Browse a Collection of Over 83,500 Vintage Sewing Patterns

in Design, Fashion, History, Life | June 30th, 2017

My cos­tume design pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, Vir­gil John­son, delight­ed stu­dents with his for­mu­la for peri­od cloth­ing. I have for­got­ten some of the math­e­mat­ic and seman­tic particulars—does dress­ing some­one five years behind the times a “frumpy” char­ac­ter make? Or is it mere­ly one?

I do recall some anx­ious hours, prepar­ing for the school’s main stage pro­duc­tion of the inces­tu­ous Jacobean revenge tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. The soci­etal cor­rup­tion of the play was under­scored by hav­ing the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters slouch around, snort­ing mimed cocaine in cut­ting edge, mid-80s Vogue Pat­terns … those big unstruc­tured jack­ets were very a la mode, but they gob­bled up a lot of high-bud­get fab­ric, and I didn’t want to be the one to make a cost­ly sewing mis­take.

What sticks in my mind most clear­ly is that 20 years was the sweet spot, the appro­pri­ate amount of elapsed time to ensure that one would not appear dumpy, dowdy, or obliv­i­ous, but rather pru­dent and dis­cern­ing. Don­ning a gar­ment that was 15 years out of fash­ion might be dar­ing­ly “retro,” but anoth­er five and that same gar­ment could be her­ald­ed as “vin­tage.”

The col­lab­o­ra­tive Vin­tage Pat­tern Wiki puts the mag­ic num­ber at 25, request­ing that con­trib­u­tors make sure the pat­terns they post are from 1992 or ear­li­er, and also out-of-print.

The brows­able col­lec­tion of over 83,500 pat­terns runs the gamut from Dynasty-inspired pussy bow pow­er suits to Bet­ty Drap­er-esque frocks fea­tur­ing mod­els in white gloves to an 1895 boys’ Reefer Suit with fly-free short trousers.

Vis­i­tors can nar­row their search to focus on a par­tic­u­lar gar­ment, design­er or decade. If you click these links, you can see pat­terns from the fol­low­ing decades: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

The movie star col­lec­tion is par­tic­u­lar­ly fun. (Flat­ter­ing or no, I’ve always want­ed a pair of Katharine Hep­burn pants…)

And it goes with­out say­ing that the dog days of sum­mer are the per­fect time to get a jump on your Hal­loween cos­tume.

Those who are itch­ing to get sewing should check the links below each pat­tern enve­lope cov­er for ven­dors who have the pat­tern in stock and pho­tos and posts by com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who have made that same gar­ment.

The prices and hand­writ­ten jot­tings of the orig­i­nal own­ers will also put you in a vin­tage mood.

The hunt starts here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Online Knit­ting Ref­er­ence Library: Down­load 300 Knit­ting Books Pub­lished From 1849 to 2012

Fri­da Kahlo’s Col­or­ful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Pho­tographed by Ishi­uchi Miyako

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Dr. Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 26 ) |

The Female Pioneers of the Bauhaus Art Movement: Discover Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers & Other Forgotten Innovators

in Art, Design, History | June 29th, 2017

You’d be for­giv­en for assum­ing that the Bauhaus, the mod­ern art and design move­ment that emerged from the epony­mous Ger­man art school in the 1920s and 30s, did­n’t involve many women. Per­haps the famous near-indus­tri­al aus­ter­i­ty of its aes­thet­ic, espe­cial­ly at large scales, has stereo­typ­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions with male­ness, but also, Bauhaus’ most oft-ref­er­enced lead­ing lights — Paul Klee, Wal­ter Gropius, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlem­mer — all hap­pened to be men. But if we seek out the women of the Bauhaus, what can we learn?

“When it opened, the Bauhaus school declared itself pro­gres­sive and mod­ern and advo­cat­ed equal­i­ty for the sex­es, which was rare at the time,” says Eve­lyn Adams in her short video on the Women of the Bauhaus above. “Val­ue was placed on skill rather than gen­der. Class­es weren’t seg­re­gat­ed, and women were free to select whichev­er sub­jects they want­ed.”

This had an under­stand­able appeal, and in the school’s first year more women applied than men. But alas, “in real­i­ty, despite hav­ing rad­i­cal aspi­ra­tions, the men in charge of the school rep­re­sent­ed the soci­etal atti­tudes of the time. If every­one was wel­comed as equals, then why did none of the women reach the same lev­el of recog­ni­tion as Paul Klee or Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky?”

