Here are some cool things informing and inspiring me lately. Hit a link if you want to dig deeper into any of them. Or subscribe to Vis-Communication for weekly design insights.
Artist/Creator Chart
This is a super useful way to think about Artists v. Creators with a bit of clarity. Read the full piece.
DIY Brand Swag
You may have seen this collaboration between iPhone and fashion designer Issey Miyake – the iPhone Pocket. It’s a super sleek, well, pocket that you can wear cross body or attach to your bag. It sold out almost instantly. While some folks were poking a bit of fun at it, especially because of the price – $150 and $230 – it has spawned a DIY make-your-own-pocket corner of social media. Now, your version won’t have the fancy 3-D knitted construction, but the overall design is very simple and smart. And the cool part to me is because of that, really anyone can make their own.
Search Etsy for iPhone pocket and they are everywhere already. You could say that this is a kind of counterfeiting, but (hopefully) nobody is selling these as originals. In fact, half the point is that they are NOT originals. Apple never has to make another one, but the good vibes live on in how individuals interpret and reinterpret something they can make themselves.
Which ultimately extends the life of the project for the brand beyond the original intention. This also happened recently for Starbucks with their $30 glass bear. It also sold out almost immediately, and there was again backlash both for the price and not having enough inventory. I mean, who knew? It’s also possible that scarcity is intentional. Wal-Mart got in on it with a dupe, but I also saw some folks DIY this with an emptied out honey bear container.
Totino’s on LinkedIn
Our resident social and Gen Z expert, Anne-Lauren Fratesi recently wrote about why brands should be having more fun on LinkedIn. Please, yes. And a couple days later, Totino’s (of pizza rolls fame) got in on it. I never thought I’d be following Totino’s on LinkedIn, but let’s see if they can keep up this energy.
DuPont Chart Room
The image above is of the DuPont Chart Room. It was a PowerPoint precursor where timely business data was held on moveable “slides” so that executives could present, sort and compare information. “One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech is a lengthy (in a good, researched way, I promise) history of “knowledge production” and whether or not PowerPoint, which is “installed on more than a billion computers” just sucks or is evil.
In my personal experience, PowerPoint boils down to an acceptable cheat sheet. I’m not an amazing public speaker, and it makes it easy to outline what I need to say, and keep up with what I need to say next. But it always feels like a Read Along book. And in reducing information to bullets, it can lose context. Its linearity offers no opportunity for comparison (as in the Chart Room), and do you really want a PowerPoint sermon?
On Typography
“If you think about typography, for example, you’re thinking about both what it says and how it says it. I don’t just mean rhetorically, but visually: a visual form conveys a lot of meaning. This is something every graphic designer knows. It’s pretty easy to understand how “hello,” written in sans serif, bold, condensed, means something very different than “hello” in a lowercase script. These lessons of how you can modulate a meaning with form, I think, are a good entryway into graphic design. It is a set of skills that could get you a job, but I also see it as a useful skill that’s applicable across many different disciplines. It introduces a rigor in the way you think—it’s a rigor that thinks about how a message is embodied.” – Designer, editor, and educator David Reinfurt Source
