

Formally Concerned (about curation) - marban
http://mfa.designcrit.com/formally-concerned/

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schrijver
There’s always ever a hand full of designers that manage to put themselves in
a position where they are having fun appropriating technological change and
shaping the visual language of our culture. Most designers just have to follow
trends. But since, when looking at the past, you see the exciting stuff, you
tend to forget it was probably dull and uninspired for the most part back then
too!

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schrijver
Therefore, less sweeping generalisations and more specific analysis would be
useful.

For example, I have have a bit of a problem with the use of the author’s. ’we’
«Instead of deep processes of discovery, we make minimalistic versions of
movie posters» Well, i don’t do that. I can’t identify with this image of the
designer, even if I know it works for some people as I see these blogs too.

Look at <http://www.manystuff.org/> and <http://dribbble.com/>

Both sites targeted to designers, but obviously not to the same people.

«I am worried that designers as a group are starting to have the wrong
conversations with form.»

Designers as a group don‘t exist. So which kind designers are having what kind
of relationship with form?

That we are surrounded by images made by other people shouldn’t necessary be a
problem: we learn through imitation. So what is different this time around?

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schrijver
I just don’t understand how anyone can be reactionary about our contemporary
world, without also seeing how much possibility all of this offers to re-
imagine visual communication, how little of the potential of open source
technology and methodology is yet being employed in design.

~~~
schrijver
I get super a enthousiastic, when a well known designer like Jonathan Puckey
works with Jürg Lehni to create a vector graphics platform for canvas and
realises it has to be open source and community driven for it to work
<http://paperjs.org/>

Or when people start to put typefaces on Github for collaborative development
<https://github.com/klepas/open-baskerville> (disclaimer: i work on this
project), or when Design collectives start to work with libre toolsets
<http://osp.constantvzw.org/> (disclaimer: i work in this collective)

I just see a really interesting time where the world of software technology is
opening up and becoming more accessible, and designers are finally in the
position to appropriate and make their own all this technological change.