The sto­ry of Gertrud Arndt, one of whose self-por­traits appears above and one of whose tex­tiles appears below that, sheds some light on the answer. “She must have felt so opti­mistic,” writes the New York Times’ Alice Raw­sthorn, when she arrived at the Bauhaus school of art and design in 1923 as “a gift­ed, spir­it­ed 20-year-old who had won a schol­ar­ship to pay for her stud­ies. Hav­ing spent sev­er­al years work­ing as an appren­tice to a firm of archi­tects, she had set her heart on study­ing archi­tec­ture.” But because of a “long-run­ning bat­tle between its found­ing direc­tor, the archi­tect Wal­ter Gropius, and one of its most charis­mat­ic teach­ers, Johannes Itten, who want­ed to use the school as a vehi­cle for his qua­si-spir­i­tu­al approach to art and design,” the Bauhaus’ house, as it were, had fall­en out of order.

Alas, “Arndt was told that there was no archi­tec­ture course for her to join and was dis­patched to the weav­ing work­shop.” In recent years, the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin has put on shows to hon­or female Bauhausers like Ard­nt, tex­tile design­er Beni­ta Koch-Otte, and the­ater design­er, illus­tra­tor, and col­or the­o­rist Lou Schep­er-Berkenkamp. “The sit­u­a­tion improved after Gropius suc­ceed­ed in oust­ing Itten in 1923,” writes Raw­sthorn, hir­ing Moholy-Nagy in Itten’s place. “Hav­ing ensured that female stu­dents were giv­en greater free­dom, Moholy encour­aged one of them, Mar­i­anne Brandt, to join the met­al work­shop. She was to become one of Germany’s fore­most indus­tri­al design­ers dur­ing the 1930s,” and her 1924 tea infuser and strain­er appears just above.

Art­sy’s Alexxa Got­thardt has the sto­ries of more women of the Bauhaus, includ­ing Anni Albers, whose 1947 Knot 2 appears just above. Her oth­er work includes “a cot­ton and cel­lo­phane cur­tain that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly absorbed sound and reflect­ed light” and tapes­tries that “would go on to have a con­sid­er­able impact on the devel­op­ment of geo­met­ric abstrac­tion in the visu­al arts.” Alma Sied­hoff-Busch­er, writes Got­thardt, dared “to switch from the weav­ing work­shop to the male-dom­i­nat­ed wood-sculp­ture depart­ment,” where she invent­ed a “small ship-build­ing game,” pic­tured below and still in pro­duc­tion today, that “man­i­fest­ed Bauhaus’s cen­tral tenets: its 22 blocks, forged in pri­ma­ry col­ors, could be con­struct­ed into the shape of a boat, but could also be rearranged to allow for cre­ative exper­i­men­ta­tion.”

Bauhaus art and design took crit­i­cism in its hey­day, as it still takes crit­i­cism now, for a cer­tain cold­ness and steril­i­ty — or at least the work of the men of the Bauhaus does. But the more we dis­cov­er about the less­er-known women of the Bauhaus, the more we see how they man­aged to bring no small degree of human­i­ty to its artis­tic fruits, even to those of its most rig­or­ous branch­es. “There is no dif­fer­ence between the beau­ti­ful sex and the strong sex,” Gropius once insist­ed in a some­what self-defeat­ing pro­nounce­ment, but the dif­fer­ences between the male and female Bauhausers — in their per­son­al­i­ties as well as in their work — make the move­ment look all the rich­er in ret­ro­spect.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & More

3,900 Pages of Paul Klee’s Per­son­al Note­books Are Now Online, Pre­sent­ing His Bauhaus Teach­ings (1921–1931)

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Animated GIFs Show How Subway Maps of Berlin, New York, Tokyo & London Compare to the Real Geography of Those Great Cities

in Data, Design, Maps | June 1st, 2017

You can’t make a per­fect­ly accu­rate map, as Jorge Luis Borges so suc­cinct­ly told us, with­out mak­ing it the exact same size and shape as the land it por­trays. But giv­en the utter use­less­ness of such an enor­mous piece of paper (which so frus­trat­ed the cit­i­zens of the imag­i­nary empire in Borges’ sto­ry that, “not with­out some piti­less­ness,” they tossed theirs into the desert), no map­mak­er would ever want to. A more com­pact map is a more use­ful one; unfor­tu­nate­ly, a more com­pact map is also, by its very nature, a less accu­rate one.

