Matthew Griffin's Library tagged design → View Popular

When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don't start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name — at least, in some circles.
"Not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and usability where most of the web must be built."
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- I worry because young designers who confuse style with design are learning to copy their heroes' technical tricks and stylistic flourishes, but not necessarily learning to communicate in this medium.
- Because eventually traditional designers who do understand branding and communication design, and who do know the difference between Style and Design, will enter this market and displace some young designers who have never had the chance to understand the craft they practice.

15 Feb 08

Mentor Series: Media and Culture

www.boundless.org/...a0001516.cfm - Preview

design gordon media pennington project truth worldview

JF: When you said that we're living in the fumes of Western civilization, how do most people today determine right from wrong?
It's so subjective that it's really utilitarian. People tend to think what's right is what causes minimal harm to the people around them or minimal harm to themselves, but allows them to do what essentially they want to do anyway.
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- Yeah, it's — it's longer than a soundbite that's for sure. But what does it mean to be pre-modern? The real question is what is the modern world? What does it represent? What kind of thinking does it — what kind of thinking does modernism — how do you define
  modernism?
  
  Post-modernism rejects even the idea that the empirical world, that the scientific method alone is adequate to explaining why we're here, who we are and what all this means, and if that fails, then all bets are off. Post-modernism suggests that everyone tells their own story. That there's no real metanarrative to explain things. There's no truth system endurable enough to give us a satisfactory foundation for understanding our lives. It is the rejection reason and revelation.
  
  I suppose you could distill pre-modernism by suggesting that revelation created a foundation for understanding the world, and that modernism added reason above revelation. But post-modernism rejects them both. Post-modernism is a baptism in material experientialism. We are simply existential in that we define ourselves as we go along and that is deemed adequate.
- I'm fascinated to see how willing our culture is to reject reality and to embrace fantasy. Because we have not been given the tools and the resources and the education and the training that reinforces our ability to deal with conditions of our real existence, and we would much rather project ourselves into fantasy at every opportunity.
- One of the most heartbreaking concerns that I see people facing today is the feeling that they can't do anything. There's a sense of helplessness for many, but that's changing. I think people are beginning to realize that a very small minority of people have taken the reigns and have exerted a disproportionately significant amount of influence in creating and producing and distributing and controlling cultural content, and people are waking up to that. And this will be one of the critical revolutionary challenges for the generation that is now coming into influence and maturity.
- Our biggest challenge will be to actually recreate culture. I think we could see a renaissance. That sounds like a pretentious way of pronouncing it. I think we could be on the cusp of one of the most exciting periods in history, particularly for people of faith and conscious. I think the opportunity to enter a time of rebirth and renewal and renaissance is right in front of us. We're now waking up to something that has eluded us because we've been asleep, and we've been benign in our attitudes, and we've allowed this to go on far too long. It's time to create a renewal of ideas and ideals that have meaning, that have generosity, that have compassion, that are rooted in truth.