I enjoyed Michael Bierut’s piece. It was kind of a “Wear Sunscreen” type of stream of consciousness. His main take-a-ways below…
Good, simple design is the key – it’s not necessary to have a ton of bells and whistles, because then people will just pass over it.
He also mentioned that the people that win design awards also lose in design competitions. To quote Coldplay – “if you never try, you’ll never know.”
Designers are problem solvers. Vignelli tried to solve the problem of decoding New York’s confusing subway system with a beautiful map. There were a few problems with his map that compromised the accuracy of the actual above-ground geography. Although the map was quite stunning, it later got replaced by another map that more accurately depicted NYC’s landscape.
And again…the issue of plagiarism comes up, as it has in every class we’ve had this semester. I’ve got kind of a new view on sharing work and information. In our theory class we discussed the notion of building upon others’ work and the simple fact that when partake in this, progress is made, and it’s made faster. The US is the only country that has copyright laws. We also talk about borrowing other people’s work in our web class. Basically, you just copy others’ code and run with it and make it your own. I’m glad this subject was brought up again, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. One of my favorite typographers recently wrote a blog post on this topic as well. You can find it here.