Three Important Considerations – Before you Build Buy or Rent

Before you Build, Buy or Rent —the most important issues governing your residence are Water, energy and communications along with location [ more specifically where the building touches the earth and it's orientation to the sun ]. These are things we all take for granted but if you carefully think about each one they have profound implications. Take away any one of these and you can imagine the impact. The other component for sustaining life is food. While this may seem overly simplistic the strain placed on our natural resources causes us to take a closer look at those things necessary for life. Consider the quality of each item and where it comes from.

What is design?

Design is not chopped liver.

Design is a process that leads to a conclusion. It has a beginning a middle and an end. Chopped liver is always served as a side dish. Design cannot be a side dish. Design is not decoration; it may be decorative or plain but that is not the purpose of design. Design is the development of an idea to some purposeful conclusion.

Using Your Design Senses

Sorry for the delay; it’s a bit dusty in here but hopefully we can get it cleaned up before your allergies kick in. [ read as very dry humor ]

There are two components to design or we should say creativity. The first component is to actually create something; draw, paint, dance, sing and so on and the other component is to evaluate the thing created to determine if it passes for something we wish to display to others. Both things require skill and both are subjective. Here’s what I have observed about both laymen and designers; they have trouble being really honest about their work. In terms of graphic arts some will opt for “good enough” rather than measure up to the level of professionalism exhibited in many publications and on consumer goods we purchase.

A singer must realize whether they can actually sing a listenable version of a song as opposed to just liking to sing. I like to put it this way: “appreciating talent in someone else is not the same as having it yourself.”

The key to doing great work is to be brutally honest about what you did and with courage doing whatever is necessary to fix it. Even if that means you have to leave it to more skillful hands.

Bed table chair, what does it mean to me?

How do three pieces of furniture symbolize this blog and more importantly why is it important to me? Bed Table Chair is simply a philosophy or approach to living. In this era where everything is defined by a niche it would seem that something so broad as “an approach to living”, would be out of step. Let me explain; I have for over thirty years designed places where people live and work. Those designs involved countless ways in which we interact with the material world and from that process has come a way of paring down to what is essential versus what might be interesting for the moment. In other words it’s about editing your life and discovering those things that are important.

There are plenty of sites that can teach you how to unclutter or save money and they do an excellent job of covering those topics. I suppose there will be some overlap here but what I hope to offer is some underlying strategy to living in what  I call, “the tension between heaven and earth”.

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Photoshop Link Swirl

What’s a link swirl you ask? If you click on over to Photoshop User TV you will discover a very funny but educational video podcast and if you follow the links associated with that site and the hosts you will end up with a photoshop link swirl which is simply a way to swim into the ever creative waters of photoshop.

Joe McNally The Moment It Clicks

A book that I haven’t even read but will recommend. World renowned Photographer Joe McNally gives you a video preview at this link.

New Service, See Your Web Universe All In One Place

Netvibes Offices

As more and more consumers hit the digital highways
entrepreneurs are are hard at work providing new and innovative ways to get more from the online experience. Netvibes is a free service that aims to be your one stop hub for browsing the internet, getting email and interacting with your friends and family.

From Netvibes

Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage, an alternative to traditional Web portals. With millions of users in more than 150 countries, Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, widgets, and everything else they enjoy on the Web. Founded in 2005 by Tariq Krim, Netvibes has offices in Paris, London and San Francisco.

Although there are other services that offer similar services; Netvibes does not lock you in to one service and it really is the content you wish to see. Around the middle of February Netvibes will launch a new upgrade to their service called Ginger. The new features should bring a new level of convinence to the end user and save time browsing from site to site. I highly recommend that you check it out for yourself, as you the end user are the final measure of a products success. If you have thoughts, experience’s with Netvibes please drop us a comment.

Art + Design, Reaching Up

There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to create buzz around ones blog these days. This is understandable, what with all the blogs there are to choose from but I can’t seem to bring myself to post something just for the buzz unless that buzz can be turned into a harmonious sound.

I found a little clip on YouTube that I think is worth your time. It consists of a short tribute to Paul Rand, designer of such iconic logos as IBM, NEXT, and ABC to name a few. You can find it here; you should watch it at least twice.

When a photo is more than a photo!

First a little housekeeping. I’ve found blogging to be a fun, rewarding and illuminating experience. It also takes a lot of time, especially if you wish to do it well. I don’t think I am there yet. I’ve said I was going to write about certain things with a certain frequency and that just didn’t happen. What I hope to do in the future is to make reasonable progress. Now on with the show.

Over the last year I have met and visited with many talented photographers from around the country and to their credit they have inspired me to stretch my thinking when it comes to photography. We live in the age where all kinds of things are re-purposed, or re-packaged. That’s what the photo below is all about. I shot this about a year ago and decided to re use part of it. First I cropped in the part that I wanted to focus on and then turned it into a black and white image and applied a few adjustments and filters in Photoshop. I was thinking about what to call it and somehow the idea came to call it a “route 66 stop sign”. If you didn’t have the joys of traveling the “mother road” back in the 50’s and 60’s the Diner thing might not mean as much but in those days these Diners served up some of the best roadside fare you can imagine. This is part of the sign for a place called Metro Diner. The Diner has since been demolished to make room for university housing. While Metro was built after the route 66 hey day it was designed and built in the classic diner style of years gone by. For more of this gem you can view it here.

The photo within a photo.

Photography