natalia ilyin

Sara Thompson and SuGing Ngouv blew the scalp off Lance Rutter earlier in the day with posters designed for an AIGA-sponsored event featuring Modern Dog.

Earlier this evening, I wrote:
"Rutter seems to believe that influence is plagiarism. "
And Lance responded in the comments below.

I had been reminded of David Lance Goines's dictum:
"Steal with Both Hands."

For the full tempest in a teapot:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30843947&id=1388020992

Today I was looking at a few items on Amazon and scrolled down to see their recommendations for me. Is this what it all boils down to?

1. Beowulf Cliffs Notes

2. Tablescapes: Setting the Table with Style

3. Of Grammatology

4. Williams-Sonoma Dessert Collection

5. Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening,
and Creating New Realities

6. Denise Austin's 3-Week Bootcamp

To tell you the truth, I'm down about it. Not a graphic design book among them.
Makes one question one's life. I wonder what they recommend to Biederbeck. Or Stefan Bucher. Or Art Hanlon. Or Patricia Erskine. Tablescapes?

Whew. What a last minute flurry trying to get on the road again. I just posted the fabulous new student spotlight (on my website's student page.) It's the blog for NowWhat, three Cornish students who have started a music poster design company here in Seattle. More about Seattle, grunge and poster art on the student page, or you can go straight to their blog:

http://nowwhatposters.wordpress.com/

Thomas, our NY Times-reading all-things design eyes and ears in NYC contributes this article about the challenge of type-sensitivity to lighten your Monday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/arts/16iht-design16.html?_r=2&em

I'm honored that Blonde Like Me made the recommended list for "Women Unbound," A Striped Armchair's new reading challenge.

I love a challenge. This one runs from right now until Nov 2010.

http://astripedarmchair.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/women-unbound-a-new-reading-challenge/

It really is worth checking out "A Striped Armchair". Not just to get to the challenge blog, but just generally. It makes me feel surrounded by intelligent friends.

WAX, Twist, Thirst/3ST, The Royal Order of Experience, Xpatriate, The Luxury of Protest, Opolis, Plural, Studio on Fire, Knock Knock, Office, 50,000 feet, Air Conditioned, Blender, Bustbright, Cue, Grow, Hunter Gatherer: When exactly did design firms start to think of themselves as bands?

Current design business names produce a jangle of non-meaning. and, taken as a whole, shore up what "serious business" has thought of us all along: Much as we talk "innovation, strategy and sustainability," the three current buzzwords, we're just a bunch of clever creatives after all.

Designers have ached for years to be taken seriously by mainframe business. And yet, in our attempts to show how "current" we are, we undercut our own value by giving our principals "fun" titles and naming our businesses inpenetrable names. We set ourselves up as the great brand experts, and then marginalize ourselves through the choices we make in self-description.

In our era of political correctness, when racial, sexual and stereotyping “jokes” have finally been swept from the public conversation because of their being disgusting, mean, crass, unenlightened and just plain boring, I find that I must bring to my reader’s attention a small nook of said public conversation that has not yet been tidied: the totally acceptable public humiliation and shaming of those who love what amounts to a small pile of dried and glaceed fruits held together by a winsome batter of butter, flour, eggs and spice. It is time for a new maturity on the part of the pokers and prodders. It is time to stop sending those blasted cards. It is time for the thoughtless, painful, embarrassing jokes to end. I urge you to join me in the ushering in of a renewed era: an era during which fruitcake can take once again its honored place upon the pantry shelf.

Fruitcake. Most Americans today have never tasted a real one. If your idea of fruitcake is something that you can order from a boxed fruit company or buy in a Dollar Store redolent of cheap candy and caramel-corn, well. What can I tell you. Your world is very small. Anything that is more sickly-sweet “cake” than fruit, anything that has small, unidentifiable green things in it, anything that is made by a machine and comes wrapped in plastic is, by definition, not a fruitcake. It’s a pathetic blob of sugars and preservatives aimed at separating the consumer from his dollar by imitating and commodifying That For Which Real Fruitcake Stands.

Fruitcake sums up something iconically American. There is nothing contemporary about its message. Fruitcake is part and parcel with candlelight, the cracking of walnuts, the glass of port, the country dog lying at one’s feet. It accompanies the work-day done, another log on the fire, the reading of "St. Agnes’ Eve." Fruitcake-- the real kind-- symbolizes the keeping of tradition, successful harvest, the idea of comfort, of sweetmeats, feasting, firelight--safety, survival, warmth--home.

Even the cheap fruitcakes in dollar stores, their tins decorated with pictures of sleighs and cottages, offer a desperate nostalgic attempt at these values, at connoting "home". Perhaps that’s why Shoebox Cards finds fruitcake humor so commercially viable. Home being just so, well, over.

It is not without sadness that I recognize that two of my best friends hate fruitcake. I weep for their uneducated palates, their narrow worlds. Through the years, finding their coarse humor unencouraged, they have stopped sending me those damned fruitcake cards. I believe they now send them to each other, finding solace in the companionship of ironic distance.

They’ll never know the secret happiness that fruitcake lovers know—the glow that comes with knowing you've got a carefully wrapped hunk of homemade fruitcake waiting for you. They'll never have that solid fruit-bound assurance that joy will return year after year, in ring form, suitable only for sharing with the truest of companions.