Saks Fifth Avenue‘s spring marketing campaign stopped me dead in my tracks while flipping through my latest issue of GD USA. Gorgeous communist, Cold War era graphics done by THE Shepard Fairey and Cleon Peterson.

It rocks my design world.

Last semester I was assigned a project intended to test my idea of ethical design. I honestly can’t say this project accomplished it’s goal, because I had no choice as to whether or not I could accept the project. If I didn’t complete it, I didn’t get a grade.

Nonetheless, my campaign was to promote smoking. I really wanted to stay away from the stereostypical “smoking makes you cool and sexy.” My goal was to focus on the campaign and the people in the campaign rather than focus on smoking.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with the end product. Shots of a few of the deliverables below…

I’ve been collecting things to blog about for when I upgrade my version of WordPress, and I’m excited that the day has finally come.

Without futher ado…

Like any good designer, I was tired of my website/blog theme the day I launched it. So, almost one year later, I’m proud to give you a sneak peak of the new one.

At the moment, I am absolutely swamped with school projects and work, so I’m hoping to have a complete website up and running by the end of may.

If you enjoyed the wood theme and aren’t in the mood for lots of beautiful yellow, here you go.

By the way, the image at the top is a little Pantone lovin’, dropped by nerdcore.de

We took pictures this afternoon in my senior exhibition class for the purpose of promoting our show. Each student was to dress in a way that would intrigue people to visit the show.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of something like this earlier.

By RGB6

Found via Twitter, posted by Slash.

The 7 Stages of Design Grief
The design process is fraught with self-doubt and second-guessing. I’m not sure there’s any cure for it, but if you’ve ever stared at a blank page or screen and wondered if this time the creative well has permanently dried, just know that you’re not alone.

1. Anticipation
I can’t wait to get started. This will be my best work ever, I’ll win loads of design awards!

2. Despair
I’m a hack. I have no ideas. This time I’ll be found out for sure.

3. Resentment
Why do I even try? They’ll pick the most conservative concept anyway. And would it kill them to hire a professional photographer?

4. Desperation
Deadline looming. I can’t show them a blank page! Look through design annuals for inspiration, come away with nothing except “orange.”

5. Cynicism
More drop shadows, anyone? How about tilting all those photos at jaunty angles and putting “Polaroid” frames around them? No one’s ever done that before. (Ugh. I hate myself.)

6. Resignation
This sucks, but it’s better than nothing. And now I can justify this invoice. I wonder if I can convince them that orange symbolizes “transition”?

7. Acceptance
The client liked it! Hey, maybe I don’t suck after all. I have been doing this professionally for years.

8. Repeat.

I received this in an email from my brother. Simply amazing.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

By Bruce Mau at Bruce Mau Design, a firm focused on creating an ethical, sustainable future. Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations.

I’ve taken bits a pieces, the original is 43 points long. Read the entire / incomplete manifesto here. You need to read it. It’s beautiful.

• Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
• Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
• Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
• Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
• Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
• Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
• Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
• Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
• Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
• Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
• Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
• Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

Absolutely amazing work on Behance by Allison Wilton for her BFA thesis.

Of her work she says, “Shown above is documentation of the book I designed, printed and bound containing documentation of all my senior thesis work. The book contains images I shot of all 16 artists books I completed in one semester along with writing about each project. I also included pages that were taken from actual monoprints that I used to make the artist books. 17″5″.75″ hardcover bound with aluminum handle.”

And now for a plug for my sister in law who has just started a blog on interior design. Check it out!