Vancouver, BC

A big, warm, heartfelt Thankyou! to the design community in this fine city for making me feel so welcome at the 2012 Salazar Awards event yesterday. It was a real honour to spend the evening with you… I look forward to hearing from attendees regarding your design ideas and design actions that “aim higher” in helping to unfuck the world and to help solve the problems that our design professions have abetted (often unwittingly).

You can contact me here.

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(a nod to long-time inspiration and Icograda colleague Mervyn Kurlansky)

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Bookshelves, of every imaginable type, mostly found at a blog that is all about… Bookshelves!

(thanks to designer friend Marie-Aline Oliver for the link to the link)

Beverly Hills, California

AdamsMorioka designed this poster for the International Conservation Caucus Foundation’s annual gala in Washington D.C.—but is was also designed as a tool for children and members of the United States Congress to learn animal group names. The goal was to raise awareness for the ICCF’s mission to promote the projection of U.S. leadership for international conservation worldwide. Here’s how they explain what led to the concept… with a nod to mutual friend Marian Bantjes.

“One thing I’ve learned is that the most talented people have the best stories and information. Michael Bierut always has something interesting. Michael Vanderbyl has hilarious stories. Marian Bantjes has a wealth of information about subjects I never considered. For example, Marian knows what to call any group of animal. I would say, “Hey, dude, check out that bunch of zebras.” Marian knows this is not a “bunch,” but a dazzle of zebra.”

(source)

Vancouver, British Columbia

I feel very honored to have been invited to give the keynote talk at the 2012 GDC/BC Salazar Student Awards, the annual juried competition and awards-presentation event held to celebrate BC’c most talented and promising design students and their inspirational work. The event takes place at UBC Robson Square on the evening of Friday, 11 May 2012.

The awards competition is open to all students who are enrolled in BC academically recognized certificate, diploma, or degree graphic design and advertising programs, with work in the categories of Print Design, Interactive, Brand Identity, and Video and Motion. Entry deadline for submissions is 12:00 pm on 30 April 2012. More information can be found at the event website here.

My talk entitled ‘Aim Higher’ builds on presentations I gave in Norway, Taiwan, and Spain last fall—the abstract reads as follows:

Our globalized society is morphing rapidly from an information era into an age of ideas—at the same time, we flounder in the uncertainty of tumultuous political, social, economic, and ecological instability—even as our fragile planet accelerates towards the edge of survival.

Designers have greatly influenced the shaping of the over-consuming, hyper-stimulated, non-sustainable world we are in—suddenly we find ourselves thrust into a leading role as necessary change-drivers. This presentation will address a shift in design’s role and the power it holds, share diverse perspectives from around the globe, and offer a challenge to “think about our thinking.”

Montreal, Canada

Best wishes to designer colleagues and creative communicators near and far on World Communication Design Day, which is also the 49th birthday of Icograda. This week I took on a new interim role as Acting Director at the Icograda Secretariat, providing advisory and management services and helping to ensure a smooth transition between outgoing Managing Director Brenda Sanderson’s departure and the inauguration of a new Managing Director in the coming months.

Cheers!

Oberweißbach, Germany

Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel was a German pedagogue and a student of Pestalozzi, who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. Fröbel developed the concept of the “kindergarten” (literally garden for children, coining the word now used in German and English) and developed the Froebel Gifts educational toys—these emphasized sensory exploration and manipulatives, and are credited as forerunners of abstract art, a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement, and a formative influence on Maria Montessori.

I attended kindergarten in Frankfurt, Germany as a child; like countless others in the fields of design, the elegant maple geometric “building blocks” derived from Froebelian toys that I was given to play with had a lasting effect on my sense of three-dimensional composition and perception of planar elements. (The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright also assimilated many influences into his architecture, and credited these learning tools with the geometric clarity that typified his work).

“From objects to pictures,
from pictures to symbols,
from symbols to ideas,
leads the ladder of knowledge.”

 ~ Friedrich Froebel 

(from a nice collection of German graphic art, found here)

San Francisco, California

Brent Couchman is a contemporary illustrator/designer with a stylish mid-century modern flare—see more of his work here and here.

Thanks to Carole Guevin for the cue.

Budapest, Hungary

Frustro is a display typeface designed by Martzi Hegedűs based on the Penrose triangle, an impossible object.

Thanks to Bob Roach for the link.