Helvetica Man is a fixture of national parks, coffee shops, and airports around the world, helpfully pointing the way to bathrooms, elevators, and wet floors. His bulbous head and shapely figure are easy to understand, no matter what language a person speaks. This innocuous, multicultural figure did not emerge by accident. He was invented by the Austrian philosopher and social scientist Otto Neurath, according to the Smart Set. Neurath believed that language wasn’t the best way to impart knowledge universally, according to the article, and “sought instead a uniform visual communication system that relied on observation and experience.” Helvetica man, as he was later dubbed, became the cornerstone of that system.

Source:  The Smart Set  

You've surely encountered Dwell magazine in your travels. It's the oversized architecture and design magazine exploding with beautiful homes and objects for the fairly well heeled. We couldn’t help but have a giggle when Metropolis (an architecture and design magazine for the really well heeled) took a stab at Dwell in their blogs. Here’s their Open Letter to Dwell Magazine:

Dear Dwell:

Love the magazine. As a favor, I have rewritten the Table of Contents of your July/August issue:

Cover        House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 43    House with Vertical Wood Slats
Page 52    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 58    Ice Cream Makers
Page 66    Pavilion with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 70    Philadelphia
Page 80    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 88    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 96    House with Vertical Wood Slats

I hope you find this useful.

Fondly,

Jeff Speck, AICP
Washington, DC

Putting aside the vertical and horizontal slats appearing on the Metropolis homepage, it's a fair observation and a good ribbing. And not surprisingly, commenters used the opportunity to do a little ribbing of their own:

Gary @ 6:30 am: "At least the slats *are* a reason to read Dwell. No-one reads Metropolis

Herbert @ 10:37 am: "Well, at least Dwell sends me my magazine. And yes I subscribe to both."

I believe the man they called Jesus had words for dust-ups like this one: "First take the vertical wood slat out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Oh snap!

Source: Metropolis 

Our lives are surrounded by small and seemingly insignificant objects that, if we stop and think about them for a moment, were created by designers. Golf balls, barrettes, toothbrushes: They are not simply manufacturing accidents but very specific responses to our needs and wants and the designers’ aesthetic goals. The “Objectify Me” section of the website for the design documentary Objectified invites designers and design-watchers to muse on these small wonders with wonderful results. The golf ball prompts Craig Foltz to ask a series of whimsical questions. Debbie Millman recalls a juvenile obsession with barrettes that led to misdemeanor theft. And Alice Twemlow turns her gaze to the badminton shuttlecock, which

seems to me to contain all the time and space of a long summer’s afternoon on a large green lawn. In its delicately ribbed frame are encapsulated pitchers of lemonade, the drone of bees, the smell of mown grass and the sun-baked mustiness of the garden sheds where shuttlecocks rest along with broken croquet mallets, dog-chewed Frisbees and trapped flies.

Source: Objectified

Image by barkertrax, licensed under Creative Commons.

Barry Katz, writing for the summer 2009 issue of Arcade, sees the economic downturn as a much needed kick in the teeth for the design world, especially in advertising. He writes:

All this means fewer products, fewer resources expended on making things and fewer designers engaged in conceiving and planning them. Fewer products to sell means fewer advertisements, which means less paper and more trees, less air time and more air. Suddenly there is less chemical pollution of the biosphere and less visual pollution of the semiosphere. People feel less assaulted by the relentless barrage of things and images and become more attentive to the spaces between them, which they will begin to call “nature.”

Katz suggests a new breed of unemployed designers will actually design more, introducing the concept of “un-design,” a process that, among many other restorative acts, includes dismantling cigarette machines and neutralizing corporate identities. Sounds like a good start…

Source: Arcade 

Most jewelry designers create pieces intended for mass production, Chronogram observes. Not so with Nervous System. Cofounders Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz built their company around open-source software that lets people design one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces based on gorgeous, biological patterns.

Louis-Rosenberg and Rosenkrantz, who come from science and architecture backgrounds, also have pre-designed pieces available: their delicate dendrite earrings were inspired by the aggregate growth of coral; their cut-felt radial necklace (part of the radiolaria series) nods to the bubbly repetition of plant cells and honeycomb.

But perhaps best of all? Most people can afford to engage with Nervous System’s art. “Our work is just as beautiful in stainless steel as it would be in silver, so why should we exclude a large segment of the population just to make a little more money?” the duo told Chronogram. “Besides, it is difficult to blur the line between consumer and producer when most consumers cannot afford the pieces.”

Source: Chronogram 

Image from Nervous System, licensed under Creative Commons.

The way artist Miriam Kilali sees it, access to beautiful spaces shouldn’t be a perk reserved for the wealthy, or even those who can consistently make rent. Kilali is the visionary behind two high-design homeless shelters, one in Moscow and another in Berlin, with a third hopefully to follow in New York City.

“I knew from experience that beautiful buildings give strength,” she told Spiegel Online, “especially after gruelling times. People living on the street need that, twice over.”

To that end, the Berlin shelter boasts glistening chandeliers, wood floors, original artwork, and designer furniture, according to Spiegel Online, and is a living refutation of critics who thought it “was a waste of money to so extensively decorate a home for men many regard as just alcoholics on the margins of society.”

