Nothing has been a bigger boon to tracking industry trends than flickr.com. Its thousands of members openly post their photos online, making it a trend seeker’s treasure trove. (more…)

In an effort to keep up with all the blogs I read, I use Google Reader to aggregate and display my faves. The other weekend, I stumbled across the index page of all of the New York Times blogs. I spent the morning looking over them all, selecting the ones I want to keep reading and duly adding them to my Google Reader.

Then a funny thing happened on my way to read more blogs. I realized I don’t ever read a blog once I add it to Google Reader.

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Traditional design processes dictate that logo design be undertaken in a pure, pared-down visual form — creating a logo in black and white. I was taught to design identities in black on white to ensure the mark communicated successfully at its core.  Traditional thinking has it that the mark has to work in black and white first. Also, clients may be unduly swayed to or from a logo if we showed them initial designs in color. If a client hates orange, then that logo, which might be the best at communicating the personality of their brand, has died an early, perhaps unnecessary, death. So, at Go East we continue to start all identity projects working with black on white.

However, I am beginning to question the wisdom of this approach.

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courtesy of TrueisTrue.com

I really admire Mike Cina of You Work For Them because he and his partner have shown that the designer’s vision is his or her  value. A designer’s technological or hand skills pale in comparison to the ability to imagine, to envision and to dream. Art, business, design become powerful when powerfully melded together. True is True is Mike’s digital scrapbook. It’s a great for its simplicity and its power. 

The Rake has a great article on You Work For Them. Props for it.

This year Go East will celebrate its 20th anniversary. We have many, many things to celebrate as 20 years of success in the creative industry is a huge milestone. 

Inevitably, celebrating anniversaries raises the question of developing a logo for the anniversary. Commemoration, celebration, nostalgia and gratitude all arise at this time, as does the desire for a logo or mark that embodies the spirit and emotion of the anniversary. The responsibility for capturing these emotions, as well as determining the creative tone of the upcoming celebrations, falls to the designer designated to create the mark. This is no small challenge. 

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You heard it here. Mushrooms are the hot design trend for Autumn/Winter 2009. Mushroom colors, patterns, shapes and textures—it’s all ripe for the trend picking. We look forward to seeing funghi on all fashion, furniture, stationery and accessories this time next year.

I never thought I would be a Twitter advocate, but in recent weeks I have become a true fan. The bare bones essence of tweets keeps me tapped in just enough to know when and where Gustav was hitting land or which vice presidential candidates was just announced, without having to slog through my normal channels of info. Since I was especially interested in the protests that happened in Saint Paul during the RNC, I followed most of the action in realtime on Twitter. It was the perfect feed of updates and links to make me feel like I was actually in the middle of the action. The raw energy was exciting. And when it was over, so were the tweets. 

Interestingly enough, it seems that big biz feels the same way. Business Week’s recent article, “How Companies Use Twitter” shows how effective a 140-character press release can be.

Inherent to all design solutions is the solving of a problem by changing order. Designers rethink and reorder to get new results. New results are what everyone is looking for: our society, our culture, our community, our clients all want and need new outcomes to situations that baffle them on a daily basis. That is why, inevitably, design is the answer. 

Now when I say design, I mean design in its broadest, most thought provoking sense. I am not only referring to design within specific disciplines. The best designers can and do reconsider and reorder the world—in their minds—all the time. The best designers are engineers, developers, graphic designers, architects, chefs and others, who know the elements involved and know how to re-order everything and anything to get a new result. 

At Go East, “Design Response,” is our internal initiative that encourages everyone to apply their design skills—thinking, solving, reordering, refining, etc.—to the chaos around us. The results have been extraordinary.

Posing the assignment, “Use design to respond to high gas prices” elicits a vast array of online, offline, internal, and community solutions that excite us to push for the big solutions.

• Gourmet gasoline inspires other premium positioning projects.
• Online mileage tracking widgets show how costly each trip to Starbucks really is.
• A social community of lunch-goers coordinates efforts, saves gas and creates sales opportunity for local vendors.
• An imaginary map of what widespread public or alternative transportation in Minnesota could look like inspires conversations about the benefits of mass transportation. 

In each case, design thinking about the project is diverse, visionary and expansive, which is exactly what our culture needs today. And it gives us the opportunity to flex our individual and collective smarts. Nothing is more satisfying than that.