Xinyi

A journal of my design education. All thoughts are welcomed!

[f1f2works]

X

[design-xinyi]

ITP Spring Show

[design-xinyi]

14th between 5th and 6th Avenue

Swiss International Style 

clarity and transparency of information

I regard the subway and parking lot signage design as Swiss International Style. For those systems, the function is the core idea. The goal of these designs is to guide people. The clarity and transparency of information is addressed well by the design. Using large-scale sans-serifs typeface (Helvetica in the subway signage) and complementing with iconography in vivid colors achieve the goal of communicating clearly and effectively. 

Environment unawareness of cultural context

The Namaste Bookstore front is so strange that catch my eyes immediately. There is a Budda near the door and the store sign is made in Neon. While the combination of these two features is already a weird image, this is a normal bookstore inside. Namaste is the greeting word used in Hindi. Obviously the store wants to communicate the message of being peaceful and mystery. This image is communicated by the name of the store but goes wrong with the other design choices. The whole setting reminds the behavior of a trying to bring one culture and hack it into another one without proper modifications. Design should fit into certain cultural context. If we are borrowing some elements from another culture, we must be aware of what we are doing and  being able to translated it in a way that is sending the message properly.

Escapism unwillingness of facing the reality

There are people who set on the ground and beg for money. To me, hey look fine. They seem healthy, and in the good condition to work. I assume that because they are unwilling to deal the reality, they choose this easier why to earn a living: begging. It is not that they are incapable of working and feeding themselves.They just escaped.

  Consumerism encouragement of purchasing

I notice some shipping packages at the front of a store and a store with enlarged version of candy dispensers. Another grocery store has many adhesive advertisements on the door near the handle. It feels like they are shouting at you and trying to cram you with informations during the very short moment of opening the door and entering. The information overload is so overwhelming. Buying something online is not an economy way of purchasing goods since the packaging and delivering process cause a lot of wasted materials and energy. I related all those three things to consumerism.

[design-xinyi]

those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them.

an article in Salon by David Weinberger

[cooperhewitt]

Artificial Nature - Dan Freidman

Designed by Dan Friedman. POSTER, “ARTIFICIAL NATURE EXHIBITION POSTER FOR THE DESTE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, ATHENS, GREECE”, 1990

Offset lithograph on white wove paper. 1997-19-432.

See more stuff from the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.

[ohno-anotherblogname]

Dan Friedman’s 12-Point Manifesto Live and work with passion and responsibility; have a sense of humor and fantasy. Try to express personal, spiritual, and domestic values even if our culture continues to be dominated by corporate, marketing and institutional values. Choose to be progressive: don’t be regressive. Find comfort in the past only if it expands insight into the future and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Embrace the richness of all cultures; be inclusive instead of exclusive. Think of your work as a significant element in the context of a more important, transcendental purpose. Use your work to become advocates of project for the public good. Attempt to become a cultural provocateur; be a leader rather than a follower. Engage in self-restraint; accept the challenge of working with reduced expectations and diminished resources. Avoid getting stuck in corners, such as being a servant to increased overhead, careerism, or narrow points of view. Bridge the boundaries that separate us from other creative professions and unexpected possibilities. Use the new technologies, but don’t be seduced into thinking that they provide answers to fundamental questions. Be radical.

(via ohno-anotherblogname)

[design-xinyi]

I have mixed feelings about technology. The Macintosh was introduced in 1984 and has been a major influence on this period. But in my own opinion, the emphasis on technology is somewhat overrated. If you look at this country across the entire twentieth century, you’ll see that there’s a tendency to celebrate all new technologies. Yet you could look at how each new technology has contributed to the deterioration of life.

Ellen Lupton interviews Dan Friedman, June 15, 1994

[legrandcirque]

A caricature sequence of posed joke photographs showing five stages of putting on a crinoline, ca. 1860.

[design-xinyi]

Self-reflection

[design-xinyi]

Villard de Honnecourt Grid

[design-xinyi]

What is Authenticity?

[jasonaalejandro]

Sheila de Bretteville, renowned designer and typographer, left the Feminist Art Program at CalArts to co-found the Woman’s Building, the Women’s Graphic Center, the Feminist Studio Workshop and Chrysalis Magazine. After that she became the founding Chair of the Communication Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design. She is currently director of the Yale University Graduate Program in Graphic Design and the first woman to receive tenure at the Yale University School of Art.

[design-xinyi]

Food and Identity

A five-day course-integrated study tour to Barcelona

Food has always been closely linked to identity, but in the past two decades, it has also become the focus of a host of issues that reflect cultural, social, and even political values. In this course, we will look at the nexus between what you eat and who you are by focusing on food culture in two countries: Denmark and Spain. Each has a deeply-rooted culinary tradition that was shaped by geography, religion, and demographics. In recent years each has also shot to the forefront of the gastronomic world, producing a distinctive kind of cutting-edge cuisine (‘molecular gastronomy’ in Spain; ‘New Nordic’ in Denmark), that has turned its chefs into celebrities and its restaurants into the object of international pilgrimage. In this course, we will examine what the impact that those changes, and others, have had on identity in each nation.

[design-xinyi]

Is religion a choice? 

A speculative "Questionnaire" based on Rochli's Heterosexual Questionnaire.

[design-xinyi]

Ways of seeing

http://walyou.com/optical-illusion-interior-design-concept/

[design-xinyi]

John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)

[design-xinyi]

Second self, the DIGITAL SELF online.

[design-xinyi]

Rhetoric and Semiotics