Toluu : Thinking for a Living Blog

Thinking for a Living Blog

Thinking for a Living is an ever-growing platform dedicated to the concept of open source design education.

Since our site is named Thinking for a Living™, we thought it was time to share how we do it for ourselves. Case in point, the recent launch of the new Luigi Bormioli site. Designed and developed by BBDK in conjunction with User Experience Strategist Ian Coyle of Superheroes, the story of this site’s development is a perfect example of how, with careful management, everyone can get their wants and needs satisfied when you’re doing the right thing. This project also illustrates how our efforts intersect each other; in this case, BBDK and Thinking for a Living™.

The challenge

One year ago, BBDK was approached by Luigi Bormioli to refine the companies brand position and web presence based on our past experience within the tabletop industry. Luigi Bormioli is renown worldwide as a leading company in the glassmaking industry and was seeking a refined online presence that promotes the company’s product offerings and brand position to a United States audience. The site should reflect the look and feel implemented on the existing Flash site while intro

Objectified TrailerYesterday

Gary Hustwit has posted a trailer for Objectified, a documentary about industrial design – a film about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them. The voices in the trailer belong to Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid.

Bleed does TokyoJanuary 4

I stumbled across this in my email today and I had to share. Here’s a nice animation created by my friends at Bleed for DesignTide. Last year, this piece was shown for an entire week at the crossing at Shibuya Station. The famous Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo is known to be the busiest crossing in the world.

Experimental JetsetDecember 30 2008

Danny, Marieke and Erwin update with a new site for 2009. Experimental Jetset is a small, independent graphic design studio based in Amsterdam, consisting of three persons: Marieke Stolk, Danny van den Dungen and Erwin Brinkers. They have been collaborating as Experimental Jetset since their graduation from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and producing inspiring graphic design ever since.

Playing is SeriousDecember 17 2008

Every once in a while, I marvel at the fact that I can work on an illustration or piece of design, and then share it with an audience halfway across the world within seconds of my finishing it. The internet has made it easier than ever to share the final results of our labors, and we’re still coming to grips with how to apply an order and structure to our boundless visual consumption habits.

In a time when the final result is placed on a pedestal and obsessively consumed, I think it’s wise to discuss process. By putting so much of our emphasis on the product and not on the process, I think we’ve led our younger practitioners to some false assumptions:

Good work is always easy, and is usually the result of a lightning bolt of sudden inspiration.
Everyone that’s successful has some secret bit of information that they’re not sharing.
Everything before the final stroke is magic. If the work isn’t easy, you’re doing something wrong, or you’re just not cut out for this type of thing.

All are, of course, wrong. Often times the best, most “effortless” solutions are the result of an arduous process. No secrets here: good work is hard work, and you burn through a lot of bad ideas to get to the good ones. As Alan Fletcher said, there’s tons of waste when you’re mining gold.

It’s startling to me how