Things we do, thoughts we have and things we like at Vostok Studio
Archive of articles classified as' "Quotes"
Back homeLucky we: two homage websites in less than a week. Today we dedicate it to Mr. Rams. No need to put into words the great imprint this man has had on Design. That he’s had on us. Happy birthday sir.
For a bit of Rams eye-candy, you’ll find some good photos of him in the Thomas Mayer Archive. And to help you refresh your memory, in case you don’t know it by heart already: Rams’ good design decalogue.
To me, The Daily is a near perfect realization of exactly the idea that occurs to print editors every single time they get their hands on digital media for the first time, regardless of what the underlying technology might be: “Let’s make it just like what we know so well in print.” As a result I found it sadly lifeless and lacking in urgency. What a waste of US$30 million.
I think the human body and buildings have a lot in common. Buildings are as weak as they are heavy, and one tool in our armament is a process known as genchiku, which we can use to decrease the overall weight of a building – you could think of it as a process that gets rid of unwanted flab and beefs up muscle where it’s needed. However, I think that some people don’t consider balance in quite the same way – simply putting more on top doesn’t necessarily make a structure stronger.
Shigeru Aoki at The earthquake from an architect’s perspective
The motivation for the first streamline designs was functional improvement: more speed, less resistance and fuel optimisation. Here’s a great video from 1936 where Chrysler explains the concept of streamline to their customers introducing new car models with softer and rounder shapes:
What started as a functional need later became a styling trend. Thousands of objects were designed in aerodynamic shapes even though they were supposed to be still. In this flickr gallery there are a few great examples:
The greatest advocate of streamline as a styling aesthetic were Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy”>Raymond Loewy who believed that curves were great, especially for making a product more appealing to the public. One of his most famous designs is a pencil sharpener that, although it was supposed to be screwed to a table, its shape was as streamlined as a supersonic rocket:
This quote of the streamline godfather explains everything:
The most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph
We found a great letter thanks to @martuishere on the subject. We abide religiously by number 3 and thus feel the need to post it here:
Unlike advertising agencies, we are not in the business of selling. We love our work and we love showing off the diversity of work we’ve done (please ask to see our portfolio!) but that’s because every project is crafted with thought and research, and with respect for our clients. We put all our resources into every client that engages us because we don’t need to save our best ideas to sell ourselves to potential new clients.
We believe the best way to express our views on design is to let our clients speak for themselves:
We’d like to thank our clients and Riot Cinema for this video.
We’re big fans of Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist, it’s great to see that the NYT Lens blog has recently given him some love. I wish we could embed the video/interview here but NYT image archive has no embedding options (FAIL). You can see it here.
I don’t want to find out that much more. I want to shoot them the way I see them. As opposed to really creating an essence of who they truly are; it’s my idea of who they are.
The words of a true aesthete.
Bruno Teixidor brought me a wall map of the Moscow’s metro network some time ago. I have it hanging on a wall to remind me this exact quote:
The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it.
Richard Fairley
Now check the metro map:
How much information about the city and the country who build it, right? You can tell it has a strong, centralized and authoritarian political power just by looking at how the lines converge at the very center. Their concept of traffic transversality isn’t lines that doesn’t cross the center but a circular line that reinforces this idea.
But is the metro network what shapes that reality or was it there before? Let’s check a regular roadmap of the city:
Very much the same: strongly centralized, everything that needs to go from A to B needs to pass through the center first. Everyone, every matter.
If you check New York or Barcelona, for instance, you’ll se something different. Everything seems more rational and decentralized. Both cities have a strong grid shape reflecting that interactions between people (being social or business) are more important than political power.
The funny thing about this quote is that it was said regarding software and programming, not urbanism. Do you thing it applies to the design of interactive systems as well? Do we end up shaping structures that reflect the organisation behind. Is that good or bad? Are there powerful examples?
Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros, has come up with a beautiful way to convey information through images. Add music –Bach in this case– and you have a documentary: not a narrative documentary but a powerful visual documentary. It’s called Sounds + Vision: At War.
In his own words:
The music amplifies the pictures, and the pictures amplify and clarify the music. It’s a way to get a really large amount of information in pictures and music to people in a way that is very intuitive and easy to absorb.
-Chris Hondros
You can read more about it in the NYT’s Lens blog.
Via Marco Arment:
Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)
