Vancouver, BC

A big, warm, heartfelt Thankyou! to the design community in this fine city for making me feel so welcome at the 2012 Salazar Awards event yesterday. It was a real honour to spend the evening with you… I look forward to hearing from attendees regarding your design ideas and design actions that “aim higher” in helping to unfuck the world and to help solve the problems that our design professions have abetted (often unwittingly).

You can contact me here.

Vancouver, British Columbia

I feel very honored to have been invited to give the keynote talk at the 2012 GDC/BC Salazar Student Awards, the annual juried competition and awards-presentation event held to celebrate BC’c most talented and promising design students and their inspirational work. The event takes place at UBC Robson Square on the evening of Friday, 11 May 2012.

The awards competition is open to all students who are enrolled in BC academically recognized certificate, diploma, or degree graphic design and advertising programs, with work in the categories of Print Design, