BLOOM OBJECT
I Help Flower Lovers Grow Up The world is suffused in undifferentiated creative businesses. What the world needs, what high quality clients are willing to pay for, and what our designers want to develop and deliver, is deep expertise. Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. Not price. It is expertise and expertise alone that will set us apart in a meaningful way and allow us to deal with our clients and prospects from a position of power. This body of Precious Projects deals with flowers and their power. What would happen if there was a release of incredible energy, functionality, and beauty into your products, services, and experiences such that you are pulled from the sea of competitors, toward your place in a prestigious domain? Luxury. Identities — which are design systems — contain this promise. It's how luxury markets are captured and held, it's how clients pursue them and stay loyal. Brands that have an addictive quality are hard create and hard to resist. They find and retain buyers. When a client meets the Path of Least Resistance, this is where form and experience design have made buying faster, more satisfying and rewarding than not buying. Email: hbs@howardstein.com Call: 646 703 5023 Click here for more on Bloom Object. You cannot have growth if there's no room for it.
HELIX and VESTEX
BRAND MANNERS: Untwisting Complexity in Life Sciences and Healthcare. The project's first phase was to name and visually brand two new companies. The second phase takes place once construction of a new seven-floor building has been completed and the branding can be continued into the interior architecture in 2019. With extensive experience and degrees in both law and medicine, the founder is uniquely positioned to lead a team that will grow close to one hundred experts in the healthcare and life sciences arena. I wanted to service this focused positioning with a spectacular brand language. After I assembled nearly two-hundred names. HELIX was the most appropriate to the business, described by its tag-line, "Untwisting Complexity In Life Sciences and Healthcare." The name VESTEX was chosen for the second company in the business of venture capital. For the visual element I chose the Coxeter Helix, a tetrahelix with outstanding visual potential and power. Every part of the visual identity uses the element designed using this helix as its source. This is the client's core branding. For HELIX and VESTEX I configured the helices into humanist forms, that would remain faithful to their wide and deep meanings as well as their visual excitement and flair. The helix element is scalable, enabling massive roll-out into architectural applications. What the client has gained is an alphabet — a language — that can scale into a virtually limitless library of ideas and imagery that integrates into environments, services, and products for years to come. (more on Graphic Design Page)
Caught! The Spanish Imperial Eagle
The following is a long-term project, intended to be interactive and multi-platformed, that I am working on when not busy with other things. The scope of it is massive, but it begins quite humbly in these samples: This is an invitation to take part in a planet-sized story. The immense and recent popularity of animals in photographs and videos in social media, suggests a level of global caring and wonder—and humor—of which we were unaware before the internet. Animals make us laugh, at times through our tears. There is a massive call to action to save endangered species. On Twitter alone, dozens of organizations and thousands of individuals are taking part in the effort; financial aid, increased action to halt activities such as poaching and trafficking, destruction of habitat and ecosystems, as well as the closing of zones of demand that require captivity and cruelty. Animals are penetrating the social bloodstream at a speed impossible before the internet, teaching us to open fresh eyes for their value, their brilliance, and beauty. And disappearance. Every dog one meets on the street, it seems, was rescued from a shelter. We join in this mission with illustrations accompanied by short stories from the perspective of the animals.. The working title is Caught! Global issues happen somewhere else. Our environmental crises are too vast for anything we do to be of consequence. Or so we believe. This book of illustrations and short stories offers a small window of possibility. a fingertip of contact, the start of a relationship. This project focuses on letting the animals talk, getting each endangered creature under your skin with their side of the story, based on facts about their daily struggle. In these first-person narratives these creatures have been endowed with self-awareness, and the capacity for reflection. They have names and homes, they have family and friends. The narrative is not militant, political, or activist. It is a socially conscious, one-inch step into a forbidding future. As one goes about coloring, one shares the troubles told in each story, in addition to the meditative restfulness that has popularized coloring. Looking after…
Shouts and Whispers II
The task is not to breed generalists. It is to enable the specialist to make himself and his specialty effective. — Peter Drucker The text above was designed to cover an entire store window, a story-as-graphic. One could look through a few words and see what the store has on display behind the glass. Stand further back and see what appear to be sentences, which will combine with reflections from the outdoors. In our rushing about, these graphics make one pause and consider. Above: Cursevex 50-1 — Very large pattern with a host of feasible technical solutions. Above: BSQ 1041b
Shouts and Whispers
Pure graphics — for projects in progress, standing alone until going to work.