“It is about getting people to take control of their own lives, creating their own environment,” Kilali said. Residents of the shelter were involved in the redesign throughout the process, from helping to pick the new furnishings to tearing out decrepit, old carpeting. Each resident selected a piece of Kilali’s artwork to hang in his bedroom.

See pictures of the Berlin and Moscow shelters at the website of the organization that runs them, Gebewo.

(Thanks, Design Observer.)

There’s a whole lot of Obama-wear out there, from the streets of New Jersey to the runways of Paris, but the printed Ts and onesies made by Piggyback-Kittycat are especially fetching designs that ought to do well with the baby-mama set. With messages like “Baby Needs a Change” and “My Mama’s for Obama” for the kids and “Go Bama” and “Obama’08” for mothers, they take equal inspiration from children’s wooden blocks and contemporary design. Babies can’t vote, but the persuasive power of cuteness plus progressive advocacy shouldn’t be discounted when undecided grandparents (pdf) come for a visit. Piggyback-Kittycat “head hog” Ruth Weleczki says she custom-designed a shirt for one customer that targets an older demographic: It reads “Audiologists for Obama.”

Image courtesy of Piggyback-Kittycat.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show that premiered last month at the Bumbershoot music and arts festival is an enlightening mashup of graphic design sensibilities in which Western motifs and techniques meet Persian script, and the hipster rock world intersects with ancient Middle Eastern culture. The show’s approach is to pair up posters, one by a U.S. artist alongside one by an Iranian, based on their styles and imagery.

Although the Iranian posters are not explicitly political, their design choices are more loaded with meaning than meets the Westerners’ eye. “In Iran, graphic design is viewed by many as a creation of the West and is met with skepticism,” Mark Baumgarten writes in Seattle Sound (article not available online). The use of Persian script itself is guided by cultural strictures.

“Graphic designers in Tehran are expected to treat it with a respect that does not allow for using the language’s characters creatively,” he writes. “Still some artists are rebelling against that orthodoxy.” One is Shahrzad Changalvaee, whose work (above) is paired with a Spoon poster by Jeff Kleinsmith in the show, which is being billed as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters in the United States.

Curator Daniel R. Smith, who traveled to Tehran to find poster artists, tells Seattle Sound the search was a challenge—he had to escape his “tour guide” minders to do it—but that state censorship was more a chilling effect than a death-sentence scenario.

“There’s just this general sense of what you probably shouldn’t be doing in terms of imagery and definitely in terms of political stuff and poster design,” he says. “But what I also hear is that whatever you want to do in private is not a problem. If you want to have a private exhibition of nudes, you can have it in your own house.”

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show will be on exhibit through October 15 at Design Commission in Seattle. Next year it will travel to Tehran, where its organizers aim to share it with Iranian designers who are often prohibited from visiting the United States.

Images of posters by Jeff Kleinsmith and Shahrzad Changalvaee courtesy of the  Seattle-Tehran Poster Show . 

Finally, some pleasant news related (however tangentially) to the oil industry: Minnesota Public Radio and MNSpeak are celebrating the 50th anniversary of what might be America’s most aesthetically pleasing gas station—the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet, Minnesota.

This milestone inspired me to browse images of other Wright structures, whose practical designs and clean lines ensure a calming, refreshing effect on the viewer. You can browse his work at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s website and view a list of the many public sites designed by the architect, in case you want to see one up close.

Image by Elkman, licensed by Creative Commons.

When inspiration strikes, there’s not always a computer around to record the ideas. Like cocktail napkin sketches, or ideas written on the back of a person’s hand, the website Deeplinking has compiled a few pen-on-paper prototypes of ideas that became websites.

The photo at left, for example, was the original design for the micro-blogging site Twitter, then called Stat.us. The current design of Utne.com, in fact, was once little more than chicken scratches on a torn piece of paper. For a more in-depth and active example, Deeplinking also provides an impressive, moving paper prototype in the YouTube link below.

Image by jack dorsey, licensed under Creative Commons.

A sinking polar bear, a melting Inuit, and a deer haloed with a Mercedes-Benz logo—each made of porcelain. Cynthia Hathaway’s “Souvenirs Revisited” collection gives classic Canadian icons a startling new treatment with political overtones.

Hathaway’s figurines are part of a movement in Canadian design toward what Tim McKeough calls “lumberjack chic,” a rather self-conscious take on wilderness and outdoor life. Writing in The Walrus (subscription required), McKeough highlights several designers who employ an “aesthetic [that] doesn’t so much reflect modern Canadian culture as it does other people’s expectations of what it means to be Canadian.”

—Steve Thorngate

In “Design Solutions” in the September-October issue of Good, Tucker Viemeister praises the progressive City and Country School of New York City for having a playground designed to hurt children. 

Well, not quite, but the schoolyard, which features a railless jungle gym and slide among its playground equipment, is meant to teach kids that life is full of hard knocks, and if you’re not careful you’ll get a scraped knee. Viemeister writes, “To grow, we need to take chances. Progress is littered with mistakes and accidents.”

The school’s founder, Caroline Pratt, organized the school in 1914 under the belief that kids learn by engaging in open-ended problem-solving in which they have a real investment in the outcome. Now, me, I always thought it was the kiss that made the boo-boo worth it. —Jason Ericson