Comments on: Designing Optimism

By: p.berkbigler

p.berkbigler — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:43:41 +0000

It’s taken me a bit to get back to this post, but I’ll admit to not knowing a lot about Peche prior to reading the article I highlighted. I only happened onto that article because I was browsing the Complete New Yorker to find content to toss at my students in a layout and design course I’m teaching.

The smidgen of Googling that produced elements of my article simply helped to fill out the fairly full sense of Peche that the New Yorker article offered to begin with. He’s certainly a designer that may be a bit lost in the shuffle of history, but he also clearly has a lot to offer contemporary design sensibilities.

Glad to hear both of you comment on your contributions to optimistic design.

By: PixelHustler

PixelHustler — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:10:31 +0000

I don’t know who that is either. And, I’m sure I looked at the same Google results that you did. Regardless, to answer the second question, I’m rather new to the professional design field. I graduated from college in May of 06. I have a full time position as a designer, but I was really frustrated with my job at the beginning. I was doing alot of what seemed to be busy work. Separating colors out for screen printing, changing copyright information, etc. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the major difference between designing as a job and designing because you like it. I started a new project where I had to design t-shirts for our generic sports line (i.e. not team-branded, just shirts about a specific sport). I made about 15 different designs in 2 days, and realized that the flare, the passion for designing was there again. I like soccer, and I wasn’t held back by many restrictions, so the results were much better than the busy-work stuff I was doing beforehand.

By: ben swift

ben swift — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:14:05 +0000

I’m going to guess that no comments means that I am not the only person to read BADG who has no idea who Peche is. I did a little googling but didn’t see enough to get a real feeling for his work.

To answer the question posed:

when was the last time you created anything that generated delight in yourself or a viewer?

I try to do that all the time. I try to inject humor into most of my work. And I find that most things I create are joyfully useless.