Welcome to Design Notes.
Sarah Brody’s Montblanc “Meisterstück” Fountain Pen
I created Design Notes to keep track of noteworthy design “gems”: links, movies, book and magazine recommendations, articles, models & mentors, products and more. I want to share this invaluable information with you, colleagues, friends and all those who care (deeply) about good design.
Enjoy!
Sarah Brody, Editor in Chief
THE NEXT GENERATION stealth campaign is—stillness. read more here at NYTimes.com:
ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.
Great sites for having a preview to colors for a palette.
Discover Adobe® Kuler™ — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.
Another great web-hosted site to generate color schemes.
http://www.colourlovers.com
Color Psychology Blogs:
Five letters … two words … one idea that can help you realize the full power of your people
One of the most formidable challenges of business leaders is getting large global groups of people to work productively towards a common purpose.
For the past two years Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) has invested in a global research project to study this challenge and identify the conditions that lead to effective collaborations in a wide range of fields.
As One debunks the myth that there are only two major styles of leadership: the traditional command-and-control model and the newer collaborative model. In reality, there are multiple styles of leadership, some or all of which may lead to more effective collaboration, depending on the situation. Drawing on extensive original research, As One explores eight major archetypes of leaders and followers.
As One also includes illustrative examples of As One behavior, such as:
Cirque du Soleil: Transformational Theater—Canada’s Cirque du Soleil doesn’t just create performances; it creates theatrical experiences beyond the audience’s imagination. What’s its secret? Finding and developing the right talent.
Linux: The “Accidental” Organizer—A combination of idealism and pragmatism lies behind the story of Linux and its “ecosystem” of “volunteer” developers.
Dabbawalas: Even During the Monsoon—The dabbawalas of Mumbai, who, each day, deliver 200,000 lunchboxes to office workers in the city, operate to Six Sigma standards of precision and efficiency. How? By working as one.
As One takes more than 60 cases of successful, collective behavior and applies advanced analytics to identify key characteristics of effective collective leadership. The book shows how you can apply them to your organization. By analyzing and increasing the understanding of WHO leaders want to work with, WHAT they want to achieve, and HOW their people work together effectively, the As One discipline helps leaders to create the conditions for success in their organizations.
For more information and to join the global As One community, visit www.AsOne.org. Gain insights from other leaders’ As One experiences, explore case studies, identify your archetype using the online archetype classifier, download iPhone/iPad apps, and more.
You can also download and view excerpts from the book below.
Praise for As One
CIO Insight names As One among the best 11 business books (ranked #5) in 2011
Acting “As One” is the key to unleashing productivity, the potential of people, and the inspiring power of purpose. I recommend this book to every leader − and to every individual who wants to be part of something bigger than him- or herself.
—Robert A. McDonald, Chairman of the Board, President and CEO, Procter & GambleBaghai and Quigley nail it right on the head: creating a collaborative environment that facilitates collective behavior is essential to achieving results in today’s technically sophisticated and globally complex environment. This book is grounded in compelling research and is beautifully presented. A ‘must read’ for leaders who are looking to develop a more effective mental model for how to capture the power of collective behavior in their organization.
—Roger Connors and Tom Smith, authors of the New York Times bestselling The Oz Principle and Change the Culture, Change the Game
As One brilliantly destroys a common leadership myth—that there is basically one good leadership model and that is to have a clear strategy, communicate it to all, show emotional intelligence, etc. The authors show eight distinctly different types of organizations, with successful case studies. For the reader wondering, “So how do I use this information?,” As One provides an early diagnostic decision tree, leading readers to which of the eight models fits them best, and the authors spell out how to build each organization model and how to adjust hiring, communications, strategic planning, and succession planning to each. Brilliant!
—Brad Smart, President, Smart & Associates, and author of Topgrading
First and foremost, companies are about people. As One provides a well-grounded roadmap for moving ideas into action.
