Designated Designer by Branden Janese

I just turned twenty five years old and one thing I’ve noticed is that I’m officially not young anymore. The most painful reminder is the way the birdbrains in the generation behind mine whisk around the web. The world dominating design of Apple has managed to, by sleek and simple design, birth a generation that literally grew up with a laptop in their laps. Selfies by the age of seven, passwords by ten and full on Internet status by twelve, I can’t keep up with their hairless, fast texting fingers. Gone are the days when the glow in the youth’s eyes was due to innocence, now it’s from the artificial light of an Iphone five.

What’s interesting about design as a profession today is that the triumph of yesterday’s best designer, is the devil that has made anyone with a Macbook and Photoshop, their own designer. Today’s business logos, web layouts and furniture designs are increasingly becoming self-made, when a few decades ago there was a guy for that.

Author Alice Rawsthorn took her slim newspaper column with the International Herald Tribune and turned it into Hello World, a livre filled with two hundred plus pages on the history of design, sprinkled with black and white photographs. Rawsthorn is the esteemed writer of Yves Saint Laurent: A Biography and she uses her creative, chronological writing style freely throughout Hello World. The text reads much like a timeline of events, people and ideas that lead us to the free for all that is design today.

Rawsthorn admits that examples of bad design are frighteningly common (75), including pretentious corporate symbolism and anything that guzzles energy unnecessarily. She shamelessly clears up the confusion between art and design, saying that amongst her research, art=good, design=not so good (108). She makes a great point in challenging the differences, mainly by stating that artists generally have more freedom in their works for personal expression whereas designers carry the burden of delivering a product to fit clients’ expectations.

Why Everyone Wants to do an Apple is one of the most effective chapters, not only giving readers the history and brilliance of Steve Jobs but proving why Apple’s design is still victorious. Hello World quoted Jobs, Let’s make it simple. Really simple […] The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious. Rawsthorn details Job’s commitment to designing a desire, rather than just another product, and points out that at one time in the eighties Jobs refused to add a fan to the machine in fear that it would disturb the computer’s consumer (99).

The success of product design is responsible for the bleak destiny of designers careers. Hello World remind us of when design was most in demand and why we still need that guy. Although I miss the time when penmanship represented your character and there were only four classroom computers and you had to wait your turn to play the Oregon Trail, I can’t deny the beauty of change. Hello World is an inspiration to both designers and ordinary Macbook owners, to utilize thoughts of yesterday to create something superb for the future.

Who would design your dream house?

Tricky to choose but I’d plump for the Japanese architect Junya Ishigama as his work is formally and sensually gorgeous, technically and environmentally ingenious and responsive to its surroundings.

What is your favorite Yves Saint Laurent piece from your personal collection?

I don’t own anything by YSL, but my favourite vintage piece is a pink and white 1967 Pierre Cardin shift dress.

Describe what you predict the modern working world would look like if Steve Jobs choose a different career path.

Greiger. Our computers wouldn’t be quite as elegant to look at, as sleek to the touch or as easy to use, but on the plus side the working world might well be designed more efficiently and responsibly in terms of its ethical and environmental impact.

Most effectively designed city that you have visited? Why?

Chandigarh, the ideal city designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in northern India from 1950 until their deaths in the 1960s, is wonderful, because it was planned and built to offer the best possible quality of life to the people who live and work there. It was designed with both efficiency and desirability in mind with plentiful green spaces. No wonder its nickname is “The City Beautiful”.