The Inksie Art Team is pleased to showcase Brent Couchman’s Print & Production Poster, now available in the Inksie Shop.

We commissioned Mr. Couchman to create a design based on one of the four Inksie Principles:

Inksie engages artists and the public alike in the medium of print. We believe that it is a powerful, communicative platform. We exercise the medium’s strengths through distributing original works of printed art and design to the public.

The print is a three-color serigraph on 18″ × 24″, 80-pound cover. Mr. Couchman chose French Paper’s luscious Hot Fudge from their Pop Tone line. It comes in a limited edition of 100.

Paris-based Xavier Encinas Studios is the art direction and graphic design studio of Xavier Encinas. The studio has worked with numerous high-profile clients, most notably Nike and the Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver. In addition to starting the studio in 2005, Mr Encinas is the design director for biannual art and fashion magazine Under The Influence.

The studio works primarily in print and packaging; their portfolio consists of magazine spreads, business cards, letterheads, promotional items.

Jarrik Muller is an Amsterdam-based designer. His work explores dimensional letter-forms and typography as an object. The Journal interviewed Mr Muller about his latest explorations and his thoughts on type.

You created the 3D typeface for German magazine Jpeople, correct? How did they approach you for the project?

I started this 3D typeface as a personal project in 2006 and finished it in 2009. It started as a 2D typeface; after I added grey tones to it I realized that there might be more than one way of viewing it than a 2D typeface. I began to see the possibilities of a 3D typeface and began experimenting with random words made out of foam board and wood. This resulted in a 3D typeface, constructed out of paper, that is easy to use, reproduce and has plenty of possibilities for design processes. Thanks to Zedz for being a good sparring partner, always there to bounce ideas off.

This is a wrap-up on a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

Unfortunately, Mr Rams was not available for an interview. His thoughts on each principle, reproduced with permission from Vitsoe, come from conversation with Mark Adams, Managing Director of the furniture company.

Based on my experience as a designer, I have distilled the essentials of my design philosophy into ten principles. But these principles cannot be set in stone because, just as technology and culture are constantly developing, so are ideas about good design.

This is the last entry of a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

I am a big fan of Dieter Rams and his ten principles. This last principle sums up all previous nine principles into one:

Find as few solutions for as many problems as possible.

Which is a nearly perfect definition when you talk about design as product design. To understand its theoretic core you need to see that he uses two slightly different notions of design in the same sentence.

Good design is as little design as possible.

With design, as in “Good design,” he refers to design as a form of basic engineering. With design as in “little design” he refers to design as the process of giving shape. (In German, design is Gestaltung, literally: shaping.) If you replace the two notions of design with these more specific definitions, the sentence sounds less paradoxical (and less rhetoric):

Good engineering is giving as little shape as possible.

So good engineers avoid shaping objects? Isn’t engineering just that: giving shape to a concept? Yes, it is: Good engineers focus on shaping the necessary parts of a product. In other words:

In a perfectly engineered product every shape is necessary.

Which, of course, is consistent with the rhetoric in principles two, four and seven. The only way for me to add some opinionated salt to the ten principles – which, to me, read more like a poem than an engineering guideline – is that design also needs a break from total consistency to feel humane and approachable.

Oliver Reichenstein wrote on Rams’s tenth principle, Good design is as little design as possible. Mr Reichenstein is the founder of the design firm Information Architects. Lab Partners, Ryan Meis’ and Sarah Labieniec’s design and illustration studio, created the above illustration based on Mr Reichenstein’s essay. They have designed and illustrated for numerous clients including Monocle, Wired Magazine and HP.

This is entry nine of a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

Designers are not tree-killers or waste-makers. Rather, we are material utilizers, for better or worse. We create experiences, provide information, and promote interactions, whether it be in products, printed materials, or the spaces we inhabit. Rams was quite ahead of his time with his statement, “Good Design is environmentally friendly.” Today, environmentalism is all the rage. You’d be hard pressed to find a brochure, a piece of packaging, or even an iron that lacks a small statement or tiny leaf proclaiming its care for our world. Worse than that, big brands seem to tout their environmental concern – so much that there is almost a backlash to it.

This is entry eight of a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

Taken together, Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design represent an extension of Bauhaus Modernism, which, while still offering useful guidance to practitioners today, has been successfully challenged by the Pop and Post-Modern generation. However, the principle “Good design is thorough down to the last detail” is equally applicable to design work that crosses ideological boundaries. In the context of the other nine principles it is something of a no-brainer. It could be argued that it simply reinforces the other tenets – after all, we need to have ‘something to be thorough in,’ such as ensuring innovation, usefulness, understanding, aesthetic beauty, environmental friendliness…you get the picture, but how else might we think of thoroughness?