what up from china

They say design is soon movin over to china to be closer to prototyping and mfg, and i'm a little bit of proof. I'm interning for a toy co. here as a designer- along with 2 other americans and a frenchman. They are looking for someone from germany now, and had israeli interns in the past. My israeli supervisors are interested in having a international design team to push and pull different mindsets and methods from around the globe- not to mention the extreme language hurdles. Mandarin is the majority lang. in the office, plus the boss' hebrew, and our english, and a few spurts of german, french, and pig latin. See, our collegues speak often in mandarin and we americans don't have a language that no one else knows. So thus the piglatin. we call it our "secret language". It seems that talking about people in front of them in a diff language is the trend. gar!!

But I digress. What I've found here, is that they know nothing of the design process. I take that back. They know nothing of design. It's completely fustrating trying to work w/o a solid project basis, trying to explain that ideations are not the final mfg'd product, and that ideas are literally ideas. On top of that the vocabulary is all twerked. The boss told my co-worker that he needs to be more "oily".... meaning flexible? i think...its fustratingly funny. Or describing to them that there are differnt types of people/designers for web/graphics/engineering- and that although I can design the website visually, I am not a programmer. "Did you make the new website yet?" I don't even know how to access the server! I just arrange photos on illustrator!

gah!

Check it out...

http://castrobabypuncher.blogspot.com/

clever truths

upclose shot

clever ad

pixelproject

im sure most of you here should have a website. why not post it up here for free...just for fun.
http://www.nonbot.com/pixel-project.aspx

all you have to know is what hex color you want and what link you want it to link to.

Color + Design Blog

This sweet site takes things and boils them down to their color schemes which are downloadable in diff file formats. Cool inspiration, methinks. Imagine giving a preso, "And I was inspired to use these colors by a female parrot fish" [link]

ironic.

Made in the Uk by chrisparry. A signet ring with your fingerprint on it. This one made me smirk. Quite the concept of taking sometihng so personal and unique into a piece of jewelry- ergh signet ring. So literal. Yet has some sense to it. What if, instead of signatures we just used our thumbprints? it'd be much harder to reproduce- but everyone would need better eyes. to identify it i guess. kinda like one of the winners of the global ID card competition.


Ashleigh Caffey, New York