Australian illustrator Sophie Blackall tells the most moving, beautiful, heartbreaking story from her wonderful Missed Connections project.
debbie millman
LATEST
brainpickings.org / brainpicker
Let Me Count The Ways – a hand-drawn love letter from the inimitable Debbie Millman (previously), to complement history’s most beautiful definitions of love.
The important feature that design brings is this bridge between the science and the arts. And I don’t think many people understand the power of design to put these two things together.
[…]
It doesn’t occur to them that everything is design – every building, everything they touch in the world is designed. The world around us is something that somebody has control over and, perhaps, they could have control over.
Legendary British industrial designer and interaction design pioneer Bill Moggridge, who designed the first laptop and who passed away last year, talks to Debbie Millman about innovation, education, human-centered design, and the future of interaction.
Moggridge was remembered earlier this week at a memorial service in New York City.
New episodes of Design Matters are available on iTunes every week and highlights from the archives can be found on SoundCloud.
If you’re confident that what you’re doing is actually 51% original, you can actually get bolder about what the other 49% is.
A wonderful conversation with graphic designer John Flansburgh, half of the indie rock duo They Might Be Giants, on
Fantastic Design Matters interview with design writer and urbanism advocate Alissa Walker, who is on a mission to make Los Angeles – one of the world’s most traffic-laden cities – a mecca for walking and public transportation.
Complement with Walkable City.
Do not be afraid to want a lot.
Things take a long time; practice patience.
Avoid compulsively making things worse.
Finish what you start.
Often people start out by thinking about all the things that they can’t do. Once you take that path, it’s very hard to get off of it. Shoot high and shoot often.
In this interview on The Great Discontent, the inimitable Debbie Millman (who is newly on SoundCloud!) offers five pieces of advice for young people starting out in any creative field – a fine addition to our running record of sage advice.
Complement with Neil Gaiman’s advice on the creative life and treat yourself to Millman’s sublime Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.
It’s not a failure until you stop trying.
[…]
I don’t think you can achieve anything remarkable without some risk. Risk is actually a rather tricky word because humans aren’t wired to tolerate it very much. The reptilian part of our brains wants to keep us safe. Anytime you try something that doesn’t have any certainty associated with it, you’re risking something, but what other way is there to live?
An interview with the brilliant Debbie Millman, whose 5-point advice to young people starting out is to be heeded.
Complement with famous creators on the fear of failure, which might be the greatest psychological impediment to happiness, and see Millman on confronting our self-imposed restrictions.
I suspected that it’s going to be a great break that allows me to step back and think about what I do and for whom I do it. I learned in the first sabbatical that it’s maybe the best strategy… to make sure that what I do remains a calling and doesn’t deteriorate into a job or a career.
[…]
The way the time is dispersed from person to person and from job to job, and I don’t think it matters that much. What matters — what really, really matters — is that time is planned and is kept pretty holy, meaning is not interrupted by anything else.
Celebrate the launch of the fantastic new Sagmeister & Walsh site with Debbie Millman’s equally fantastic Design Matters interview with Stefan Sagmeister, in which the celebrated designer discusses the value of sabbaticals, the danger of adaptation in happiness, and the difference between design and art.
Sagmeister is the author of the excellent Things I have learned in my life so far.
For more on preventing creative purpose from becoming “work,” see how to do what you love and how to avoid work.
Debbie Millman’s fantastic, National-Design-Award-winning Design Matters podcast – remarkable interviews with designers, artists, and cultural leaders - is now on SoundCloud.
For a taste, here is Millman’s interview with the inimitable Roman Mars of 99% Invisible fame:
[To tell a good, authentic story], you basically have to take your sincerity and the things that you feel and deconstruct it and reorder it and circle all the way back to getting back to that original sincerity and the thing that felt in the beginning that compelled you to tell that story. And all of that process is very technical.
Other interviews include Tina Roth Eisenberg, Jessica Hische, Bill Moggridge, Stefan Sagmeister, Erik Spiekermann, and yours truly.
You can also subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes.
The ceaselessly talented Debbie Millman remembers pioneering astronaut Sally Ride, who passed away earlier this year, in a beautiful visual essay for The New York Times. The artwork is made of felt letters painstakingly hand-stitched on felt fabric.
“Memorials are the promises that we make to future generations.”
Jake Barton on the role of museums and memorials in society, an excerpt from Debbie Millman’s fantastic Design Matters podcast.
“Each person has a literature inside them.”
Jake Barton on Debbie Millman’s fantastic Design Matters podcast. Hear the full episode here.
Anaïs Nin on love, hand-lettered by Debbie Millman – hardly gets better than this. Available as a limited-edition print benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women artists and writers.
