Welcome to our design studio, where you'll never see the light of day but you can bring your dog.
“Just a quick word on our creatives. You’ll notice that several of the designers have stacks and stacks of design books and publications on their desks, their Paul Rands, their Vignellis, and so on. This is great to capture. It makes the designers feel good because it allows them to think that one day they’ll also design an airline logo or redesign a subway wayfinding system or create timeless animated movie credits when in fact we all know that they’ll mostly be creating rubbish animations in Keynote that only sales managers in the Midwest will see, and more importantly, not even give half an eff about.”
A new clothing line designed to help autistic teens get dressed more easily.
“The standard clothing features many of us take for granted — zippers, buttons, even tags — can be a challenge for teens with autism to navigate. That’s why Lauren Thierry, a former CNN anchor, eliminated them entirely when she designed her Independence Day line. The clothes have no front or back, and they’re reversible, in case unsightly stains pop up. There’s also a rechargeable GPS device option in every piece of clothing, in case the child wanders or gets lost.”
Ruins of the future – how John Portman's architecture made Atlanta the backdrop for dystopia.
“Filmmakers use architecture to represent societies that are forming or collapsing, and conceptual structures are too eccentric to symbolise the collective groups that dominate dystopian storylines. Portman’s work fits on film in part because his design philosophy straddles the modernism and brutalism handed down to his generation from predecessors such as Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer, who strove to incorporate functionality and community into their buildings. … All the flesh has been removed and you just see the architectural bones. Portman’s buildings would make very beautiful ruins, because the essence of them is so powerful and so direct.”
“Way, way back in a time before English had branched off from other Germanic languages, plurals were formed with an –i ending. So mouse was mus, and mice was musi. That plural –i pulled the u forward into umlaut. Later, the –i plural ending disappeared and a whole bunch of other sound changes happened, but we are left with the echo of that mutated vowel in mouse/mice, as well as in foot/feet, tooth/teeth, and other irregular pairs.”
Some thoughts on the horrible future of automated cinema.
“A gleaming, brushed-aluminium wood-chipper. At one end, thousands of films are being thrown in. And a copy of Robert McKee’s Story, outlining the principles of screenwriting. And Kurt Vonnegut’s rejected anthropology master’s thesis, The Shapes of Stories. And maybe something like Billy Mernit’s Writing the Romantic Comedy. All thrown in to the chipper. Beneath that shiny casing, whirring happens. Some time later, something ker-plunks out the other end. Not just a finished screenplay, but a completed film. No need for cameras or actors or costly night-time location shooting permits. The machine has written it, directed it, edited it, all using the finest CGI that the near-future has to offer. A random synthesis of all the cinematography and performance and cliché that it’s been fed. Nothing more than an act of pattern recognition, replication and variation.”
That is all.