—Jonathan Byrnes, Senior Lecturer, MIT, and author of Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink
Different kinds of organizations with different kinds of objectives need different kinds of leadership. As One identifies eight archetypes, or models, that call for distinctive styles of leadership, gives live examples of successful leaders, shows that different archetypes may be needed at different levels of organization, and provides practice in identifying appropriate archetypes according to organizational needs and objectives. I’ve never seen anything like it. It works!
—Thomas C. Schelling, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and 2005 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics
An insightful look at how we work together and, most importantly, how we can do it better. Valuable lessons for anyone in a position of leadership, whether in a small business or a global corporation.
—Andrew N. Liveris, Chairman & CEO, The Dow Chemical Company
Most will be bowled over by the measurable benefits produced when collective attributes can be identified more sharply. As a new tool, As One is so intuitively rich that you kick yourself for not being the one to think of it!
—Nik Gowing, TV news presenter, broadcaster, and author of Skyful of Lies and Black Swans
Individual Action, Collective Power (Portfolio Penguin; 3 February 2011) by Mehrdad Baghai of Alchemy Growth Partners, and James Quigley, Global CEO of DTTL, with Ainar Aijala, Global Managing Director, DTTL Consulting; Sabri Challah, Vice Chairman and a senior partner in the Human Capital practice of Deloitte LLP in the United Kingdom; and Gerhard Vorster, DTTL Regional Managing Director for Consulting in Asia Pacific and the Chief Strategy Officer at Deloitte Australia.
Credits: Text from the Deloitte Website
Everyday I meet people—today it was a very high-ranking and genuinely kind executive of a very well-known and much loved company—who know that design is no longer an afterthought, but central to almost anything we do in life and work in order to succeed, to delight, to transform…
The complex business problems we face today can’t be solved with the same thinking that created them
says author Marty Neumeier in this entertaining and original read. Instead, he says, we need to start from a place outside traditional business thinking. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovations, we can no longer “decide” the way forward. Today we have to “design” the way forward—or risk ending up in the fossil layers of business history.
Marty Neumeier’s Innovation Toolkit
This is the third in the author’s bestselling series of “whiteboard overviews.”
In his first, THE BRAND GAP, he addressed the gulf between business strategy and customer experience. In his second, ZAG, he explored the number-one strategy of high-performance brands. In the third, THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY, he shows how design thinking can build a culture of nonstop innovation.
If you wanna innovate, you gotta design.
—Marty Neumeier
Garr Reynolds on The Designful Company
Branding guru Marty Neumeier understands that we are all very busy, so he crafts his books to make a big impact in less than 200 pages. His previous bestsellers, The Brand Gap and Zag are provocative, informative, and inspirational books that I use every semester in the Marketing class I teach. Like his previous books, The Designful Company is a lesson in simple, clear, and beautiful presentation, and the contents are a powerful complement to his earlier ideas.
Early in this book, Marty makes the case for the power of design and aesthetics and why they matter today more than ever. Innovation and design are key in the transformation of an organization; everyone says “innovation” matters. The term has become a mere platitude, a sort of tag-line for many organizations. In the book Marty explains how to actually build a culture of change that embraces design by focusing on 16 key levers such as weaving a story, bringing design management inside the organization, introducing parallel thinking, recognizing talent and creativity, and more.
One of the levers of change that I found particularly interesting (obviously, given what I do for a living) was the lever #8: “Ban PowerPoint.” This is, ban the awful, death-by-PowerPoint approach and replace it with a more engaging and powerful presentation method. If you have an innovative company that truly understands design and creative collaboration, then you have to abandon the dull, lifeless, and typical PowerPoint presentation for compelling stories and conversations that are visual, simple (without being overly simplistic), and memorable.
“If a business is really a decision factory, then the presentations that inform those decisions determine their quality,” says Marty. But a change in presentation approach is only a small part of the transformation. This book is about how to kick-ass though a greater understanding of your potential for creative collaboration.
