“Talent is the implemented desire to excel at something.”

—Stefan Sagmeister

“The next project has to be what you are aspiring for, not what you’ve just completed—you’ve already done that.”

—Paula Scher

“The quality of the product has much more influence than what the designer does.”

—Stefan Sagmeister

“Graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible.”

—Neville Brody

A great interview with Joey Roth on the creation of the beautifully-designed Sorapot, “a unique, modern teapot. Its architectural shape and simple functionality bring tea’s quiet beauty into sharp focus.”

Joey also designed these insanely cool ceramic speakers:

Debbie Millman: You started your career with a strong sense of “work first, and survival will come.” What advice would you give to students who are just graduating?

Milton Glaser: I often say that the most important thing in those first ten years out of school is not to take a job that will determine your entire life—which happens to a lot of people. They start working for a magazine and they start by assisting, and then they become a junior art director, and then an art director, and ten years later, they’re married and have children. And then the option to change course has been reduced to almost nothing. So you have to be careful.

–from “How to Think Like a Graphic Designer” by Debbie Millman

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it—like Moliere’s M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life—and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises.

— Douglas Martin

iPad. Never have so many embraced a great product for exactly the wrong reasons. Too many designers and publishers see the iPad as an opportunity to do all the wrong things—things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.

In the minds of many, the iPad is like Flash that pays. You can cram traditional publishing content into an overwrought, novelty Flash interface as The New York Times once did with its magazine. You may win a design award but nobody will pay you for that content. Ah, but do the same thing on the iPad instead, and subscribers will pay—maybe not enough to save publishing, but enough to keep the content coming and at least some journalists, editors, and art directors employed…

Everything we’ve learned in the past decade about preferring open standards to proprietary platforms and user-focused interfaces to masturbatory ones is forgotten as designers and publishers once again scramble to create novelty interfaces no one but them cares about.

Amen.

This week, I received a copy of a book I created of photos from Song’s Karaoke Birthday.

I’m very happy with how the print turned out. If you’re interested, you can get one here.

Great concept work on interactive reading experiences by IDEO. I really like the social functionality of the second concept and the geo-location and focus on exploration and discoverability in the third concept. Multimedia ebooks are definitely the perfect platform to explore non-linear narrative experiences.