365: AIGA Year in Design 28

A few days ago, I received the 365: AIGA Year in Design 28 in the mail. It said that they had shrunk it down from previous years, but I don’t have any other editions to compare it to, since I didn’t get anything like this last year, even though I was already an AIGA member then (maybe it’s because I had a student membership.) It’s hard to see the scale from the photo, but the page size is 5" x 7".

So this book had design work from two competitions: 365: AIGA Annual Design Competitions, and 50 Books/50 Covers, which I had talked about in a really early Flush post. The section dividers, eight of them for the 365: AIGA Annual Design Competitions, and only one for the 50 Books/50 Covers, were cleverly designed (by Thirst/3st, directed by Rick Valicenti). Each divider spans two spreads, but the left page of the first spread and the right page of the second spread actually make one composition. And the concept of the dividers basically had to do with “me,” where the identity design section divider says “It’s Me,” for example, and the information design section divider says, “Believe Me,” and so on.

What’s also cool is the cardboard packaging was intentionally minimized to go with being green, and, they even spelled out “Recycle Me” (which I just realized right now relates to the section dividers) with teeny holes. I wish they had made that more obvious, though, because I almost missed it before I recycled it.

Visually, I’m not really a fan of the blue-grid sphere motif (see first photo). The sphere/globe reminded me of some cliché 80’s AT&T commercial where it’s all mysterious with the black background and light type or lines. I don’t know what the idea behind the globe thing is.

Flush.

Re: Take Back “Intelligent Design”

I was listening to an episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman yesterday and the guest, Rick Valicenti, mentioned a project that he did called “Intelligent Design: Creating an Evolved Red Vs. Blue State of Mind” which involved the red and blue states with the Coka vs. Pepsi war with binary codes and presentation. I guess that term could be used for situations like this, where both subjects are in the project.

While searching for that project, I also found a related usage of “intelligent design,” where Adobe did some sort of story of Rick Valicenti and his company Thirst. I guess here the term is used to represent computerized visualization and presentation of data.

Flush.