Art and Democracy
What’s still lacking is the interface. We have more information than we have skills to turn it into useful knowledge. It’s a human problem, not for lack of the technology. We are still using computers that require a ton of babysitting and human guidance to get much done with them. We need more background, policy-driven computing. The real goal of the vision is a deep extension of our senses—more knowledge and more control of our world. We want to know more about people, more about the places we’re in and where we are going, and more about the things we have and might acquire. — Mark Rolston Chief Creative Officer, frogdesign I have in mind patterns I have created for years, forming a tissue framework that works in reverse: rather than information design content as a starting point, the idea is to begin with an abstract framework and see how the surface of it, the architectural tissue might better guide an effective interface. Design for twenty tiles:
The Fox and The Hedgehog
Why are so many experts so wrong, yet people keep listening to them? Who really is worth listening to about the future? Philip Tetlock, the author of Expert Political Judgement builds on Isaiah Berlin's characterization of judgment modes into Hedgehogs (who know one big thing) and Foxes (who know many things). Hedgehogs don't notice and don't care when they're wrong; that's why they're so compelling. Foxes learn. Hedgehogs believe in Big Ideas – in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird virtually every interaction in society. Foxes, on the other hand, are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem. Hedgehogs are more easily seduced by clear narratives. Foxes are more data-driven, less willing to stake out strong positions. Hedgehogs: "relate everything to a single central vision …in terms of which all that they say has significance." They over simplify, don’t use diverse data sources. Foxes: "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory….entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal;…..without seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one all-embracing inner vision." One should be able to consider two sides of the argument, think in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, and be able to hold conflicting thoughts. Foxes believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking multitude of approaches toward a problem. They tend to be more tolerant of nuance, uncertainty, complexity, and dissenting opinion. Most innovations and new ideas are found in tiny places where others fail to look. Ignoring the hedgehogs and generally accepted thinking will afford opportunities to see familiar problems in new ways. ~ Nate Silver
Play To Win: Portraits of Power
Portraits of Power is a series about people of all ages in all walks of life. Think she doesn’t have power? Ask her dad.
Gianluigi Buffon Captain and Goalkeeper Italy’s soccer team
Shooting Cataracts
I’m ten days out of my second cataract surgery. My eye scratches, wells with tears.
“Oh, don’t worry, “ said the non-medical world I encountered. ‘My sister was at the movies the same afternoon.” “My uncle went out for lunch straight from the hospital.”
Not me
Eight months before we were satisfied the left eye had settled, the cataract was removed from the right I’ve had a life of eyes.
I want to talk about photography and design, taking photographs daily,
Art is Not About Communication
‘Art is not about communication. Art is not a way of conveying information. It’s a way of understanding information. That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold.’ — James Kochalka
A Word On Templates and Custom Design
I HAD THE OCCASION TO SEE SOME WEB DESIGN WORK clients of mine had commissioned by another designer. The clients appeared quite proud of the work delivered. Until I pointed out that web design templates had been used, that these templates were widely available on the web for free, and that there were thousands from which to choose, using a simple two-word Google search. This revelation caused some dismay and distress. The clients were certain the work done was original, created from the ground up. I felt quite badly for them paying for custom work in good faith, but they were clearly getting ripped off and I felt a responsibility to provide some insight into what I saw. Why did I not just let it go? Because such improper practice by designers damages the design profession. Templates require simple modifications. Some added content, changes to text style and colors. It's working with a kit of parts. Custom work, by contrast, takes time, some depth of humanistic thought, as well as technical expertise. A high bar. Custom design works hard to be compelling, to solve problems — templates do not care. Original custom design can be reconfigured to offer new solutions — templates have no such ambition. Templates have no intention. Custom design marries itself to brand positioning—templates choke the branding program before it draws first breath. It’s like branding behind bars. This is problematic on several fronts. It undermines professional standards designers like myself must maintain, and as importantly, I don’t like seeing people getting ripped off by professionals in any field, whether by lawyers, mechanics, dentists, or designers. We put our trust in a mechanic, that the replaced part has not already done fifty thousand miles in two cars. The free template website is one of those parts. You might be able to drive it for a while, but pretty soon something breaks down. Will your designer be able to make seamless additions building parts indistinguishable from the template? If so, why not build from the beginning? Because one can skip over the hard part and miraculously present something…
Live in Mystery
WE NOW KNOW ENOUGH to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us how to live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse 'negative capability.' He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had 'the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art. But before we can get a fourth culture, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. Every humanist should read Nature. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. That simple idea will be the starting premise of any fourth culture. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science, wrote, 'It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism." — Jonah Lehrer via Maria Popova
Stay Eager
"DO STUFF. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” ― Susan Sontag STARE. IT'S THE WAY TO EDUCATE YOUR EYES. Pry, Listen, Eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. —Walker Evans Coat Rack, Hat & Cap Rack, Mail Rack, Umbrella Rack, Dog Lead Rack. Painted Aluminum.