New York

The same rule applies to maps of all kinds, and espe­cial­ly to tran­sit maps, quite pos­si­bly the most use­ful spe­cial­ized maps we con­sult today. They show us how to nav­i­gate cities, and yet their clean, bold lines, some­times turn­ing but nev­er waver­ing, hard­ly rep­re­sent those cities — sub­ject as they are to vari­a­tions in ter­rain and den­si­ty, as well as cen­turies of unplannably organ­ic growth — with geo­graph­i­cal faith­ful­ness. One can’t help but won­der just how each urban tran­sit map, some of them beloved works of design, strikes the use­ful­ness-faith­ful­ness bal­ance.

Lon­don

Liv­ing in Seoul, I’ve grown used to the city’s stan­dard sub­way map. I thus get a kick out of scru­ti­niz­ing the more geo­graph­i­cal­ly accu­rate one, which over­lays the train lines onto an exist­ing map of the city, post­ed on some sta­tion plat­forms. It reveals the truth that some lines are short­er than they look on the stan­dard map, some are much longer, and none cut quite as clean a path through the city as they seem to. At Twist­ed Sifter you’ll find a GIF gallery of 15 stan­dard sub­way maps that morph into more geo­graph­i­cal­ly faith­ful equiv­a­lents, a vivid demon­stra­tion of just how much tran­sit map design­ers need to twist, squeeze, and sim­pli­fy an urban land­scape to pro­duce some­thing leg­i­ble at a glance.

Tokyo

All of those ani­ma­tions, just five of which you see in this post, come from the sub­red­dit Data Is Beau­ti­ful, a realm pop­u­lat­ed by enthu­si­asts of the visu­al dis­play of quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion — enthu­si­asts so enthu­si­as­tic that many of them cre­ate inno­v­a­tive data visu­al­iza­tions like these by them­selves. Accord­ing to their cre­ations, sub­way maps, like that of New York City’s ven­er­a­ble sys­tem, do rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle to dis­tort the city; oth­ers, like Toky­o’s, look near­ly unrec­og­niz­able when made to con­form to geog­ra­phy.

Austin

Even the maps of new and incom­plete tran­sit net­works do a num­ber on the real shape and direc­tion of their paths: the map of Austin, Texas’ Cap­i­tal Metro­Rail, for instance, straight­ens a some­what zig-zag­gy north­east-south­west track into a sin­gle hor­i­zon­tal line. It may take a few gen­er­a­tions before Austin’s “sys­tem” devel­ops into one exten­sive and com­plex enough to inspire one of the great tran­sit maps (the ranks, for exam­ple, of “The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town”). But I would­n’t count out the pos­si­bil­i­ty: the more ful­ly cities real­ize their pub­lic-tran­sit poten­tial, the more oppor­tu­ni­ty opens up for the advance­ment of the sub­way map­mak­er’s art.

See all 15 of the sub­way GIFs at Twist­ed Sifter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Bauhaus Artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy Designs an Avant-Garde Map to Help Peo­ple Get Over the Fear of Fly­ing (1936)

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch a Mesmerizing Hourglass Filled with 1,250,000 “Nanoballs” (Created by the Designer of the Apple Watch)

in Design | May 26th, 2017

Apple Watch design­er Marc New­son has cre­at­ed an hour­glass that stands about 6 inch­es tall, mea­sures 5 inch­es wide, and fea­tures 1,249,996 tiny spheres called “nanoballs,” each made of stain­less steel and cov­ered with a fine cop­per coat­ing. It takes 10 min­utes for the nanoballs to pour through the glass, from first to last. The action looks pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing, to say the least.

