WHAT IS RULES FOR DESIGNERS IN THE COMMERCIAL WORLD

1. Never engage in an argument or oppose the person who holds your cheque; he/is probably more concerned about the outcome of your design than yoursefl.

2. Things are not design oriented; your design will firts and foremost be used to deliver a message to the market for your client, before it is an item of personal artistic expression.

3. Communicate patiently with your client. Remember, they are not designers, so use their language to get idea across.

4. I believe there is meaning and a story behind your design and works, but if you don't put effort into telling me, how will i fully understand?

5. respect the deadline; meeting it improves your creadibility and will impact your career develipment.

6. people prefer to talk to someone who is presenable, meaning clean and tidy. stylist doesn;t have to mean unclean and untidy, do you catch my drift?

7. punctuality is important, it is important to anyone who is professional, which includes designers.

8. Never get angry during the price negotiation process, it's just business and nothing to do with insulting your work. there is no reason for them to do so anyway, if you really think about it.

9. your reputation can be proved by business references or winning award. Don;t forget to win more award, because it is what customers believe in.

10. Never, ever, attempt to copy others' design for any reason at all. it is a death sentence to any designer.

By : NWPK 12

The not-so-old adage is pretty simple: “Think globally. Act locally.”

We started using it a few decades ago as an environmental call to

action. But in today’s networked global community, where pollution

drifts and fl ows across countries and continents, can acting locally

really be enough? Yes and no. Doing the right thing in our own

communities is an important step to save and sustain our wild places

and designed spaces. But we also need to gain a wider perspective

and focus on the big picture fl ickering just beyond our

fundamentally narrow view.

Unfortunately, Font won’t give you any tips on sorting recyclables,

but it will suggest another interesting idea: “Think globally. Design

locally.” Most of us are pretty good at the latter, but maybe don’t

have the time or inclination to go global and seek out smaller, more

intimate pockets of design diversity. The problem we run into

as we all reach for success is that increasingly internationalized

commercial communication is distilling messages down to a

common denominator. And as certain logos and images (and the

copycats they spawn) multiply across the world, fi nding inspiration

in our own backyards – or someone else’s – is getting harder.

The force of some projects or architectural Works is based on its historic

fundaments. The recurrence to stylistic elements from the past to create objects

in the present fallows the path to offer a product that takes from the

collective taste or from fashion its commercial viability. Never the less, the

solutions that unite those elements generally are based in a poor knowledge

of the original styles and their contexts, which is why the results become an

arbitrary handle of the stylistic elements and works without aesthetic logic.

In Mexico, the Word “colonial” has become an everyday Word, a word of

a huge and inexact use, applied to refer to the mix of several different

styles, from sites in different continents and created in different

times, those elements have in common the fact that they belong to

the past, mostly from the Spanish style in Mexico from the colony (from

the XVII and XVIII centuries), but that also have the baroque, the neoclassic,

the art nouveau and still the art deco from the early XX Century

Some of the elements are more highlighted tan the others when the intention

is to show the building as if it belongs to a determined style.

This way, when its offered as “colonial”, the highlighted element, even

if it is in a modest way, is the Spanish tile. Its place in facades is strategic,

to look like a symbol of identification with a supposed style.

The “Colonial style”, is a reformulation of the “Californian” style, call

“Spanish revival” in the United States. Fashions as the actual Californian

style are evidence of how an image based in elements from the past

works as a generator of the urban image and, most of all, from the collective

life. The interesting thing about this real state-urban-architectonical

phenomenon, from a cultural point of view, is the fact of that

the ignorance of the historic elements of architecture it has as an answer

a same demand. The taste, more than the technical knowledge, of

course, the determinant factor is the election of a product, like a house.

By : Tonatiuh Castro Silva

Style versus Design
Why understanding the diference is what it’s all about.
By Jefrey Zeldman
My father was a Sunday painter, and his art books played a formative role in my
childhood. Like many kids, I was fascinated by sheer representation. I lost myself
gazing at painstakingly rendered engravings of battling gladiators, picturesque villages,
and Roman ruins at sunrise. I understood art to be synonymous with drawing well.
Te more painstaking the detail, the more lines in the etching or leaves on the tree, the
better the artist in my childish, unformed estimation. Later, I discovered comic books.
Still later, museums. Maxfeld Parrish made me want to take drugs, and also made me
realize I could never be a painter. Paul Klee seemed like a bad artist who couldn’t draw.
Andy Warhol was a cheater because he used assistants.

I do not pretend to understand art today, but I do know that my earliest impressions
had little to do with the nature of art, and everything to do with pure visual sensation.
Like Disneyland and the circus, art was spectacle. But you can only ride the Matterhorn
so many times, and you can only chomp so much cotton candy, before nausea sets in.
From sensation, I graduated to style. Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man. Pop art. Rock, and then
soul, and then punk album covers. I was a Style addict. I could not tell good from bad,
but I knew what was cool.

Many young web designers view their craf the way I used to view pop culture.
It’s cool or it’s crap. Tey mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the
same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you
to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates
stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style
can communicate brand attributes.

It can also convey the designer’s contempt for the subject matter. “Tis is boring, so
here are some stripes and here’s a drop-down menu, so you’ll know I’m better than
this stupid assignment.” On this level, style is an underground language, from one
peer to another, having nothing to do with the site’s visitors or purpose. Indeed, this
stylistic appliqué can interfere with the site’s purpose. Ten the usability gurus step
in, blaming Design for the failings of stylistic fetishism.

Designers driven by Style can succeed if they are lucky enough to pick and choose
projects that beneft from their stylistic obsessions. Most web designers do not have
that luxury. But that doesn’t stop them from applying the stylistic vocabulary of
leading designers to the projects they do have to work on. And so we end up with
e-commerce sites that resemble rave fyers, and informational sites embellished
with occasionally dazzling but more frequently misguided and inappropriate intros.
Te web used to look like a phone book. Now much of it looks like a design portfolio.
In fact, it looks like the design portfolio of 20 well-known designers, whose style
gets copied again and again by young designers who consider themselves disciples.
Distinctions between graphic design and communication design are lost on these
designers. As is the distinction between true style, which evolves from the nature of the
project, and derivative pastiche, which is grafed onto many projects like a third arm.
When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that
paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and
what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a b