This project involves a packaging series for nuvéa, a brand focused on hydration, softness, and sensory beauty. The design seamlessly...

In his book “The Order of Time” Carlo Rovelli notes how we often asks ourselves questions about the fundamental nature of reality such as “What is real?” and “What exists?” But those are bad questions he says. Why? the adjective “real” is ambiguous; it has a thousand meanings. The verb “to exist” has even more. To the question “Does a puppet whose nose grows when he lies exist?” it is possible to reply: “Of course he exists! It’s Pinocchio!”; or: “No, it doesn’t, he’s only part of a fantasy dreamed up by Collodi.” Both answers are correct, because they are using different meanings of the verb “to exist.” He notes how Pinocchio “exists” and is “real” in terms of a literary character, but not so far as any official Italian registry office is concerned. To ask oneself in general “what exists” or “what is real” means only to ask how you would like to use a verb and an adjective. It’s a grammatical question, not a question about nature. The point he goes on to make is that our language has to evolve and adapt with our knowledge. Our grammar developed from our limited experience, before we know what we know now and before we became aware of how imprecise it was in describing the richness of the natural world. Rovelli gives an example of this from a text of antiquity which uses confusing grammar to get at the idea of the Earth having a spherical shape: For those standing below, things above are below, while things below are above, and this is the case around the entire earth. On its face, that is a very confusing sentence full of contradictions. But the idea in there is profound: the Earth is round and direction is relative to the observer. Here’s Rovelli: How is it possible that “things above are below, while things below are above"? It makes no sense…But if we reread it bearing in mind the shape and the physics of the Earth, the phrase becomes clear: its author is saying that for those who live at the Antipodes (in Australia), the direction “upward” is the same as “downward” for those who are in Europe. He is saying, that is, that the direction “above” changes from one place to another on the Earth. He means that what is above with respect to Sydney is below with respect to us. The author of this text, written two thousand years ago, is struggling to adapt his language and his intuition to a new discovery: the fact that the Earth is a sphere, and that “up” and “down” have a meaning that changes between here and there. The terms do not have, as previously thought, a single and universal meaning. So language needs innovation as much as any technological or scientific achievement. Otherwise we find ourselves arguing over questions of deep import in a way that ultimately amounts to merely a question of grammar. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Solid Order is a young fine jewelry brand from China, known for its neutral aesthetic inspired by geometric forms and...

Via Jeremy Keith’s link blog I found this article: Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs. It’s about the disillusionment of designers since the ~2010s. Having ridden that wave myself, there’s a lot of very relatable stuff in there about how design has evolved as a profession. But before we get into the meat of the article, there’s some bangers worth acknowledging, like this: Amazon – the most used website in the world – looks like a bunch of pop-up ads stitched together. lol, burn. Haven’t heard Amazon described this way, but it’s spot on. The hard truth, as pointed out in the article, is this: bad design doesn’t hurt profit margins. Or at least there’s no immediately-obvious, concrete data or correlation that proves this. So most decision makers don’t care. You know what does help profit margins? Spending less money. Cost-savings initiatives. Those always provide a direct, immediate, seemingly-obvious correlation. So those initiatives get prioritized. Fuzzy human-centered initiatives (humanities-adjacent stuff), are difficult to quantitatively (and monetarily) measure. “Let’s stop printing paper and sending people stuff in the mail. It’s expensive. Send them emails instead.” Boom! Money saved for everyone. That’s easier to prioritize than asking, “How do people want us to communicate with them — if at all?” Nobody ever asks that last part. Designers quickly realized that in most settings they serve the business first, customers second — or third, or fourth, or... Shar Biggers [says] designers are “realising that much of their work is being used to push for profit rather than change..” Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. As students, designers are encouraged to make expressive, nuanced work, and rewarded for experimentation and personal voice. The implication, of course, is that this is what a design career will look like: meaningful, impactful, self-directed. But then graduation hits, and many land their first jobs building out endless Google Slides templates or resizing banner ads...no one prepared them for how constrained and compromised most design jobs actually are. Reality hits hard. And here’s the part Jeremy quotes: We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. ​​And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism. Less work advocating for your customers, more work for advocating for yourself and your team within the organization itself. Then the cynicism sets in. We’re not making software for others. We’re making company numbers go up, so our numbers ($$$) will go up. Which reminds me: Stephanie Stimac wrote about reaching 1 year at Igalia and what stood out to me in her post was that she didn’t feel a pressing requirement to create visibility into her work and measure (i.e. prove) its impact. I’ve never been good at that. I’ve seen its necessity, but am just not good at doing it. Being good at building is great. But being good at the optics of building is often better — for you, your career, and your standing in many orgs. Anyway, back to Elizabeth’s article. She notes you’ll burn out trying to monetize something you love — especially when it’s in pursuit of maintaining a cost of living. Once your identity is tied up in the performance, it’s hard to admit when it stops feeling good. It’s a great article and if you’ve been in the design profession of building software, it’s worth your time. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

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