By Michael + January 27th, 2009
It’s often that I find my mind wandering relentlessly from thought to thought as I walk down the street or navigate Photoshop. It’s then that I take those thoughts and prune them for my blog. This is probably going to be a bit more nebulous than most posts. For the past week I’ve neglected my [...]
By Michael + January 13th, 2009
With the new year comes new ventures. Mine shall hence forth be called Theory + Craft. As with the start of this blog I felt just arrogant enough to think that I had something legitimate to contribute to the creative world. The idea is to reintroduce the notion of mid-century design generalization to the masses. [...]
By Michael + December 21st, 2008
A few months back my company Pattern Making Co. decided to enact an indefinite boycott on the iPhone SDK, because our application the Cool O’Meter 3000 was denied live status on the App Store. You can read up on our rationale at the following blog post. When we heard that another App that had also [...]
By Michael + December 20th, 2008
When it comes to designing products a modicum of restraint should be employed to ensure a successful result. Sure there are many features that could be added just because they are possible but I ask you to live strictly by the following cliche - keep it simple stupid. The notion of “just because” has been [...]
By Michael + December 12th, 2008
In the film, A Beautiful Mind, the brilliant yet flawed professor John Nash has an epiphany that he publishes as “Governing Dynamics.” This theory alone has been my obsession for the past few years. Governing dynamics, in it’s blithe simplicity, stipulates that if all participants of a system are interested only in serving their own [...]
By Michael + December 10th, 2008
There was an inside joke in college that if you wanted to occupy a class with nonsense for a good hour all you had to do was raise the following question; What is the difference between art and design? Someone would pose a statement and then another would refute it. If you hit a lull [...]
By Michael + December 4th, 2008
It’s important to glance back to the past once in a while. Design being a pragmatic sport wasn’t always an easy endeavor. Before the invention of rapid prototypers, 3D modeling applications, and straight up magic machines industrial designers had to get down and dirty with their medium. Follow the breadcrumbs and you’ll see how limitations [...]
By Michael + December 1st, 2008
Over the weekend I scoured the internet in search of an appropriate printer to provide printing services for my client’s business cards. What struck me as surprising was the lack of printers with decent brand presentation - websites. Every site that I found looked like it was produced in the 90s (ex. 1 2 3) [...]
By Michael + November 26th, 2008
It was while talking to my lady friend yesterday that I gave some thought to the superstition that riddles the design process. The creative gods as they may be sometimes bless us with the eureka solution right away, other times it can take several hours to days to have a break through. With such a [...]
By Michael + November 14th, 2008
From time to time I do freelance design consulting for companies on the up and up. My services may include branding design work, interaction design, and even creative product development. I’ve been fortunate to have a keen sense for navigating the minefield that is courting potential clients. In this article I’d like to address what [...]
By Michael + November 12th, 2008
Rarely is it the case that you place something out there for mass consumption and it’s received exactly how you had planned it. An essential difference between products that fail and those that flourish are in their abilities to adapt to market opportunities. When your users find a new and innovative way to use your [...]