Category: Design

Barbara Glauber’s Love for “Weird” Types

From discovering type on a Letraset poster to directing typefaces as a graphic designer, Barbara Glauber has had a long and deep love affair with typography. The principal of New York-based Heavy Meta has built up an impressive portfolio of designs defined by an expressive use of typography rooted in the CalArts tradition where she graduated from in 1990. We caught up with the design educator, mom, and also co-founder of celebrity dirt website The Smoking Gun (she designed the original website for her husband Bill Bastone) for a quick interview about her latest projects, type wish list, and her upcoming Typographics talk, “Crashing Vernaculars.”

➜ Read the rest at Typographics TypeLab

A Generations-old Bookbinder Gets a Modern Makeover

A bookbinder—a craftsman who hand-folds, hand-sews, and hand-cuts books—is a dream client for many graphic designers. It’s no wonder creative agency &Larry were excited to work on the rebranding for Bynd Artisan, a new atelier set up by stationery and leather craft goods manufacturer Grandluxe to promote the craft of bookbinding in Singapore.

Despite the client’s wealth of heritage and tradition (they go back three generations), &Larry was careful not to historicize the subject for the contemporary audience. Instead, creative director Larry Peh and his team went the modern and elegant aesthetic, a signature style of &Larry that has won the decade-old studio much acclaim, including most recently, Singapore’s President’s Design Award Designer of the Year in 2014.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Piracy & Design: Rethinking Intellectual Property in the Third Industrial Revolution

Knockoffs, fakes, and counterfeits are the bane of modern industrial design. They are unauthorized copies of designers’ intellectual property. They are the stolen profits of manufacturers. They are the products of piracy: a phenomenon wrecking an industry’s will to innovate and create “original” and “authentic” design. But to consumers, piracy offers affordable goods, diversity of options, and sometimes, even better design. Piracy isn’t black-and-white like a pirate flag, but a nebulous concept whose edges ebb and flow like the waves of the sea. What’s a copy to some is homage to another, what is original today is tomorrow’s evolution, what is piracy to the industry is competition to society.

How will we recognize piracy and intellectual property in industrial design with the rise of digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing? By democratizing access to the means of production, it will become easier for users to copy, remix, and self-repair objects in ways that traditionally infringe upon a designer’s intellectual property. This calls for a need to redefine what piracy means. In response to the digital revolution, some designers and manufacturers have strengthened protection over their designs via the law and technology, while others are opening up access to them, believing that design is a collaborative process that benefits from a community working on it together. Will the rise of open design see an end to piracy?

This thesis examines more closely the relationships between piracy, intellectual property, and industrial design by studying a variety of case studies and interviews with practitioners. Beyond just a legal and economic issue, piracy is a reflection of society’s assumptions about the design process, who a designer is, and what design is for. Piracy is a ghost that will always haunt the world of design.

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Visual Arts in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Design Criticism. 

To find out more, visit the Design Piracy Institute.