What should designers resolve to do differently next year?

What New Year’s resolutions do you think designers should make for 2014?

‘Stop listening to the people who say it can’t be done. The greatest compliment any idea can be given is when a client says “no way – you can’t do that!” When an idea is so bonkers, so batshit crazy that it blows the lid on the meeting and you are shown the door. We creative few are invited to the party because we’ve been to more interesting places, tasted weird things and learnt from a wide and varied catalogue of experiences that saying yes is far more interesting than saying ”actually, do you have it in vanilla?” Change is terrifying. The new can backfire. There is always a reason to say no to a truly innovative thought. But those who can ignore the misery-guts to go on and get the loopy ideas through are the ones that change markets and develop first mover advantages for products, services and organisations. And that’s what we are there to do. Stop worrying about people saying no and start devising ways for them to more easily say yes.’
Simon Manchipp, executive creative director, SomeOne

‘Believe in yourselves because 2014 is your time. Never before has there been so much momentum behind and belief in the role that design can play for the good of our economy, the good of society and just the overall way we live our lives. In 2014 the Design Council will be celebrating 70 years of the best of British design and working with the next generation of designers who can really make that difference. So be bold.’
John Mathers, chief executive, Design Council

‘One thing I’d like to see is more designers disconnecting from the vast number of social networks their work has become attuned to (i.e. Dribble and Instagram to name a few) and become less fixated on comments about their WIPS, sketches and follower counts and get back to basics. That is… more time and energy spent producing better quality work that isn’t inspired by creative vanity or borrowed ideas from other peoples work. Make it. Finish it. Then show it.’
Timba Smits, designer and illustrator

‘Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” One thing we all know about the future is that it will be different. So designers need to resolve to do everything differently. Great design is about challenge, bad or mediocre design is about familiarity, comfort zones and staleness. So bring on 2014 and lets get celebrating every paradigm shift!’
Liz Dunning, partner, Dunning Penney Jones

‘Open-source design is the way forward for 2014. Although the conception of design-based solutions may occur in isolation, it is crucial that specialists take a more collaborative approach to meeting the specifics of a brief. Designers must therefore think more laterally about how to source expertise and input from a number of different departments, to avoid the risk of missing out on key elements that could make a finished solution stronger. Marketing teams are obvious sources of secondary input. However, it is essential that time be taken to consider how more operational parts of a business could contribute ground-level insight, in order to make sure that a design is market ready.’
Simon Ward, chief executive, Holmes & Marchant

‘Be yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. Think inside the box. Listen. Mean what you say. Don’t be trendy. Learn to love words. Challenge yourself. Ask for more money. Don’t procrastinate. Be nice. Practice what you preach. Have an opinion. Don’t panic. Surprise yourself. Experiment. Stop pissing about. Set your sights higher. Push it. Defy convention. Whistle while you work. Have a reason. Tell stories. Steal like an artist. Say what you mean. Trust your instinct. Reinvent the wheel. Stop polishing turds. Hold your nerve. Be honest with yourself. Don’t look back. Be brave. Have fun.’
John Spencer, founder and creative director, Off the Top of My Head

 [Thu, 19 Dec 2013- DesignWeek]

London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks will feature taste and smell

Viewers at London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks will be able to ‘taste and smell’ the display as well as watch it this year, according to the designers.

The 2011 fireworks display, designed by Jack Morton Worldwide

Jack Morton Worldwide is designing the display for the tenth year running and says that this year a new partnership with Vodafone will bring ‘a new level of sensory experience’.
Vodafone, the consultancy says, plans to ‘augment the show’ to add taste and smell experiences.
It is estimated that more than 200 000 people will line the bank of the Thames to watch the display, with millions of people tuning in to see it on BBC One.
Jim Donald, project director of Jack Morton Worldwide, says, ‘It’s a great honour to create a show which year-on-year sets the bar in innovation and creativity.
‘We are delighted that this year, with the newly joined partnership with Vodafone, will take the audience experience to a new sensory level.’

[Fri, 20 Dec 2013 | By Angus Montgomery]

Designing the V&A’s ‘rapid-response collecting’ exhibition

The Victoria & Albert Museum is holding a ‘rapid-response collecting’ exhibition in Shenzhen, China, as part of the Bi-City Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism.

The concept behind the V&A’s rapid-response initiative is that it ‘collects in fast response to important events’.
The museum has already used this principle to exhibit a model of Cody Wilson’s Liberator – the world’s first 3D printed gun – and to buy a pair of Primark jeans in the week that the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which made clothes for Primark, collapsed, killing more than 1000 people.

