davymac : pixels+print professional

I found this very apt description on the value of experience on the 37signals website (the folks behind Basecamp)

Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second - Signal vs. Noise

…The designer version of the Picasso story usually involves a designer sketching out a brilliant logo on a napkin during a lunch meeting. If you’re looking for a real-life example, that’s pretty much what happened to Paula Scher; She walked into a meeting and, a few seconds later, sketched the new logo for Citibank.

No lengthy process, just the right solution. In this Adobe video profile of Scher, she offers an explanation similar to the one in the Picasso tale:

“How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second. it’s done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.”

That video of Paula on the Hillman Curtis website is worth checking out too.

(I see this post is now becoming popular on some of the other blogs too)

Of course the ‘Blinding flash of Inspiration’ is not the regular MO of many a creative, I know that with most creative professionals it’s still usually a case of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (your mileage may vary). Mind you we all have our moments and it’s certainly a great feeling to crack a creative brief in an instance of crystal clear insight, great - but rare.

Paula’s description of how this apparent ‘inspiration’ works is right on the money for me, it’s all about the cumulative build up of experience.

In particular professional creatives actively seek out and accumulate visual references, and their success owes a lot to this habit.

John Hegarty (another creative hero of mine) referred to the creative mindset as behaving like a cultural antenna, I guess it’s just how we’re wired

So remember, if you encounter a creative bragging that genius-like inspiration strikes them regularly on a 9 to 5 basis then, like discovering that the chef is thin, run like hell.

Thanks to YouTube I just found some classic movie title animations by the legendary Saul Bass.

Go check them out, amazingly, even at these small viewing sizes, Saul’s powerful graphics are still very effective.

I saw him on a documentary once voicing his preference for illustrating on very cheap papers, instead of the high grade expensive stock that the art supply stores would foist upon us, his wanted to keep the costs down in case he made a mistake. A habit he was still maintaining despite his monumental success.

Anyone involved in the creative industries will know only too well that good Project Management is critical to success. As in many other disciplines today’s creatives must manage and be accountable for more than the central creative processes alone.

This is especially true for small businesses, ie: the majority of designers, where the creatives may also be the Account Handlers and have to wear several ‘hats’ in the course of their working day.

The good news is that the current state of software and web(2.0) infrastructure means that creatives have never had it so good when it comes to project management options - previously the almost exclusive domain of the PC platform. A relatively unsung benefit of Mac OSX is how it has attracted such rapid growth from software developers, especially in business and groupware/comms applications.

Many of the software options available are reasonably inexpensive and will offer several advantages over using ‘plain vanilla’ email as the main knowledge management toolset, there are also some more enterprise strength choices which can be tailored to your needs, although at a significant cost.

Recently I have been very impressed with a couple of applications that are very much in the ascendant in the Mac software universe.

The first is Daylite from www.marketcircle.com. This truly is an industrial-strength environment for project management and has been designed with creative workflows in mind. The learning curve for Daylite is quite steep and there is a danger of ‘analysis paralysis’ when you see how configurable this application is, but if you stick with it you’ll find little it can’t cope with. Daylite plays well on servers too and it has an excellent integration with apple’s Mail program. Daylite costs start at $189.00 per user.

On the sidebar of this blog you will notice a link to Basecamp, this is an online collaboration environment - which in itself requires a high level of trust from the user as everything is maintained online.

If you can live with the ‘everything online’ practice (and I have already overcome my resistance to this) then you will see many benefits to this solution and it is rightly lauded for its design, implementation and sheer elegance of operation. You can sign up for a trial account for free and a moderate (15 projects allowed) account is only $24.00 per month.

Of course the big downside with this is that if there is a broadband outage you are cut off from your Basecamp data, however you can syncronise it with Apple’s iCal and then have at least an offline reference as up to date as your last sync. And realistically if there is a broadband outage then almost all means of communication are out of action anyway - no email, web, chat, Skype etc. and instances of outages like this are, thankfully, decreasing.

Check out my blog links on Project Management for a whole world of bloglinks for this.

And, of course when you’re done with all this project management its back to the drawing board Wacom tablet…

Another one of my pet obsessions is movies and their effect on popular culture, so I recently picked up the ‘Alien Quadrilogy’ (is that a real word?) DVD box set at my local HMV shop. I’ve seen them all quite a few times of course but the one that really stands the test of time is the first movie in the series, directed by Ridley Scott. One of the bonus discs presents tons of background info in the making of the film, I particularly liked the storyboard drawings produced by Ridley himself (an art school graduate), almost every scene was hand drawn before setting up to shoot. The payoff is that you can see the attention to detail in every frame, this film is a masterpiece of art direction and cinematography - in addition to being the first real ‘A’ list horror movie. Notably it took a fine artist, H. R. Giger, to visualise the design of the creature itself in such a radically different - and effective way.

Co-incidentally I also bought another Sci-Fi cult movie favourite, ‘Dark Star‘. This black comedy Sci-Fi movie was started as a student project by John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon, - who later wrote the screenplay for Alien.

The launch of the new MacPro desktop workstation at the Apple WWDC on Monday has the Mac creative community drooling in anticipation, and rightly so. The external casing has changed little from the G5 (hey remember them?) but under the bonnet is another story. All of these desktop units sport the new Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processors - with four processors at your disposal, at up to 3Ghz per processor, and many more hardware architecture improvements this becomes the ‘must-have’ for professional creatives. Incredibly, they are selling for less than the cost of the G5 Quad PowerMacs that they are replacing, on the UK Mac websites.

So if you’re a Pro Mac user, as of Monday, you are now officially working on an antique.

Following the recent re-opening of the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast they have managed to acquire a fascinating exhibition from the renowned Magnum Photos Agency. The exhibition is entitled ‘Magnum Ireland’ and features many photographs from such world-class photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliot Erwitt, Ian Berry and others.

The images date from as far back as the 1950s to the present day and are inspiring examples of superb photography, covering subject matter from the domestic and mundane to the (unfortunately) more familiar images of violence in the 1970’s. The online gallery is impressive (as are all the other Magnum galleries) but I’m really looking forward to seeing the actual prints in the gallery. If you’re in the Belfast area try and catch this exhibition.

I recently attended my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brighton University and, in addition to enjoying being the proud dad for the day, was pleasantly surprised to see the university awarding an Honorary Doctor of Letters to the graphic designer Margaret Calvert.

Margaret worked with Jock Kinneir in creating the UK road and motorway signage system, started in 1957 and still in use today. The scope of this design project is simply staggering and, although the original artworks have been updated and digitised they are still the source for what is seen on the roads today. Amongst her many design achievements Margaret has also designed several typefaces, the Linotype ‘Calvert’ font is one of her designs, named after her.

An impressive body of work indeed, I particularly like that fact that Margaret’s work is best viewed by driving past it, not many portfolios you can say that of.