I highly recommend The Designful Company. Even seasoned marketing, branding, and design pros will find the book an inspirational refresher with concrete ideas. And if this is your first Marty Neumeier book, you’ll be blown away. Wonderful, fresh content and a little book that is a visual tour de force.
Garr Reynolds is the creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net. Garr’s book, Presentation Zen, features a foreword from Guy Kawasaki and is endorsed by such industry luminaries as Seth Godin. Together his Web site and book have fundamentally changed the way people around the world create and give presentations.
The first important book of the year. In the tradition of IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE and BUILT TO LAST, THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY changes the way we think about business. During these challenging times, when doors are shutting all around us, Neumeier’s book opens a big window.
—ALINA WHEELER, AUTHOR OF DESIGNING BRAND IDENTITY
In another short but very sweet book, Neumeier introduces us the aesthetics of management. The Designful Company makes a great contribution to our understanding of design as a core business competence.
—ROGER MARTIN, DEAN OF THE ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, AND AUTHOR OF THE OPPOSABLE MIND
If this is your first Marty Neumeier book, you’ll be blown away. Wonderful, fresh content presented as a visual tour de force.
—GARR REYNOLDS, PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT AT KANSAI GAIDAI UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF PRESENTATION ZEN
Form follows function? Form is function! In The Designful Company, Marty Neumeier lays out a powerful case that business innovation is a byproduct of design thinking. Follow these rules and your company can innovate faster, collaboratively and continuously.
—JOHN GERZEMA, CHIEF INSIGHTS OFFICER AT Y&R, AND AUTHOR OF THE BRAND BUBBLE
Design thinking has the potential to step-change all aspects of innovation in business. When you need a disruption, when market dynamics are changing, when new sources of growth are needed—companies that focus on design have a competitive edge.
—CLAUDIA KOTCHKA, VP DESIGN INNOVATION AND STRATEGY, P&G
At last! A book that clearly articulates how and why design is absolutely fundamental to the success of business today. Chock-full of great insights.
—THOMAS LOCKWOOD, PhD, PRESIDENT OF DESIGN MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE
No filler. No fluff. Marty Neumeier has distilled his message on innovation and design down to just the good stuff. Read the whole book on your next flight, and arrive with fresh insights ready to share.
—TOM KELLEY, GENERAL MANAGER OF IDEO, AND AUTHOR OF THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION
In the first half of this book Neumeier presents a good argument for the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of the designful company and in the second half he gives us a decent prototype for the ‘how’. If you don’t see that calling it a ‘decent prototype’ constitutes high praise, you need this book.
—FRED COLLOPY, PROFESSOR AT THE WEATHERHEAD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, CASE WESTERN UNIVERSITY, AND CO-AUTHOR OF MANAGING AS DESIGNING
Required reading for addressing “wicked problems”!
—PETER LAWRENCE, CHAIRMAN OF CORPORATE DESIGN FOUNDATION
*This is another entry specifically for my friend Anastasia, a writer.
EVEN as artist and design by nature, (I was born with the gift of an almost perfect photographic memory) and had my own sketch book by by age 2, I still can learn from this wonderful book.
Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain teaches you the way of seeing. looking. Looking again. And I highly recommend this book to any writer who happens to think she or he would not be visually “talented”—wrong: we all —people from just about every walk of life—writers, artists, students, corporate executives, architects, real estate agents, designers, engineers—have the ability to draw, pain and express ourselves visually—by applying the right (revolutionary) approach to problem solving. This book will show you, how.
Not only a book about drawing, it is a book about living. This brilliant approach to the teaching of drawing!should not be dismissed as a mere text. It emancipates.
