Visual Culture

Design generally speaking is often overlooked and misunderstood. This typographic poster highlights 7 rules to understand design & designers. Would look nice in a conference room no?

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What a clever concept for hairstylist Yuka Suzuki, designed by Studio Kudos.
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Each year Nicholas Felton visualizes his life by documenting his daily life with arbitrary statistics and stunning info graphics. The content is a bit narcissistic, but the exploration he engages in each year with information design is inspiring to say the least. To view the 2009 version of the Felton Report go here.

thanks Valerie for the tip

Acclaimed writer and educator Cornel West shares his thoughts of the state of the nation with an open letter to President Obama. It has just been a year since he took office and people have put him under a microscope since day 1. Yes, things could be better—but we would like to ask were people this critical of Bush this early on? Cornel’s poetry as always is critical and respectful, but a bit self-serving.

“Designers will have less control over the ‘look’ but more of a role in shaping the ‘feel.’ This is a big change—and a big opportunity. The task of designing will be more layered, more multidimensional, more theatrical. We will direct more than design. We will have to think more—about cause and effect, about here and there, about now and later. We will have to understand more—about space and time, about sound and motion, and about languages and cultures other than our own.”

Jessica Helfand

To see our full archive of quotes see below: (more…)

Here is an interesting series of designs by Dutch designer Frederik Roijé that was presented at imm cologne this week. Each bowl is shaped like a city map (above: Manhattan) and is elegantly designed in cast aluminum. Sure to be a conversation piece. For more on the series go here.

Photo from Flickr user PghFun1

PNC’s green wall towers at nearly 2,400 in square feet which is the size of two tennis courts. Wow!

According to a post over at Forecast Earth, the idea is catching on.

Like green roofs—their perpendicular counterparts—green walls are covered in vegetation and provide the benefits of natural insulation and removal of air pollutants. PNC, which provides banking and wealth management services, estimates it will be 25 percent cooler behind the wall than the ambient summer temperatures.

The PNC wall features more than 15,000 ferns, sedums, brass buttons and other plants that create a swirling pattern of varying hues of green above the company’s logo. They are divided among hundreds of 2-by-2-foot aluminum panels that were anchored onto the building’s frame after part of the granite facade was removed.

Joanne Westphal, a landscape architecture professor at Michigan State University (more…)

Creative Review is always trying new cover concepts. The February Issue is no different with the magazine packaged in a compostable bag. An added twist is that they added a few tomato seeds so the subscriber can grow their own tomatoes using the compostable bag. Instructions are on the back. Happy gardening.

Instructions on how to grow tomatoes:

Rumor is that Bansky will premier his first movie at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah that will be going down soon. For more on the film go here.

Designer, Igor Udushlivy thought up an of how a book jacket and bookmark could work together to create a unified image. We dig it! See his concepts below:

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