Development model

The Shenzhen exhibition is the first proper test of this curating practice. For the show, the V&A invited Shenzhen citizens to contribute an object that could tell a story about living in the city today.
Curated by the V&A’s Corinna Gardner and Kieran Long, the exhibitions features objects such as a guqin (a traditional musical instrument), a bra without undewiring and a handbook to the flora and fauna of Shenzhen.

The exhibition design is by Andreas Lechthaler, with graphics by Alexander Boxill.
Violetta Boxill, creative director of Alexander Boxill, says, ‘We needed a system that would be very flexible and concise – we weren’t sure what sort of exhibits we would be working with or even what the quality of the walls in the space would be.

‘Right at the beginning we came up with the idea of using one large surface. We wanted to use a pattern and settled on the idea of a peg board grid, that could accommodate both labels and objects.’
Label carriers were designed to either sit on or hang off the main exhibition table.

Label development model

The metal exhibition signage was produced in the UK and shipped to China for the exhibition, while exhibition labels were designed by Boxill in the UK and printed out in Shenzhen.
Boxill says, ‘We were producing labels right up until the day before the exhibition opened.’

The Shenzhen Biennale runs until 26 January 2014. The V&A says it is planning to use its rapid response collecting technique to create a changing display at its museum in London from May 2014 onwards.

[Fri, 20 Dec 2013 | By Angus Montgomery]

High Art and Home Furnishings

Textiles by Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse and Vorticist artists are to go on show, examining the interaction of home furnishings and high art.

Echarpe No. 1, Matisse

Artist Textiles from Picasso to Warhol recalls a period in the 20^th Century when art could be accessed by the general public for the first time, through the purchasing of clothing and home furnishings.

Belle Fleurs, Chagall

Raoul Dufy, one of the exhibition’s main attractions, was one of the pioneers of producing art on textiles. Dufy first moved into textiles work when he collaborated with French fashion designer Paul Poiret who saw art and fashion as inseparable.

Circus, John Rombola

Producing art on textiles was the first step towards democratising art, presenting the possibility of there being a masterpiece in every home.
Andy Warhol’s work represents this journey’s final destination. His Pop Art movement sought to erase the divide between high art and popular art and make art indistinct from consumer object.

Manhattan, Ruth Reeves

Many artists lament the commercialisation of art that Pop Art ushered in; regardless, this development was a turning point in modern culture and has informed all artistic movements and debates since.
Work from a disparate selection of key artistic movements feature in the exhibition including Vorticism, Fauvism and Surrealism.

Spring Rain, Dali

The exhibition will display over 200 rare patterns by some of the biggest names in art including Dali, Matisse and Moore.
Some pieces, such as work by Miro, Dufy and Picasso, have only recently been discovered and have never been on public display before.

Sun God, Padraig Macmiadhachain

The exhibition shows how artists adapted their styles to suit the medium and conversely how working on textiles revealed brought out new facets of their work. The pieces on display present textiles as a vital component of modern art.
Artist Textiles from Picasso to Warhol runs from 31 January ­ 17 May 2014 at the Fashion and Textiles Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1.

[Thu, 19 Dec 2013 | By Alex Horne]

A look inside the £27m Stonehenge Visitor Centre

Details have emerged on what the £27m Stonehenge Visitor Centre will look like when it opens on Wednesday.

Denton Corker Marshall has designed the centre and Haley Sharpe Design has designed the interpretation of a permanent exhibition as well as temporary exhibition Set In Stone? How Our Ancestors Saw Stonehenge, which is about theories through the ages of who built the landmark.
The DCM-designed building is situated one-and-a-half miles to the west of the stone-circle within the World Heritage Site.

Barrie Marshall, director of Denton Corker Marshall says the centre is ‘sheltered, lightweight, and informal.’
It consists of three pods: one clad in sweet chestnut timber, which houses the museum displays and service facilities; a second clad in glass which houses the educational base, a café and retail facilities; and a third which is also the smallest and clad in zinc provides ticketing and guide facilities.

Source: Peter Cook

They sit under a steel canopy, supported by irregularly placed sloping columns and clad on the underside with zinc metal panels ‘shaped with a complex geometry reflecting local landforms,’ says Marshall.

While DCM has designed the café and shops, Haley Sharpe has designed an interpretation for the Visitor Centre, as well as site signage and way finding, and will work on further interpretation within three Neolithic houses, which are expected to be built next year.
These will give an insight into how inhabitants of the site may have lived almost 5000 years ago.

