Critical Debates in Design: Task 4 - Corporate Social Responsibility

After seeing the Michael Moore "Fahrenheit 9/11", I made a research on good CSR policies of companies around the world. One of the companies, that caught my attention is one of the biggest manufacturers of sport equipment - Nike. 
According to a site, the company sells approximately to 19 000 US retailers, and approximately in 140 countries around the world. The company manufactures in China, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, and as well in the US and Italy. 
It seems that in the past the company had issues with critics such as Naomi Klein. In her widely read book "No Logo" she deals quite extensively with Nike, accusing them of abandoning countries as they developed better pay and employment rights in favour of countries like China, where these are less of a cost. She points to a photo published in 1996 showing children in Pakistan stitching Nike footballs as an example of the use of child labour. Other critics have suggested that Nike should publicise all of its factories, and allow independent inspection to verify conditions there. Any auditing carried out by Nike should be made public. A lot of focus is given to wage rates paid by the company’s suppliers. By and large, audits have found that wage rates are above the national legal minimum, but critics contend that this does not actually constitute a fair living wage.

Workshop

Some photos from our workshops. Creating letters with 2D and 3D techniques and creating an image using the Fibonacci sequence and different colours of paper.

Design Authorship: Inspiration

 As I decided to create a book on identity I got the idea to start the project using me as a starting point. In order to find where we are and who we are - we must first start with identifying ourselves. Everything matters - from the colour of our eyes to the shape of our hands, from the music we like to the friends we have. We must learn to find a way to ourselves, and show our personality and true self. I think, that this project could be used also as physiological perception of ourselves.
This is a video, I found during my critical debates research of a Spanish design studio called Atipo. They used human face to represent typography. The way they combined typography, make-up and photography is really well done. Here is a video making of the process.

Critical Debates in Design: Task 3 - Title Sequence

After seeing the Kyle Cooper talk about his story of making title sequences, I got inspired by his devotion and work and remembered some movies, that impressed me with their original openings. Interesting how I always pay attention to them, and remember some movie just because it's beginning has caught my eye.

One of them is "Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events"  It is designed by  Jamie Caliri  in 2004.




The movie, which is based on a children's book series, tells the story of the three orphans who are sent to live with a distant relative Count Olaf. But the evil and greedy Olaf is after the children's fortune and is secretly concocting a scheme to kill them.  The end credits for this dark Hollywood fairytale - one of the most impressive credit sequences of 2004 - are built around a truly original piece of animation, featuring the animated characters of the children and Olaf.

Critical Debates in Design: Task 2 - Wayfinding System

As we are all familiar with the city, museum and metro sign systems over the world, with small differences in choice of font/colour scheme/positioning, they are all the same. Some are better, than others, probably because certain colours/fonts can interact with people's perception better than others. Nevertheless the environmental sign system, that I found interesting and worthy to present is the system for the Eureka Tower Car Park in Melbourne, Australia. It was created by a Hamburg based designer Axel Peemoeller while working for Emery Studio. 

Inspiration: Minimalistic movie posters

Something interesting, that I found during my research on the internet. Created by MOXYcreative (James Alexander Mathers and Andrew Lau) these unique posters got me inspired with their simplicity and originality. They created 10 posters redesigned according to  different men's style in the movies they chose. The posters actually can be ordered from their website. Moxy Creative House is design agency, specializing in creative direction and development in fashion, and other visually driven industries. Forthermore I got inspired and decided to research a bit more and found some really smart creations. You can find some of them below, and here .