three questions together and explains us as humans is the fact that there was a time when we as a species hunted in a pack. LIke ran fucking antelope down as a communal pack. And that only if we return to a compassionate, team-working, running species will we find more happiness. And that we should all throw away our tennis shoes because they fuck up our feet.

Steve Jobs dropping out of college after 6 months bc he felt so guilty about spending his working class family's life savings on his education at Reed College. But stayed afterwards for 18 months on the floors of his friend's dorm rooms, putting up coke bottles to pay for food, and walking 7 miles every week to a church for a hot meal. All of this just to drop in on classes that he cared about. He took a calligraphy class there and learned about letter press and typography and calligraphy, and fast forward a few years, used what he learned to elevate the typography of the mac, and (because microsoft copies everything) changed the overall aesthetics of the personal computer forever. That's connecting the dots, something that you can only do in retrospect, but gives you comfort in today and tomorrow because just the simple concept that a few years down the road you'll be able to use what you are doing today gives you the comfort and reassurance to take a few risks.

Forbes showed photographs of interesting compositions in nature/life that he's taken over the years. Basically the idea that design is everywhere around us, it's only the process of seeing it.

Loved Kahneman's talk about the experience self and the memory self, and how it related to our happiness. But, since I have some other homework to catch up on, i'll let you watch it yourself. This, and watching Inception and the Matrix within the last two weeks made me think about my memories and thoughts a little differently. Enjoy.

20 Rules of Good Design

The three that I think are the most important:

Concept: Having a clearly defined concept and creating work that is focused towards that concept and maintaining the honesty of that concept.

Be decisive: The idea of doing things with a purpose, or not at all.

Communicate not decorate: Communicate the concept, not adding elaborate or extraneous elements just for pretty sake.

The three I need to practice:

Type is image, it just as important: This is also one of my most important rules, a close close tie with communicate not decorate. It's something that something I lose sight of when I'm designing, sometimes the simplicity of a word or phrase, how short or long a word is makes designing around it difficult. The simplicity of the words "Dandelion Wine" and "Ray Bradbury" during this bookjacket redesign project has really challenged me, and focusing on the type and letting that shine through without being so dependent on imagery is something I'm working on.

Squish and separate: Need to work on my typography skills, paying attention to all the hierarchy rules, typographic color, size contrast, etc elements from last semester that I need a refresher on.

Negative space, create it, not fill it: I love the swiss and Jan Tschichold and whatnot because there is something about their creation of negative space that resonates with me on a visceral level. I need to utilize space better, create it, embrace it.

The ones I think should be ignored:

Type is only type when it's friendly: eh. Since I'm on Tschichold..I don't think his type is necessarily the most friendly, it's plain and unobtrusive, and kinda harsh along the edges, but I love it and I think it's a great reflection of type.

Ignore fashion: We are designers, we are supposed to be mindful of fashion and the needs of a client, who are probably really mindful of fashion in relation to their image.

Dieter Rams and Don Norman

Dieter Ram's "10 Commandments for good design" expresses the most important principles for what he thought was good design. The principles that I connected the most with are:

Good design makes a product understandable. As it applies to graphic design, it is about paying attention to the details, the hierarchy, the typographic color, the color palate, the texture of paper you print on, all the details that goes into communicating the mood, style, feel of your design concept. This clarifies your concept to your audience.

Good design is honest. It's about communicating and not decorating, utilizing negative space in a composition, keeping to the honesty of what you are designing, not offering promises that can not be met.

Don Norman's TED talk about 3 ways good design makes you happy was such a pleasant watch. He talks about how how design makes you happy on a visceral, a behavioral, and reflective way, how our subconscious instinctively connects with design that looks and feels friendly, that does not cause us anxiety, that makes us feel good about ourselves or portrays some positive image. He's all about the effects of positive thinking. One thing that really stuck out with me is this psychology experiments he mentions during his talk. A group of people are told to do a task that will determine their IQ, causing them to feel anxious about performing the task. All fail. Next, another group of people are asked to do the same thing, but they are relaxed with candy before, they are all about to perform the task. Norman talks about how our brain releases dopamine that causes us to be relaxed and makes us capable of forming more "out of the box" ideas. That's why brainstorming works so well, because when you are relaxed with the idea that no idea is a bad idea, you are more capable of forming better ideas.

Maybe that's why my entire weekend of design has been kinda slow, sure progress is being made, but that that reflective part of my emotions and thinking has caused me to become anxious with self doubt. So I'm listening to the new happy Taylor Swift music and eating valentines sugar cookies. Hopefully finally I'll get these projects done. Norman's talk, even just his demeanor, his delivery of his talk reminded me about how important being positive is. And I do have a totally different user experience when I am using something "friendly-designed." I respond to vintage, warm colors, cute graphics, rich whimsical textures and patterns a lot more than I'd care to admit. It makes me feel good. It makes me want to design when I see design that looks happy.

