Creative Inspirations: Kit Hinrichs

In this video, Kit Hinrichs talks about his history with design, along with explaining how important it is to make things clear and understandable as designers. He attended Art Center in Los Angeles, California. During his time in Los Angeles, he met a lot of different people and learned a lot about design and design styles. He later joined the Marine corps, followed by Hinrichs moving to New York. After New York, he moved to San Francisco, where he established Hinrichs Design Associates. He later became a partner with one of the most influential design firms in the US, Pentagram. He finally left Pentagram and established his own studio, Studio Hinrichs in San Francisco. Hinrichs’ career is really caught my eye because it shows his work ethics, even at 68 years old. I also found it interesting how he is a collector, collecting numerous items from figures to flags. All in all, this video really showed me how the love for design can go a long way. One should do design because it is something they love doing; they want to make things better and easier to understand, not just for aesthetic purposes.  

Cropping Images

In this video, John McWade talks about cropping techniques and how they are used to manipulate images in a design. He focuses on the 7 kinds of cropping, which consist of the hard crop, soft crop, split crop, stickout crop, the knockout crop, false crop, and shape crop. Each crop technique is unique and are used according to the feel the designer is trying to illustrate through his design. I’ve used most of these crop techniques at some point in my designs, but I’ve never realized how much I’ve favored some techniques over the others. John showed me how using certain techniques can strengthen a design through simple crops or even radical interesting ones. All in all, this was a great, informative video that explained these techniques very well.

Image Crop

Borders

Positive/Negative

Seeing Color

Michael Bierut Talk Recap

I found this video to be one of the best design videos I've seen thus far. Not only was the video very informative, but I really enjoyed how he went into details about specific projects he worked on. One of my favorite things he talked about was the MAD logo he created. He made this logo he was really excited about, but his clients were not. He stated that he pushed this idea of a blocky single line logo (A+D) for a long time, all because he liked it. He finally gave up and decided to go back to the drawing board, even though he invested a lot of time and energy on the previous logo. He finally came up with a simple solution, a logo created of simple shapes, circles and squares, that spelled out MAD. He not only stopped at the logo, but created a full alphabet using these simple shapes. He created a brand, something the company can use anywhere and people would recognized as being MAD. This really caught my eye because it shows how sometimes you have to move on from the design you like the most and start all over. It also shows that a solution could be really simple, yet effective. Another item I liked from this video was the idea of how important type can be in design. During his New York Transportation project, Micheal remade the Helvetica typeface to Helvetica DOT. The only changes made were the dots on top of the lower case i's. This shows how such a small point has such an important meaning. Details matter. I enjoyed how he used the typeface and its shoulders, descenders, and other parts, to make his icons. This gives a congruent feeling when the icons and type are next to each other. All in all I really liked this video and how Micheal presented his work. I gave me inspiration and a different outlook when looking at my own personal projects.