You can pick up your very own hand-made hour­glass for $12,000. But if your pock­ets don’t run quite that deep, you can set­tle for watch­ing the time piece in the video above. Get more infor­ma­tion on the New­son hour­glass here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

in Design, Technology | May 3rd, 2017

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

in Design, Environment | April 25th, 2017

Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Noc­turne in B major well-suit­ed), and watch the video above, a silent data visu­al­iza­tion by vision­ary archi­tect and sys­tems the­o­rist Buck­min­ster Fuller, “the James Brown of indus­tri­al design.” The short film from 1965 com­bines two of Fuller’s lead­ing con­cerns: the expo­nen­tial spread of the human pop­u­la­tion over finite mass­es of land and the need to revise our glob­al per­spec­tive via the “Dymax­ion map,” in order “to visu­al­ize the whole plan­et with greater accu­ra­cy,” as the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute writes, so that “we humans will be bet­ter equipped to address chal­lenges as we face our com­mon future aboard Space­ship Earth.”

Though you may know it best as the name of a geo­des­ic sphere at Disney’s Epcot Cen­ter, the term Space­ship Earth orig­i­nal­ly came from Fuller, who used it to remind us of our inter­con­nect­ed­ness and inter­de­pen­dence as we share resources on the only vehi­cle we know of that can sus­tain us in the cos­mos.

“We are all astro­nauts,” he wrote in his 1969 Oper­at­ing Man­u­al for Space­ship Earth, and yet we refuse to see the long-term con­se­quences of our actions on our spe­cial­ized craft: “One of the rea­sons why we are strug­gling inad­e­quate­ly today,” Fuller argued in his intro­duc­tion, “is that we reck­on our costs on too short­sight­ed a basis and are lat­er over­whelmed with the unex­pect­ed costs brought about by our short­sight­ed­ness.”

Like all vision­ar­ies, Fuller thought in long spans of time, and he used his design skills to help oth­ers do so as well. His pop­u­la­tion visu­al­iza­tion doc­u­ments human growth from 1000 B.C.E. to Fuller’s present, at the time, of 1965. In the image above (see a larg­er ver­sion here), we have a graph­ic from that same year—made col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with artist and soci­ol­o­gist John McHale—showing the “shrink­ing of our plan­et by man’s increased trav­el and com­mu­ni­ca­tion speeds around the globe.” (It must be near micro­scop­ic by now.) Fuller takes an even longer view, look­ing at “the con­flu­ence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trans­porta­tion tech­nolo­gies,” writes Rikke Schmidt Kjær­gaard, “from 500,000 B.C.E. to 1965.”

Here Fuller com­bines his pop­u­la­tion data with the tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs of moder­ni­ty. Though he’s thought of in some quar­ters as a genius and in some as a kook, Fuller demon­strat­ed his tremen­dous fore­sight in seem­ing­ly innu­mer­able ways. But it was in the realm of design that he excelled in com­mu­ni­cat­ing what he saw. “Pio­neers of data visu­al­iza­tion,” Fuller and McHale were two of “the first to chart long-term trends of indus­tri­al­iza­tion and glob­al­iza­tion.” Instead of becom­ing alarmed and fear­ful of what the trends showed, Fuller got to work design­ing for the future, ful­ly aware, writes the Fuller Insti­tute that “the plan­et is a sys­tem, and a resilient one.”

Fuller thought like a rad­i­cal­ly inven­tive engi­neer, but he spoke and wrote like a peacenik prophet, writ­ing that a sys­tem of nar­row spe­cial­iza­tions ensures that skill sets “are not com­pre­hend­ed com­pre­hen­sive­ly… or they are real­ized only in neg­a­tive ways, in new weapon­ry or the indus­tri­al sup­port only of war far­ing.” We’ve seen this vision of soci­ety played out to a fright­en­ing extent. Fuller saw a way out, one in which every­one on the plan­et can live in com­fort and secu­ri­ty with­out con­sum­ing (then not renew­ing) the Earth’s resources. How can this be done? You’ll have to read Fuller’s work to find out. Mean­while, as his visu­al­iza­tions sug­gest, it’s best for us to take the long view—and give up on short-term rewards and profits—in our assess­ments of the state of Space­ship Earth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work: The Celebrated Designer Dispenses Wisdom Gained Over His Long Life & Career

in Creativity, Design, Life | April 24th, 2017

“None of us has real­ly the abil­i­ty to under­stand our path until it’s over,” the cel­e­brat­ed graph­ic design­er Mil­ton Glaser mus­es less than a minute into the above video.

