arts

I went to the Seed 3 Conference in Chicago. This is the first in a series of posts about the presentations I saw there.

Carlos Segura is the founder of Chicago-based Segura Inc and runs a whole host of websites and commercial interests centering around his design expertise and passions. At Seed 3, Carlos took the crowd through a history of his businesses and explained the importance of respecting your audience, picking your clients, and doing work you can be proud of.

On seeing things differently

Carlos started out his talk by showing off some pictures of sewer covers. In New York City, he pointed out that the manhole covers are made in China and India. In Los Angeles, he noticed that they also came from India. In Chicago, they were produced in Mexico. These are the sorts of things he believes are important to notice, the details that slip past casual view.

“Communication that doesn’t take a chance, doesn’t stand a chance.” - Carlos Segura

The Segura Inc. businesses

Carlos is involved in a lot of sites/businesses:

• t26 - a type foundry. On t26, font designers showcase and sell their wares. The site was designed to market the type as well as the designer and early on in its history, they used to create music videos to go along with each font, a nifty idea that helped people understand the attitude and feeling that the write fonts could convey.
• 5inch.com - a site dedicated to CD packaging and printing.
  

  “Delivers the delivery vehicle for CDs.” - Carlos Segura

• CarType - a site for collecting design details (logos, emblems, typography, industrial art) of cars
• Segura Inc. - This is the overarching company and contract design firm. Carlos walked the crowd through various design projects such as working with fashion retailers on tags that live beyond purchase, comic book covers that didn’t look like comics, creating topographical pamphlets and brand identity for Rockshox, and working with Corbis to use their photos to tell stories through imaginative croppings and side by side presentation.

Words to work by: What I took away from this presenter

• “Respect for the audience is what will get you work from clients.” Nobody wants to work with a firm that’s “too cool” for their customers. Treat the customers as special and with respect.
• Similarly, “talk to the audience, not the client.” If the client has an issue, tell them “I’m not designing for you.”
• “Build relationships with clients that choose to listen to you.” Life is far too short to work with people that waste your time or make work feel unrewarding.
• “Be unique with what you’re asked to do.” When clients request your work, give them something more than what they were expecting.
• Only produce things that you can be proud of.
• “We create what we think the client needs (not just what they’re asking for).”
• “Cause and effect. The one choice we have the power to make - what we do with our time - is the choice we fail at most frequently. You have to be willing to accept the byproduct of being fired.”

Additional Stuff:

• BusinessPOV video interview of Carlos Segura out in front of the conference

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

A cute short from Hillman Curtis about two friends and an exercise to bring them closer. Does it work?

[Via Coudal Partners]

Imagine standing in a completely vacant Shibuya Station admiring the lines: up, down, left, right. Beautiful. An opportunity that doesn’t exist in the everyday. It has the atmosphere of one of those hidden spaces accessed through Haruki Murakami’s fiction.

Does anyone have an idea of how to take a screenshot of a flash tour like this? I really love some of the frames I’ve been able to create by exploring and I’d like to take a hack at drawing a few later but I don’t know how to capture the image.

Two outstanding pieces of Chilean architecture with some striking similarities.

• Spa Las palmas de Leyda / Cristobal Valenzuela Haeussler - A beautiful Chilean Spa retreat. Natural slatted wood exterior outside of the windows provides privacy while still allowing light. Straight lines, clean, floor to ceiling windows.

  

• House on the road to Farellones / Max Nuñez & Bernardo Valdes - Another Chilean beauty, this one a house. Concrete and glass captures a scenic view of Santiago. I absolutely love this one.

  

Riding the elevator up on the way to work today, one of our QA engineers mentioned to me that he had no idea how our team was going to hit a deliverable for Monday. Our devo site is in too much flux to be certain that we will stabilize it in time. Shrugging, I channeled Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush), the hapless theatre owner from “Shakespeare in Love” and stated “it’s a mystery.” That’s when somebody else on the elevator chimed in and said, “what you need is deus ex machina.”

Boy do I work with some smart people.

“Deus ex machina” means “God from a machine” but it derives from the world of Greek tragedy (especially referring to the plays of Euripides) and refers to the use of a cheap plot device to resolve difficult situations in the drama. The Wikipedia article uses the 1978 “Superman” movie as a more modern day example. Remember when Lois Lane gets buried in her car and dies only to have Superman reverse time by flying around the globe so fast that time reversed? Superman had never previously unveiled this talent and I’m not so sure he ever used it again, it was just a bit too convenient. That’s deus ex machina.

Aristotle’s “Poetics” has this to say about the use of deus ex machina:

It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina - as in the Medea, or in the return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The deus ex machina should be employed only for events external to the drama - for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element the Oedipus of Sophocles.

Music and corresponding video made entirely from Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Amazing and actually catchy. I want to hear a remix of “Apocalypse Now.” Reznor?

And while we’re on the subject…

This article was too good to pass up. Does the punishment fit the crime? Will it work?

Brandon Keim recounts the essence of a talk by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran given at the World Science Festival.

The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.

George Saunders has written an entertaining short piece for the New Yorker about an Amazon nun and a supposedly gay preacher he catches French kissing in the sacristy. If you don’t question your religious practitioner, it might be time to start.

Now here she was, French-kissing Father X, while Father X pinned her against the black-topped counter, one leg riding up between hers. Something about their position suggested a mother bird feeding her young. She was reaching down to give him something; he was reaching up to take it. Behind them, aghast, sat the holy implements.

Father X, it had been rumored, was gay. He was pale, slight.

Hereby that rumor was refuted.

Or at least complicated.

If you’ve been waiting for the price to lower on Kindle before you pick one up, wait no longer. Amazon has just dropped the price from $399 to $359 (and it still ships to you free via 2-day air). It may be a while before you see any further price drops…

I picked up a Kindle about a month and a half ago. While I have not yet written a comprehensive review, suffice it to say that I love mine so far. I’ve read a couple of books, peruse the New York Times daily, and have downloaded a couple of samples from new authors I may try out. It’s all integrated quite nicely and reading is very pleasant.

As I sat organizing hundreds of books at home yesterday, I actually decided to get rid of the vast majority of them since I could always get them for the Kindle; inexpensive much of the time and free for others. Any book that’s part of the public domain, and most of the older classics are lumped in that category, I can get for free via Project Gutenberg.

Any of you folks planning on purchasing a Kindle? What’s it going to take for you to switch?