Source: Peter Cook

At the centre of the exhibition a 360-degree theatre has been designed, which Haley Sharpe designer and director Alisdair Hinshelwood says was the result of visitor focus groups – ‘people want to stand in the centre of the stones.’
As this has not been permitted since the 1970s, because of erosion and damage, the new AV experience allows visitors to be surrounded by a panoramic screen.
The new interpretation design is delineated along three categories – People, Landscape and Meaning.

‘Meaning explores different explanations on the formation of Stonehenge, Landscape is about the wider landscape of Salisbury Plain, and People is about the people who built Stonehenge and who are buried there,’ says Hinshelwood, who adds that the interpretation is made up of ‘media reconstructions, museum material and tactile models.’

The Haley Sharpe design incorporates the display of 300 prehistoric artifacts, displayed and organised with the English Heritage.
There is also a reconstruction of the wooden roller system which is understood by many archeologists to have been used to transport the stones that were quarried from South Wales 240 miles away.

Source: Peter Cook

Jade Design has designed a catalogue for Set in Stone?, the first special exhibition.

Catalogue jacket by Jade Design

[Tue, 17 Dec 2013 | By Tom Banks]

Design Week's review of 2013

Our biggest stories

Daniel Weil’s redesign of the chess set was our most-read story of 2013. Weil based his designs on a Classical theme and the new set made its debut at the World Chess candidates tournament in London in March.

Also among our most-read stories was our article about French type designer Fabien Delage, who claimed the Home Office used his typeface without permission on its controversial anti-immigration van campaign. Design Week broke the story, which was later picked up by the BBC, the Guardian and Huffington Post, among others.

Source: Paul Robertson

And we also reported on Government plans to make deliberate copying of design a criminal offence. The proposed legislation change is still travelling through Parliament.

Our most important analysis

We investigated how organisations such as Xerox, Barclays and even the UK Government are embedding design at a high level to improve performance and to make more money.

Editor’s View of the year

‘Brand42 and the Daily Mail have torn up the web design rule-book, and the results, while not always pretty, are incontrovertibly effective. You might not want to admit to visiting MailOnline, but you have to acknowledge its success.’ We take a look at Mailonline, which won the Grand Prix Award at this year’s Design Business Association Design Effectiveness Awards.

Biggest opportunity

Transport for London opened up its 2D design framework in October, with work covering branding, graphics and digital design. Will you be among those to get your hands on the roundel?

The thing We Liked the most

This brilliant Irish postage stamp, designed by The Stone Twins, features a full 200-word short story, written by Dublin teenager Eoin Moore.

This year’s hottest exhibition

Source: Courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Our favourite exhibition this year wasn’t at the V&A, Barbican or Design Museum, but was Leandro Erlich’s totally surreal Dalston House installation in, you guessed it, Dalston.

Our favourite voxpop response

‘Designers create value and more businesses should recognise this. We excel at Design in this country, it’s an under-exploited competitive advantage, great designers provide a clear vision for a brand and the means to communicate this to the consumer, when we get it right this makes brands magnetic. I was invited to join the management board at Mulberry in 2008 and left in 2012.  Over 5 years turnover tripled and the share price rose from £1.50 to a high of £26.00; that’s what designers can bring to a company at board level.’ Construct founder Georgia Fendley, who was brand director of Mulberry from 2008-12, looks at what designers can bring to companies at board level

(Tue, 17 Dec 2013 | By Angus Montgomery)

Frankenstein, pole dancing bears and the London Underground on ice

Sweden’s Icehotel has returned for its 24^th year complete, with an array of new designs for its selection of suites.

Source: Photo: Christian Strömqvist

Mind the Gap by Marcus Dillistone and Magdalena Åkerström.

Every year the Icehotel is rebuilt from scratch over two months using 1800 tonnes of ice. Each construction uses entirely new designs making each hotel completely unique.
Throughout the year people submit plans to the hotel in the hope of being given a chance to realise their designs in ice. This year there were 200 entries by people wishing to make their (temporary) mark on the sublime Swedish landscape.

Source: Photo: Christian Strömqvist

A face in the Crowd by Mikael

The Swedish Icehotel is the original ice hotel but the concept has spread all over the world. One can even be found tucked away off Regent Street in London.
Fittingly, as you can find an ice hotel in London a piece of London can be found in Sweden’s Icehotel. One of the rooms designed for this year’s hotel features a to-scale reconstruction of a tube carriage.
The Mind The Gap room, designed by British film director Marcus Dillistone, is a tribute to the underground on its 150^th anniversary. 