The 86-year-old Glaser’s many con­tri­bu­tions to pop culture—the  I ❤ NY logo, the psy­che­del­ic por­trait of a rain­bow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ clas­sic bul­let logo—con­fer unde­ni­able author­i­ty. To the out­side eye, he seems to have a pret­ty firm han­dle on the path he’s been trav­el­ing for lo these many decades. Aspi­rant design­ers would do well to give extra con­sid­er­a­tion to any advice he might share.

As would the rest of us.

His “Ten Things I Have Learned,” orig­i­nal­ly deliv­ered as part of a talk to the AIGA—a ven­er­a­ble mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion for design professionals—qualifies as sol­id life advice of gen­er­al inter­est.

Yes, the Inter­net spawns bul­let-point­ed tips for bet­ter liv­ing the way spring rains yield mush­rooms, but Glaser, a self-described “child of mod­ernism” who’s still a con­tender, does not truck in pithy Insta­gram-friend­ly apho­risms. Instead, his list is born of reflec­tion on the var­i­ous turns of a long and most­ly sat­is­fy­ing cre­ative career.

We’ve excerpt­ed some of his most essen­tial points below, and sug­gest that those read­ers who are still in train­ing give spe­cial empha­sis to num­ber sev­en. Don’t place too much weight on num­ber nine until you’ve estab­lished a sol­id work eth­ic. (See num­ber four for more on that.)

MILTON GLASER”S TEN RULES FOR WORK AND LIFE (& A BONUS JOKE ABOUT A RABBIT).

1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE

Some years ago I real­ized that… all the work I had done that was mean­ing­ful and sig­nif­i­cant came out of an affec­tion­ate rela­tion­ship with a client.

2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB

Here, Glaser quotes com­pos­er John Cage: Nev­er have a job, because if you have a job some­day some­one will take it away from you and then you will be unpre­pared for your old age. 

3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

Glaser rec­om­mends putting a ques­tion­able com­pan­ion to a gestalt ther­a­py test. If, after spend­ing time with that per­son “you are more tired, then you have been poi­soned. If you have more ener­gy, you have been nour­ished. The test is almost infal­li­ble and I sug­gest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH (or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT)

Glaser con­cedes that a record of depend­able excel­lence is some­thing to look for in a brain sur­geon or auto mechan­ic, but for those in the arts, “con­tin­u­ous trans­gres­sion” is the qual­i­ty to cul­ti­vate. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism does not allow for that because trans­gres­sion has to encom­pass the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fail­ure and if you are pro­fes­sion­al your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat suc­cess. 

5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE

I have an alter­na­tive to the propo­si­tion that I believe is more appro­pri­ate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED

Style change is usu­al­ly linked to eco­nom­ic fac­tors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when peo­ple see too much of the same thing too often.

7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN

The brain is the most respon­sive organ of the body…. Thought changes our life and our behav­ior. I also believe that draw­ing works in the same way…. Draw­ing also makes you atten­tive. It makes you pay atten­tion to what you are look­ing at, which is not so easy.

8. DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY

One of the signs of a dam­aged ego is absolute cer­tain­ty. Schools encour­age the idea of not com­pro­mis­ing and defend­ing your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usu­al­ly all about the nature of com­pro­mise…. Ide­al­ly, mak­ing every­one win through acts of accom­mo­da­tion is desir­able.

9. IT DOESN’T MATTER

Glaser cred­its essay­ist Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging (misiden­ti­fy­ing the title as Aging Grace­ful­ly) with help­ing him artic­u­late his phi­los­o­phy here.  It doesn’t mat­ter what you think. It does not mat­ter if you are late or ear­ly, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stu­pid. If you were hav­ing a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cock­eyed or your boyfriend or girl­friend looks at you cock­eyed, if you are cock­eyed. If you don’t get that pro­mo­tion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t mat­ter.

10. TELL THE TRUTH

It’s inter­est­ing to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of use­ful infor­ma­tion about appro­pri­ate behav­ior towards clients and oth­er design­ers, but not a word about a designer’s rela­tion­ship to the pub­lic. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more cen­tral to what we do.