Journal 1: Writing Visual

Writing goes hand and hand with designing for me, since designing is so much about problem solving and finding solutions, writing is a way for me to organize rambles of thoughts into concrete ideas and themes. Writing Visual stresses the importance of sketching and utilizing free-writing and mind mapping tools to generate lateral thinking. This is what we as designers have to be fully adept at, at finding relationships between different disciplines and ideas, forming original ideas that are conceptually sturdy, not clique or accepting the obvious answers. This reading goes through several different writing techniques--mind maps, concept maps, free writing, brainwriting, and word lists--as ways to generate visual imagery. These tools are simple and stress the uninhibited recording of thoughts, as a way to make discoveries and connections not blatantly apparent. I did not realize how important this process was for me until reading Writing Visual, how important it is for my creative process to really conceptually think about my designs and whether they are working on an intellectual level. Mind maps and making several mind maps helped me organize and record all of my thoughts, concept maps helped me recognize the hierarchical relationships between certain themes, free writing helped me discover which themes were most important to me and the understanding of the book, and word lists helped me determine what visual imagery will help me in designing this book cover.

Free Write

Dandelion wine is about growing up, losing faith, and recognizing that a life without acceptance of death would not be a life worth living. It is the impermanence of our being, the nature of who we are as human beings, how terrible delicate our time in our world or reality is, that makes us want to, need to live our lives to the fullest. We will never be as young as we are today, never as naive, or as curious, or simply as unclouded in our judgements as we are today. Youth is this undeniably tender concept that few have spent enough time appreciating, it’s an ephemeral state that lasts too short. I chose Dandelion Wine because my friend told me that after reading this book, she wanted to harvest dandelions and make dandelion, and that is the feelings I have after reading this book. Nostalgia for a simpler time. A town like Green Town that exists only in our memories, a town where its inhabitants go to hillsides to set up red and white checkered picnic cloths, to eat ham and egg sandwiches, and enjoy the sweet taste of Eskimo pies and ripe, puckered cherries. It is the taste of lemonade, tart and sweet sliding down your throat when its unbearably hot outside, it’s about running through the night with only the dance of fireflies lighting your path, it’s about swatting gnats from slices of watermelon. This world that Bradbury is ten times more vibrant, more saturated with color, it’s a Rockwellian America where people don’t have to lock their doors, where neighbors walk each other home at night, where you can get a pint of ice cream freshly scooped from the pharmacy.

Time flies faster and sinks slower in this world. Days are lazily dragged on, you notice the sweet aroma of freshly cut grass, delight in what it means to be alive, to pick wild strawberries and fill pails with fox grapes. It’s about building relationships with your brother, getting into wrestling matches, playing Statues and Hide and Seek with friends. It’s about death. About appreciating how real and how alive you feel because you know that this, this summer, this life, is impermanent. That we are all easily taken. But death, though a scary idea to Douglas and Tom at first, it is just all part of growing up. It’s that transition from being a child and rejoicing in life, and becoming an adult, and rejoicing life even more because you understand how temporary it is. Like a beautiful summer spent bottling up dandelion wine for a cold winter night, but not having regrets or a sense of loss when the last bottle is empty. Because there will be another summer of harvest again, and though it might not be your harvest, you can teach your children and grandchildren of the harvest of ’28 and how to make dandelion wine as well.

The Essence of Summer. Bottling up dandelion wine, capturing June, July, August in liquid form. Each bottle signifying different moments in life, why was The Lonely One’s murders not darker, why was John Huff’s leaving not less vibrantly yellow? Life does not discriminate, each bottle is just a memory of the time that has passed. The good and bad cannot be distinguished. It should not be distinguished.

Rituals and Revelations. Doug and Tom record all the normal, everyday rituals of summer. The new tennis shoes, making dandelion wine, beating the living room rug, mowing grass, picking wild strawberries. But they also decide to record revelations, because they know, they feel it in their bones, that this summer is different. They feel it in their bones. This is the summer where they are no longer just going about the daily rituals of summer like a child just enjoying the free time away from school to play outside, they recognize the lessons to be learned. They teach each other the importance of far-telling, of memory, of people who pass away and die. It makes me wonder if I’m just obsessed with my rituals, of going to school, doing design work, working two jobs, rather than appreciating the fact that in this time, I am fully alive. Maybe I should be writing down my revelations.

The Happiness Machine. Leo Auffman sought to build this machine that would guarantee happiness, joy. It was a rolling picture machine that showed the romance of paris, of visiting these romantic lands of egypt and europe, it smelled of perfume and made gentle noises that whizzed and whined with the sounds comforting to the soul. But it brought no happiness because it was so forced, it was this man-made contraption that tried to calculate what people would find happy, what is stereotypically important--traveling, self revelations that is associated with traveling--not what is really happy. Happiness can be as ordinary as a going home to your family, watching the people that you love and care about the most make the most out of their day, it’s fresh bread in the oven, real butter on the table, your wife with flour in her hair and a smile on her face, your children setting the table, the crackling fireplace and the scent of vanilla and cinnamon, the warm lit of faces of the people that matter the most. It’s realizing that happiness does not have to be this glorified, overstated idea that shove down your throats, it nothing but simplicity. The ordinary, the everyday is happiness. It’s being content, not content like you are settling, but being fulling, incandescently content with who you are and what you have made for yourself. And that, is the greatest happiness of all. It is the machine that makes your life work, because it is simply just happiness.

