Inspiration

Jony Ive on Communicating Your Values

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There is a brief but insightful interview with Jonathan Ive of Apple in The London Evening Standard today. My favorite part:

Q: Users have become obsessively attached to Apple products. Why?

A: When I used a Mac I had a keen awareness of the values of those who made it. I think people’s emotional connection to our product is that they sense our care, and the amount of work that has gone into creating it.

One of our highest goals as a design agency is to communicate the values of our clients to their audience. When we achieve that, we feel the most successful.

Spring?

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Sure feels like Spring here in Portland today!

The Right Room

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If you look around the room and you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.

Lorne Michaels, as interviewed by Alec Baldwin on Here’s the Thing

Great Art, Mass-Produced

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There are plenty of gems in Water Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, but in particular I love the stories from the days when they were making the Macintosh. Andy Hertzfeld and Bud Tribble’s stories inspire this passage:

[Jobs] once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced.

Or, has Hertzfeld said, “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

The Finesse of Walt Disney

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Neil Gabler’s book on Walt Disney is excellent, and I’ve realized that Disney shares many traits in common with great creative business leaders such as Steve Jobs. In particular, he continually pushed for excellence, at a time when the young animation industry was somewhat of a joke and a novelty.

“In Walt’s estimation, everything that was done had to be executed with a great deal of thought toward finesse in order to make it better.”


A New Color

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The Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colors for its plastic, had more than two thousand shades of beige. “None of them were good enough for Steve,” [Mike] Scott marveled. “He wanted to create a different shade, and I had to stop him.”

Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, Chapter 6

Seeing Themselves

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“It’s the key to great service design: Create an experience that reflects customers, or, better still, an ideal in which customers would like to see themselves.”

Sally Jewell of REI, Design is How It Works, Chapter 5

Charles Eames

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Choose your corner,
pick away at it carefully, intensely
and to the best of your ability
and that way you might change the world.

Instagram As An Artist’s Sketchbook

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For a site that’s all about quick-and-easy photography, Instragram has a surprisingly good blog. A post from this past Saturday, for example, on Instagram As An Artist’s Sketchbook, reminded me that it’s a great place for “doodles and one-off pieces that I might not put anywhere else.”

It’s not at all surprising that so many designers love sharing their inspiration there.

First Thursday / February 2012

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We’ll be heading downtown come rain or shine for First Thursday. Whew, we’ve got a big agenda and are hoping our little one can keep up. If you’re out and about, say hello. A couple stops on our agenda are:

Ruth Lantz’s Shifting Meridian. Reception at the downtown Stumptown from 6 to 8 pm.

Deadstock at the Compound, curated by Jason Sturgill, opens at 7pm. (This piece of art by Ashley Goldberg.)

Finally, a trip downtown wouldn’t be right without swinging by Widen+Kennedy’s 100 $HOW, opening at 5:30.