Source: Photo: Christian Strömqvist

Narcissus by Nina Hedman and Magnus Hedman.

Other suites include the Narcissus in which guests share a room with a huge sculpted head gazing into a mirror, and It’s Alive; a room inspired by Frankenstein’s experiments complete with a light installation that, when activated, sends electric shocks around the room.

Source: Photo: Christian Strömqvist

It’s Alive, by Karl-Johan Ekeroth and Christian Strömqvist.

At the hotel’s centrepiece, the Icebar, guests can enjoy vodka and cocktails served in shot glasses of ice. This year it plays host to a gargantuan Japanese fish sculpture that functions as the bar.
The Icehotel stays open until mid-April. The hotel can be found in the village of Jukkasjärvi in Swedish Lapland.

[Mon, 16 Dec 2013 | By Alex Horne]

What should you buy a designer for Christmas?

hhmm some good ideas but which would be for me?...

'The countdown until the big day is well underway. What present would you buy a designer for Christmas?

‘I’m married to a designer (Violetta Boxill-Roope) so I could just tell you what I’ve got for her? But she’s probably reading this and I don’t want to spoil the surprise! But generally speaking, I would say that designers sometimes have a tendency to live in a bit of a bubble so something very real and grounding is always a good seasonal antidote. A big pie, a spade, some rope or something like that tends to do the trick - if not raise a steel-rimmed bespectacled eyebrow or two.’
Nicolas Roope, co-founder, Poke

‘I would buy a designer a Zolo sculptural playset. I have a plastic version that I bought a fair few years ago but as a gift I would buy Zolo 5, the luxury limited-edition wooden version (I think the first version was wooden in 1986). So much fun and with a weird ’80s/amoeba/bacterial aesthetic and good for curing creative blocks. Also if anyone reading this wants to buy me a present I’d really like one too.’
Louise Evans, aka FeltMistress

‘I would suggest arranging a day out of creative refueling. If you’re in London you could book them an appointment with the librarian to look through the amazing Victorian print samples stored in the archives of the St Bride Library. Or a Ghostsigns tour to see graphic design that has survived out in the streets and reflects changes in society, and end at God’s Own Junkyard, which reopens at the weekend—who can resist a bit of neon?’
Sarah Hyndman, creative director, With Relish

‘Don’t be a Grinch, the best thing to give a hard-working designer for Christmas is a holiday. We close between Christmas and New Year and we always encourage everyone to slob out, eat chocolates and drink too much. Watch bad TV (although we hear Elf is now only on Sky, boo hoo), and only ever leave the house if you’re going to the pub. Give everyone you meet a hug and a glass of mulled wine and just forget about work.’
Matt Utber, founder, The Plant

‘If it was possible to wrap up your friends then that would be that. In my opinion I think it’s invaluable to surround yourself with friends and colleagues that inspire you, that you can talk about your work to and trust to get an honest opinion from.’
Jason Flynn, designer, Ahoy

‘Well if my mum’s reading this I’ll have some KRK Rokit studio monitors. But for the designer in general, I think the best present has to be the gift of a great client, who’s willing to give you total creative freedom, with a decent budget and timeframe. Lord knows how Santa will fit that down the studio’s chimney but I think surely every designer would want that to sink their teeth into over a set of Pantone baubless (they do exist), fixed gear bikeor vinyl toy?’
Gordon Reid, aka MiddleBoop, illustrator

 (Thu, 5 Dec 2013- DesignWeek)

Radiant Orchid is colour of 2014

'Pantone has named 18-3224 Radiant Orchid – ‘a captivating, magical, enigmatic purple’ as its colour for 2014.

Each year the company selects a colour which it says will sum up the 12 months ahead. Pantone says it ‘combs the world’ for influences, looking at films, artworks, technology and sport events.
‘An invitation to innovation, Radiant Orchid encourages expanded creativity and originality, which is increasingly valued in today’s society,’ says Pantone Colour Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman.

She adds, ‘While the 2013 colour of the year, Pantone 17-5641 Emerald, served as a symbol of growth, renewal and prosperity, Radiant Orchid reaches across the colour wheel to intrigue the eye and spark the imagination.’
Pantone says Radiant Orchid has potential for use in beauty and interiors, and is already being used by fashion designers for their 2014 collections.

Eiseman says, ‘An enchanting harmony of fuchsia, purple and pink undertones, Radiant Orchid inspires confidence and emanates great joy, love and health. It is a captivating purple, one that draws you in with its beguiling charm.’

(Thu, 5 Dec 2013 | By Angus Montgomery)