Three Inspirational Designs

When I think about Chip Kidd's quote (A really good book cover has to work regardless of what it’s about, on a visceral and emotional level.) I think about this book cover, how the deliberate use of hand written type relates to the unnerving photography. The unexpected composition of the text on the lower right, the fact that Kafka is almost cropped off the edge of the page, creates this distinct tension that really jumped out at me.

This cover reminds me of Swiss modern type design so I really like it. The tension between the illusion of three dimensional space vs. two dimensional shapes makes it interesting. I love the negative space, the simplicity of the type, the way the rule divides part of the information on the left side.

I love this cover for its hand-done type, it definitely creates an emotional response, the swirling composition is whimsical and primitively cerebral.

Dandelion Wine Bookcover Redesign

Book Choice: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

| Author Biography |

Ray Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a “student of life,” selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury’s masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum “recommended reading” anthologies.

| Some Other Books by Ray Bradbury |

The Maritan Chronicles

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Illustrated Man

The Halloween Tree

Fahrenheit 451

One More for the Road

The October Country

Farewell Summer

Now and Forever

| Short synopsis / plot / summary |

Dandelion Wine is a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories by Ray Bradbury describing the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illnois, through the narrative of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding. It is this summer that Douglas first realizes that he is alive. Through adventures with his 10-year-old brother, Tom, and his pals Charlie Woodman and John Huff, Douglas becomes hyper self-aware of the people in his town, himself, and the beauty of the natural world around him.

The brothers decide to record the events of this summer, classifying him into two categories: the rituals that occur every summer, and his relfections of those rituals, which he describes as “illuminations,” and “discoveries and revelations.” This nonlinear book describes the rituals and illuminations the two boys experience. They record the annual making of dandelion wine with their Grandfather, which described as the bottled essence of summer, as one of the most meaningful rituals. The stories that Bradbury interweaves between the lives of the boys and the people in the town stress the importance of living in the present, and sheds light on the naunces of life that bring simple, unadultered joys.

One of the major themes of the book is mortality, and most importantly, the idea that awareness of life is also accompanied by an unsettling awareness of death, and the ending of lives and events. Douglas becomes overwhelmed with the deaths of close neighbors and friends and inevietably comes to the conclusion of his own mortality. As summer draws to the end, Douglas takes all of the rituals and discoveries he’s experienced and comes out wiser, and more self-aware.

| Overall feeling of the book (+12 descriptive words) |

Romantic

Content

Inquisitive

Questioning/Curious

Loving

Thoughtful

Humble

Confused

Distressed

Awestruck

Compassionate

Sad/Sense of Loss/Solemn

Earnest

Reflective

Illuminated

Sympathetic

Tragic

Dignified

Imploring

Compassionate

| the message |

You can’t be fully alive without recognizing death/mortality

| protagonist does... |

Through the eyes of innocent, inquistive, awestruck 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding, the reader becomes more aware of the subtle joys of happiness, summer, and the feelings of being alive for the first time.

| antagonist does... |

Mortality is the antagonist, the loss of important individuals or farewell to important events or objects. However, without these losses, Douglas would never truly understand what it means to be alive.

| 1 - 3 quote(s) from a character(s) |

“‘I’m alive,’ he thought” (9, Douglas).

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered . . . . Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in” (13, Douglas).

“He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?” (42, Tom).

“‘You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. It’s been here all along’” (62, Leo Auffmann).

“‘No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on the bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen” (75, Mr. Bentley).

“Here we come, you and me, along the same track, but further on, and so much looking and snuffing and handling things to do, you need old Colonel Freeleigh to shove and say look alive so you remember every second! Every darn thing there is to remember! So when kids come around when you’re real old, you can do for them what the colonel once did for you. That’s the way it is, Tom, I got to spend a lot of time visiting him and listening so I can go far-traveling with him as often as he can” (89, Douglas referring to Colonel Freeleigh as The Great Time Machine).

“Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family“ (183, Great-grandma)

“So if trolleys and runabouots and friends and near friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust, or fall apart or die, and if people can be murdered, and if someone like Great-Grandma, who was going to live forever can die . . if all of this is true . . then I, Douglas Spaulding, some day . . must . . “ (186, Douglas).

| Why this book to redesign |

I love this book for the sense of innocent youthfulness I felt when read it, how easy I settled into the beautiful poetry of Ray Bradbury, how much I learned about living through the candid and pondering curiosity of two little boys. All of the covers I’ve seen of this work doesn’t fully depict the deep visceral and emotional connection that people feel after reading this book. The title of Dandelion Wine bottles up the essece of summer, the lessons learned–a cover show reflect that.

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