—Los Angeles Times
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence by Betty Edwards
Translated into thirteen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world’s most widely used drawing-instruction guide. A revised and expanded edition of the classic drawing-instruction book that has sold more than 2,500,000 copies. When Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain was first published in 1979, it hit the New York Times bestseller list within two weeks and stayed there for more than a year. In 1989, when Dr. Betty Edwards revised the book, it went straight to the Times list again. Now Dr. Edwards celebrates the twentieth anniversary of her classic book with a second revised edition. Over the last decade, Dr. Edwards has refined her material through teaching hundreds of workshops and seminars. Truly The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, this edition includes:
ANASTASIA is a writer by night and business person during the day. She works for a renowned design company in the city (San Francisco). This entry is for her. Anastasia is a new best friend of mine—I met her yesterday. I happen to love writing, too, albeit I am not a native speaker. Anastasia and I discussed whether the memoir would only be […] “the country of old people, a looking back, a reminiscence, or a genre for anyone, people from all walks of life and age. I agree with the latter. So does Natalie Goldberg.
Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg
According to Nathalie Goldberg memoir […]“is not a declaration of the American success story, one undeviating road, the conquering of one mountaintop after another. The puddle began in downfall. The milk didn’t get to the mouth. Whatever your life, it is urging you to record it—to embrace the crumbs with the cake. […]
OLD FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY was a book that I took notice of the first time when I was spending a week of quiet meditation high up in the mountains of the Big Sur wilderness. Writers can benefit a lot from embracing the perspective of a visual artist, or a designer’s mind. The small general “store” of the Tassajara Zen Monastery sold Nathalie Goldberg’s books: Natalie Goldberg, the well-known painter, writer and writing teacher, who wrote the best-seller on how to write called Writing Down the Bones, is also a Zen practitioner, who applies the lessons of Zen Buddhism to her writing, and her life. In one of her newer books—Old Friend From Far Away—she celebrates the memoir that can be written by anyone, no matter your age, if you are willing to examine the nature of your mind, recollect a smell, a taste—and let a whole world flare up.
Time to list my favorite bookmarks, role-models, mentors, sources of inspiration…
I simply tag them with “Best of…”.
Perhaps (one day) my list will become as popular as Oprah’s book club or her list of favorite things.
I’ll start with typography, one of my favorite design subjects. There is almost nothing more beautiful (and enchanting) than a well-designed typeface, a well-balanced layout, a display font with character.
Words get a unique tone of voice through the look and feel of the letters that display them.
My typography teacher Evelyn Sucher at Art Center College of Design always advised us students to look at our design work and “listen” to it:
“how does it sound?”
…Evelyn would ask us every time when we lined up in front of the long wall, where we would hang up our work for a design critique with her. Evelyn, often driving us to tears with her perfectionism, would teach us the difference between finesse and faux-pas. After taking typography classes for four years with Evelyn I have developed a serious health-condition: I developed an allergy against ugly typography, which unfortunately is ubiquitous. It makes me feel nauseous and I suffer, when I have to endure it for longer period of times. Thankfully, there are great escapes out there that demonstrate typographic excellence. Here are a few as a start…
http://www.thinkingwithtype.com
ilovetypography interviews Ellen Lupton
ilovetypography Ellen Lupton Movie
http://www.elupton.com
http://www.ilovetypography.com
It took me almost 16 years to retrieve and digitize video footage of the late American graphic designer Paul Rand. As an undergraduate student at Art Center College of Design (Europe)* in Montreux, Switzerland, I got introduced to Paul Rand and his wife Marion during a hot and dry summer in 1994. Since I was studying both the basics of film and graphical user interface design, I was asked to shuttle Paul Rand around and to document his visit on campus and his lecture that included a presentation and video (interview with Steve Jobs) about the creation of the NeXT logo.
Paul Rand from Sarah Brody on Vimeo.
As I got involved in a deep conversation with him, I was humbled by the power with which he manipulated color, space and type and at the same time impressed by the clarity and simplicity of his talk.
When he and I began discussing the implications involved in using a computer, he said to me:
“You’ve got the spirit!”
and pointed with his index finger on my nose. He invited me to visit him and his wife Marion at his home and office in Connecticut and to eventually work with him.
