Designing Dialogue

Design discoveries and critical analysis

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Why Beauty Matters

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...Community opens the door to new approaches for old challenges and spurs a more informed and powerful creative instinct. Accountability, one of the most crucial benefits of engaging with your community, is what binds you to the relentless pursuit of your ideas. As you become accountable to others, your creative impulses become tangible projects. Your ideas grow roots. Community strengthens both your creative energy and your commitment to channel it.

Scott Belsky — Making Ideas Happen

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Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to bring to your attention the recent publication of my poem "cardboard cow" on the brilliant poetry site Clinic.

View Clinicpresents.com

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Remember this?

"We're all in this together" turned out to mean £14,000 tax cuts for millionaires.

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You can pour your heart and soul into designing a bomb, but the best you can do is a bloody good job. Choose your projects carefully.

TM

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Sporting @ttitude

An Olympic infographic we created at Fiasco has been shared aplenty online.

We have been hooked on the Olympics here at Fiasco. We did our best to keep up with the athletes, not just on the track but on Twitter too. Stories of trolling abounded as athletes still fresh from the track were thanking their Twitter followers. It was this sporting @ttitude that caught our attention and so we made a handy infographic to help tell the story of the Twitter Olympics all in one place - the good, the bad and the trollish. The social networks has been kind to us too! On Facebook we received 28 New Likes, reaching 3762 people. Brand Republic also shared our graphic to their 98,613 Followers. Bringing over twenty new followers in one day. Visual.ly featured our infographic on their front page accruing (at the time of writing) 471 views and over 130 shares on StumbleUpon. Our infographic was also featured on Creative Bloq, The Wall and The Drum. At the time of writing our Twitter Olympics Infographic has been shared/retweeted at least 530 times, reaching hundreds of thousands of people. Needless to say we're pretty happy with how it's been received.

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..it's a bit like an elbow in the retinas. Perhaps, inadvertently, they have created a symbol that fits our anxiety-filled era.

Adrian Shaughnessy on Wolf Olins London 2012 logo. Creative Review August 2012

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Design Think

What follows is a set of design principles / maxims that I recently shared with a friend looking to hone his skills toward the graphic design end of the creative spectrum. I thought it might be useful to share for others in a similar position.

With typography, you never run out of ideas.

This always remains: Hierarchy.

Decide for yourself to what extent you should let your decorative elements be informed by the content of your message. Can they be more meaningful?

Concepts can help bring conviction. Some visual choices are not objectively better than others, so you'll have a personal reason for choosing. Build a talent for conviction.

If you are stuck, then you're not making decisions.

Set yourself limits on how much "inspiration" you will allow yourself to consume.

Computers are insular: explain your problem to someone and you will most likely solve it for yourself [or] ask questions to get out of your head because all design is FOR someone else!

Challenge yourself with simplicity.

Grids are a tool to be used. I think they look best when they are transcended before our very eyes.

Children's books don't need Helvetica. Don't be slick for the sake of it [or] Serve.

Essentially all of these things can be boiled down to one question:

"Is it appropriate?"

As you hone your ability to feel what you see, you will be able to make others see what they need to feel; becoming more and more refined as you go on. Eventually, down to the flick of a lowercase "a" or the ligature between an "f" and an "l".

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Design Week Get Involved

Over at Fiasco our Draw to Explore project is well underway and was recently featured in Design Week and had a little mention in Computer Arts. Looking forward to receiving some more postcards from all you lovely people out there.

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Draw to Explore

At Fiasco we recently designed a graphic print to celebrate our love of drawing. It soon spiraled into a whole other project all together. Follow our Tumblr on fiascodesign.tumblr.com to see what people send us and sign up to receive a postcard yourself!

You can also find the print that inspired the project here on the Fiasco website.

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There has been a new development in my love affair with the brilliant IdeasTap. After quite a delay in the shortlisting, I have been shortlisted for the poetry competition "The Poet" offering the chance to be part of Clinic in London and a workshop led by Jack Underwood. Equal parts surprising and exciting. I look forward to finding out who gets to take part. You can find my entries on my IdeasTap Portfolio.

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Troibos Bank Magazine Designed by EatCake Bristol. Sorry for poor photos.

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I recently updated my personal website, which you can find here. I should call it an update here as a look through my numerous other posts about website beginnings (but not quite endings) will prove that I've had all sort of other versions up from time to time.

I challenged myself to create the whole site with a single page. In the end, this challenge suited a stream of consciousness approach that I had in mind for a long time. I will be making updates quite regularly from now on. So do check back from time to time and hopefully you wont be dissappointed!

What do you think?

http://www.designbytommorris.co.uk

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From FiascoDesign: A very sneaky peak at a printed self promo piece we've been working on.

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What is this user-centered design? Whether it's designed poorly or with great expertise all design is for someone and the same goes for art, whether the creator cares to acknowledge it or not.

Tom Morris

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Ed Milliband: Mr Speaker the prime minister told us that unemployment would fall in each year of this parliament. Today unemployment rose for the sixth month in a row. Does he think it has anything to do with his government? David Cameron: The government takes absolute responsibility for everything that happens in our economy…I take responsibility for that.

BBC coverage of the Houses of Parliament. Transcribed 21/01/12

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Anyone who is honest is interesting

— Stefan Sagmeister