The next 5 years of design?

and i hope people stop ripping off the scandinavians because they're not really getting any better these days.

Still, their site now is pretty grossly twee.

If you mean aping old printing processes (screen-printing, woodcuts) and styles, simple designs/blocky color designs - isn't that already the 'in' thing to do? I know Aesthetic Apparatus and all of those kind of newer graphic design groups do a lot of it, and when I pick up graphic design/student annuals, I see a ton of it.

I was young and thought that I could get some lower level PA job without being horribly overqualified. I was wrong!

ok, as long as we can all still use Helvetica forever and ever, plz.

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but they are so hot!@!!

and xpost- you don't have to be qualified, you just have to have a good reel and be willing to work seriously fucked up hours (granted, for a TON of money).

That's a pretty strong statement.

xpost- what does that mean, rjg?

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000276.html

I think we'll see a big change once IE5 and such drop out of the picture enough that people can start focusing on the browsers that properly support CSS2. That'll buy web designers some much-needed latitude. Apart from that, it's all about Flash.

right now, people just seem to be honing interfaces

that's not going to change, nor should it. A good website has a good interface, period.

welcome to design!

i am glad that things are (and have been for a while, i guess) taking a detour into the more hand drawn look. and i guess for a while, we'll have to be content to see things manifest in recombinant modes.

i assume a lot of the people chiming in here are designers. are you guys working in film or video at all? i am learning after effects but i hate 99.9% of motion graphics.

what influence does the photographic have in your work or do you mostly work with illustrations or is there even really a compositional difference to you? to be honest, i think i'm going to dive into commercial and video work and leave a lot of my print and web stuff to the unforgiving and ludicrous realm of fine art. doesn't seem to be terribly difficult to get in a gallery these days.

i like having a life

and a wife

i am working on some animation stuff too which is exciting.

i don't know why i'm being so boisterous today. i feel like i'm on crack. just one of those days when you feel like the world (or maybe just you yourself) are on the cusp of something fantastic. but at the same time it's depressing.

I was an offline video editor for a London ad agency. I got the job when I had just finished film school and so they obviously fooled themselves into thinking that there some kind of cachet in hiring someone like me.

What do you want to know? Long hours, reasonably interesting work but don't expect to do anything creative. The place I worked for was meant to be progressive and innovative but I really just watched people steal ideas and run up expense accounts. Occasionally I got to see genuinely interesting people at work (various promo/ad directors, graphic/video artists, etc.)It wasn't very well paid but for a job in the media in London it was above average. I got to eat out a lot on the company tab, lots of parties, lots of wacky "events", lots of money being thrown out of the door, but it did not have a good effect on my personal life and in the end it just wasn't worth it.

If you're young (which you are?) and you don't value your home/personal life too much, then maybe you could think about it.

actually I do kind of miss it. God, I'm so conflicted.

I like that, and I also hate it. It's like rgj said.

This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6+
Please upgrade your browser.

!!!

I'm running the newest release of Firefox, bitch!

Don't know about Macs though, I don't have one. But since I'm using Windows it's kind of necessary to use a browser other than Internet Explorer, which has all sorts of security problems.

There are no problems with Firefox, that's just a shitty website. Looks awful and seems kinda broken. Sorry.

I. AM. FUCK. ING. SICK
OF HELVETICA.

i went to school with those brand new school folks, ge0ff mcfett, etc. all the design stars. heheh. that moment, which seems to be winding down, was really teenage boy to me. the attitudes, the forms, the references. but to each their own.

i don't mind people ripping off scandinavians, but then i am one.

but then anyone living in a glass weblog shouldn't throw stones.

This font is everywhere - it's inescapable. So when I'm working on a project and the CD at my office tells me to use helvetica - when we could easily use something else - when we don't need a large font family - when, for once, we can actually try something DIFFERENT and be "creative" - ya I get sick of it. I've only been doing this for 5 years now so I'm sure my blood pressure is heading for disaster, but this one guy I work under right now barely uses any other font. Fuck.

http://www.helveticalove.com/

I think the trouble you're having is that your boss *is* using it out of habit, because his opinion is uninformed. Again, annoying.

Anyway, I thought that Brand New School website had a nice design, FWIW.

Adam I didn't know you'd been an offline editor. After school I thought maybe I'd like to do video post-production and I was a runner for a bit. Similar experience to you, it sounds like – met interesting people and had fun, then sort of grew out of it. That sounds a bit stuffy but in some ways it was more childish than school had been.

I think what's really bad about it, aside from any purely aesthetic considerations, is that it's a little broken. Won't work properly in Firefox, wtf? Bad design. Has nothing to do with the wood grain.

And I think that the severity and minimalism of the bookstore is all that many people hate about design. Too serious a house for unserious earth -- something like that.

i don't think of myself as an artist so much as i think of myself as an "ummm... an 'artist'? i don't know that i feel comfortable calling myself that. maybe." but design-wise i've been trying to make the transition to doing much more personal projects for friends and stuff. my current employment contract expires in january and i don't think i'll be renewing it. i'm probably going to get a part-time job, take the few freelance gigs i can get, do some illustration work... but hopefully spend most of my time getting closer to that 'artist' tag... and getting back into writing.

i have several friends that are much better designers than i am. seeing their work seems like enough lately. i admire their work, but don't care enough to make "effective" design choices anymore. i would like to be an image maker, and that's about it. this was all brought on by a bar that had me making a limited series of posters for them, which led to some other stuff, which led to a glimmer of hope, which hopefully will not lead to eating ramen sitting in the gutter.

ok, now imagine that made sense.

That's a huge question and it's an issue on which I'm personally very conflicted. On one level I feel that "functionality" doesn't really matter and that aesthetics should be everything. On the other hand if a design isn't "functional" then it quite literally doesn't work. So if functional means following certain rules of legibility or user-friendliness then I have no use for functionality. If you can define functional to be anything that successfully accomplishes the client's goals then I don't think it's as big of a burden.

and to what extent is anything on the web truly disposable? i surely never clean out my bookmark

The web is so much more disposable than any other medium though. You may not clear out your bookmarks but how often do you actually cache and archive old websites? How many sites that you bookmarked 2 or 3 years ago still look the same or even still exist?