In the summer of that same year I took a train from New York to Weston, Connecticut and Paul picked me up and drove me around in his silver BMW (he had a note pad on his dashboard in case inspiration would strike) a picturesque area, before bringing me to his home.
Later Paul and I spent a long time in his studio, and while looking at objects, sculptures, paintings and things he had been collecting (many of these things are pictured in his books), he looked at me and asked me why people considered primitive artwork as beautiful as a fresco of Michelangelo and pointed at a wooden sculpture. “My next book deals with this question.” He said.
Note: the book that Paul was working on was published by Yale in 1996 under the title of From Lascaux to Brooklyn.
He showed me the designs he created in a traditional fashion without the use of a computer. He showed me the office where he kept a Mac 8500, which he suggested I operate in case I would be willing to work for him.
He then spontaneously asked me to live and work with him and Marion and showed me the room I would stay in. Every once in a while, in return for instructing and working with me, he would ask me to prepare a salad for him and his wife. In 1995/96 I decided to finish my studies (I was awarded a 9th Term Honors) at the Art Center College in Pasadena first and then to go back and work with Paul.
A few months later he passed away.
*Art Center (Europe) no longer exists. Le château du Sully (The castle of Sully) which was Art Center’s former European campus, located in the hills near Montreux, was acquired by musician Shania Twain.
Every designer should know what Creative Commons aka CC is: I am familiarizing myself with CC at the moment and believe CC empowers communities and communication and content in a significant way. CC increases the amount of creativity (Cultural, Educational, and Scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.
Their free, easy-to-use legal tools empower content creators, including designers. CC gives everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”
CREATIVE COMMONS informational video by Jesse Dylan.
A Shared Culture from Creative Commons on Vimeo.
In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix.
Dylan puts the Creative Commons system into action by punctuating the interview footage with dozens of photos that have been offered to the public for use under CC licenses.
NO MATTER whether you are a new parent or sign an offer letter for a new leadership role, what you can do to make sure you succeed in your next role or job? You’re in Charge — Now What? The 8-point Plan aims to help newly appointed leaders ensure they are mentally, emotionally and physically ready for the challenges that lie ahead. Spencer Stuart’s 8-point plan is a “How-To” guide how to create a roadmap towards excellence.
You're in Charge, Now What?: The 8 Point Plan.
FROM PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: For any manager in a new position, from CEO to department subhead, the title’s question is of paramount importance.
The authors of this seminal book, top brass at leading global executive search firm Spencer Stuart, answer it with a comprehensive approach to maximizing the first 100 days on the job, drawing dramatically on the experience of more than 50 chief executives (as well as other corporate personnel) interviewed in depth. The authors’ clear, sound eight-point plan covers the bases of what incoming business leaders need to know, from how to prepare physically and mentally for the first 100 days to crafting a strategic agenda; dealing with and transforming corporate culture; shaping the management team; working with a boss or a board; and more. What truly distinguishes this book from available management volumes, besides its inspiring hit-the-ground-running approach, is the material gleaned from the chief executives (among them, for example, Gary Kusin of Kinko’s; Paul Pressler of Gap Inc.; Jonathan F. Miller of AOL; Steve Bennett of Intuit), which is full of entertaining, enlightening first-person anecdotes. Notably, this material focuses on steps to avoid as well as on appropriate actions to take. Lawrence Summers, for instance, named president of Harvard University in 2001, recalls that he “didn’t fully appreciate the importance of simply providing traditional institutional reassurance…. I failed to appreciate that if you’re going to be questioning everybody and challenging everybody, you have to do a lot of reassuring in return.” Near book‘s end, Neff and Citrin (Lessons from the Top, etc.) distill their plan into two principles: “Listen and Learn. Underpromise and overdeliver.” Their expert elaboration of those principles throughout will make their work a guiding light to many an incoming manager.