BONUS JOKE

A butch­er was open­ing his mar­ket one morn­ing and as he did a rab­bit popped his head through the door. The butch­er was sur­prised when the rab­bit inquired ‘Got any cab­bage?’ The butch­er said ‘This is a meat mar­ket – we sell meat, not veg­eta­bles.’ The rab­bit hopped off. The next day the butch­er is open­ing the shop and sure enough the rab­bit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cab­bage?’ The butch­er now irri­tat­ed says ‘Lis­ten you lit­tle rodent, I told you yes­ter­day we sell meat, we do not sell veg­eta­bles and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those flop­py ears to the floor.’ The rab­bit dis­ap­peared hasti­ly and noth­ing hap­pened for a week. Then one morn­ing the rab­bit popped his head around the cor­ner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butch­er said ‘No.’ The rab­bit said ‘Ok. Got any cab­bage?’’

Read Mil­ton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” in its entire­ty here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mil­ton Glaser Draws Shake­speare & Explains Why Draw­ing is the Key to Under­stand­ing Life

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

World-Renowned Graph­ic Design­er Mil­ton Glaser Has a Laugh on Old Jews Telling Jokes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Every Page of Depero Futurista, the 1927 Futurist Masterpiece of Graphic Design & Bookmaking, Is Now Online

in Books, Design | March 22nd, 2017

You can try to dis­man­tle your e‑reader, but you can’t unscrew an eBook. Despite hav­ing cast his artis­tic mind, as did his fel­low 20th-cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Futur­ists, force­ful­ly into the world to come, could For­tu­na­to Depero have imag­ined that such a ques­tion would arise in the 21st? The Trenti­no-born painter, writer, sculp­tor, and graph­ic design­er, led a high­ly cre­ative life, pro­duc­ing no work more endur­ing than the instant­ly rec­og­niz­able Cam­pari Soda bot­tle. But just last year, a group of enthu­si­asts suc­cess­ful­ly raised more than $250,000 on Kick­starter to bring back into print Deper­o’s sec­ond-best-known cre­ation: Depero Futur­ista, also known as “The Bolt­ed Book.”

Designed by Depero as “a kind of portable muse­um or call­ing card, a port­fo­lio of his career to date — includ­ing paint­ings, sculp­tures, tex­tile and archi­tec­tur­al designs, the­ater and adver­tis­ing work, word­plays, man­i­festoes, and reviews he received in many dif­fer­ent lan­guages,” Depero Futur­ista, as described by the reprint pro­jec­t’s web site, also shows off his “skills as a design­er and typo­graph­i­cal wiz­ard.”

These impress as much in 2017 as they must have at the time of the book’s first pub­li­ca­tion nine­ty years ago in Milan, and the bind­ing method remains as dis­tinc­tive: “Com­pris­ing 240 pages, the book is secured by two large indus­tri­al alu­minum bolts that when removed allow for the pages to be removed, rearranged, or exhib­it­ed indi­vid­u­al­ly.”

You may nev­er have heard of Depero, but today’s most respect­ed design­ers cer­tain­ly have, and some of them appear in the pro­jec­t’s Kick­starter pro­mo video giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als not just to the impor­tance of Deper­o’s aes­thet­ic achieve­ments in gen­er­al but The Bolt­ed Book in par­tic­u­lar. It offers a “bridge between the past and the future” in design, an inno­v­a­tive, iron­ic, and play­ful use of the “machine aes­thet­ic,” and evi­dence that “Depero, despite his idio­syn­crasies, was one of the most cre­ative of the Futur­ists.” (It also, of course, holds the title of the first-ever book “bolt­ed by two giant clasps.”) But per­haps the most com­pelling comes from Ste­fan Sag­meis­ter: “This book con­tains the favorite pack­ag­ing of my favorite drink, Cam­pari Soda. For this alone, it should be con­tributed at prop­er­ly — Kick­start­ed.”

Suc­cess­ful­ly Kick­start­ed, the new and 100 per­cent faith­ful reprint of Depero Futur­ista (whose few sur­viv­ing orig­i­nals sit most­ly in insti­tu­tion­al col­lec­tions) should arrive in July of this year. Even if you can’t get your hands on a real, bolt­ed copy just yet, you can view each and every one of its pages on the reprint pro­jec­t’s site. All the bril­liance on dis­play does make one regret that the Futur­ist move­ment end­ed with the tar­nish of Fas­cism. But now that ref­er­ences to the lat­ter seems to have re-entered the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion, maybe the time has come to bring back the vig­or­ous, for­ward-look­ing artis­tic inven­tive­ness of the for­mer as a kind of coun­ter­vail­ing inspi­ra­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & More

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.