80 Works for Designers

Work 07 / Lick It Good: Student Designs

The challenge: Design a series of six commemorative stamps that celebrate energy conservation. The class will brainstorm illustration styles, which will be written on slips of paper, dropped into a hat, and then selected randomly to determine how you will individually execute the stamp designs.

The Spring 09 class into a hat the following artistic styles: collage, folk art, stippled, photo-realistic, gouache, and kitsch. Here's what they came up with...

 

Katharine Widdows:

 

Jake Rae:

 

Michelle Cormack:

 

Jessica Thrasher:

Spring 09 | Class 02: Book Report

We're dong this assignment again! This time, we're focusing on doing young adult books.

Bring in a book that you really like that most people probably haven't read. Each of us will give a brief talk about the book and why we like it. Your book will be randomly assigned to another designer in the class. You are now the book designer at Knopf assigned to create the cover for the new paperback edition. (Let's ignore that Knopf doesn't regularly do paperbacks.) Come up with an idea for the cover design + a single chapter page/spread of the interior. You may not read any part of the book other than the back cover/inside jacket flap.

Class, please leave a blurb about your book here for whom you've swapped books with. Thanks!

"The Cult of Done Manifesto" by Bre Pettis and Kyo Stark

Have you read "The Cult of Done Manifesto"?

This is one of the best attempts I've seen to codify principles of agile design. Of course, it was written in 20 minutes:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Dave Randall wisely noted in the comments to the original post: "Let me know when you design an airplane, or automobile, or CAT scanner, or fire extinguisher, or elevator, or SCADA system, or microwave oven using this method, so I can be certain never to use it."

Stretching Your Creative Talent

I was reading through some old interviews with Paul Rand before our first class, and I came across the following stunner. This was taken from an interview at MIT between John Maeda and Mr. Rand:

JM: "What are the fundamental skills of a designer?"

PR: "The fundamental skill is talent. Talent is a rare commodity. It's all intuition. And you can't teach intuition."

The first thought that popped into my head? Wow, what bullshit.

Yes, you can't directly teach intuition, but you can foster it in indirect ways. That is the function of the 80 Works class. I can't lecture you in how to increase your intuition. However, I can provide you with situations that you'll experience and tools that you can adapt to your working process over time. Then your talent will teach you what it needs, through the process of ideating and making. As a result, your intuition will begin to shine through and your inner critic will have to quiet down. Being in the moment, doing the work, and moving on with detachment.

Students in my first class called 80 Works for Designers "Design Acrobatics," and for good reason. We will often find ourselves on the trapeze, flying through the air in the midst of a difficult project, hoping that we'll be able to catch the hands of another acrobat and keep from falling into the ever-present net that will keep us from being injured. We keep doing various tricks over and over again, until we cease to think about the great height we're performing at and focus only on the double somersault that needs to occur mid-flight.

Being able to peg the somersault without worrying about failure -- and, if failure does occur, brushing yourself off and climbing up the ladder again to give it another shot -- is a true measure of your creative talent.

Having confidence in your capacity to create something of meaning under any sort of constraint -- that is a worthwhile goal for your design career, and much more valuable than being driven by the fear that you may not have enough talent to be the next uberdesigner of the century.

Sorry, Paul. But we're going to prove you wrong.