French graphic designers Julien Sens and Nicolas Damiens have transformed the handwriting of musicians David Bowie, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg into free-to-use typefaces.

Not surprisingly (but unfortunately!), they had to shut it down:

We’ve launched the SongwritersFonts project, a series of typefaces created from famous songwriters’ handwritings, as a design project. The unique purpose of this was to inspire musicians and the next generation of songwriters to put their imagination at work. But, the unexpected success of this project went a bit too far… We have been contacted by intellectual property rights owners, and are sad to announce that we have to shut down this website because of legal issues. We’re sorry to have to say goodbye.

Via www.expressiveproductdesign....

TECHNOLOGY – Makes possibilities
DESIGN – Makes solutions
ART – Makes questions
LEADERSHIP – Makes actions

Above is grabbed from John Maeda TEDGlobal 2012 talk, titled How art, technology and design inform creative leaders.

Via @jamescullen123

Via @timoni

An amazing interview with David Bowie from 1999 where he (among other things) talks about the impact of the digital transformation. I honestly think that his thoughts and perspective are still very progressive today — 18 years later.

View clip here: youtu.be/LaHcOs7mhfU

There are these kinds of guys that wanted to go home 5 o’clock and their interest in what you were doing doesn’t exceed the normal demands of the day for them. And those guys never last. Because when you’re trying to push the boundaries on things and when you’re moving into different types of frontiers, you need to be surrounded by people who really believe in what you’re doing.

Above quote is by Bruce Springsteen. It’s his way of rationalising why they spend three weeks to get the drum sound he wanted for the song Born To Run.

I’m sure a lot of people find spending three weeks working on a drum sound for just one song a tad excessive — and maybe even deems Bruce as self-indulgent or obsessive.

I personally wish our work cultures cherished “slow work” higher and spend more time on nailing details than celebrating mediocre outcome that often comes with the illusion of speedy progress. Which, has nothing to do with working more hours/day, rather excepting that great things are difficult and requires time, resilience, patient and stamina.

Below is an extract from an interview with David Fincher.

I found it striking. In my profession — as a maker and shaper of digital experiences — I constantly need to balance and navigate ambiguity. Would have been all right if it was only my own relationship to it; but more often than not the challenge is to counter balance others discomfort that arise from it.

Designing an experience — especially those without obvious physical rewards such as a motion picture, music or digital services — is in many ways the art of: projecting oneself into the future; imagining an emotional response; go through the process of shaping this fantasy into a transmittable form; in the act of doing so learn, adjust and revise; and finally let it go for others to experience. As a friend of mine once said, “It’s a long and arduous journey of contradiction and vagueness”.

You can have all the best intentions but there are things you can’t plan for or make technology do. You should really embrace this and design the experience in a way that people can fill in the blanks and make it their own.

There is a fallacy in how one design a motion picture experience. I think the fallacy is that it’s a wind-tunnel tested, extremely technical, scientific experiment. That really isn’t the case. There is a lot of technical knowledge and a lot of technical expertise that goes into making a film, but remember the ultimate takeaway of a film is emotional.

You just saw a dream and either it affected you or didn’t. Louis B. Mayer once said: “the beauty of the movie business is that the only think that the buyer gets for their cost of emission is a memory.” A memory is evocative, because they work on an emotional plane.

You can have all the best intentions. You can work backwards from an impeccable blue print to hopefully bring in an audience into this place where they go, “oh! I never imagine that was going to happen”, or, “oh my god that’s so funny” , or, “that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen”. You are working towards that; but they are going to have to meet you half way. That’s the thing you can never plan on.

So when you’re interfacing with a sound designer like Ren Klyce, an editor like Kirk Baxter or cinematographer like Jeff Cronenweth, you are not talking about people who are measuring things in terms of decibel, foot-candles or feet and frames — you are talking about people who are projecting themselves into an experience and imagining an emotional response.

If that’s the intention, then the idea of saying, “OK, by 18 feet and 6 frames we need to have X” doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense to talk to Trent Reznor that way. You kind of have to say to him, “I hoping that this is where the other shoe drops”, “I’m hoping that this is where people begin to go; ohhhh he’s not such a good guy, he might actually be a murderer”.

That’s the discussion you’re having with the people I’m lucky enough to work with; what do you want to feel; how do we bring people that we have never meet to the same place all at the same time; people from different places in their lives and different places in the world. […]

We are talking about taking people to a place where they get emotionally hit by the same technical presentation, and they feel the same thing in unison.

Hear the entire interview here:
http://värvet.se/varvetpod/7-david-fincher/

“Cornell’s Soundgarden were the first to achieve real fame, playing their first London gig in 1989, one year before Nirvana released their first album and Pearl Jam were even formed. Cornell captured the attention of the mainstream media, and the mainstream crowd, and was the first grunger to make workers’ clothes look cool. Soon, big boots and flannel shirts, used to protect poor Seattle natives from the harsh climate, would become the trademark of a generation looking inward, not outward.”

I’m a big fan of the Seattle music scene. It began in the 90′ with Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden; who inspired me to learn how to play guitar and find a new depth to music. Living in Seattle and finding out that Chris Cornell passed away connected me with both gratefulness and sadness. Thank you Chris for being a pivot.

Above photo is of the Black Sun sculpture in Volunteer Park, Seattle, said to be the inspiration of the Soundgarden song Black Hole Sun.

I personally believe what we (as in makers of digital systems and services) have a lot to learn from complex systems, chaos theory and dynamical systems (e.g solving problems for large living dynamic organisms); rather than traditional design practices and factory mentality (constructing objects).

Below quote from the presentation (the last 50 second of the video) for sure taps into how to conduct a quality driven and healthy design process to solve a problem:

“The question is: when we are working on any particular problem, we eventually will adopt a particular formalism for describing a particular set of equations; which will be diffraction equations, statistics, networks or something. How do we avoid that?

The answer is: because we have circumstances where the assumptions need not apply, we constantly have to challenge our assumption to understand what is the right representation for the problem and that ultimately is the key to getting the right answer. In the traditional view we simply always wrote down the same assumptions and we took them for granted. Now we have to make sure the assumptions hold and that will enable us to do the right thing.”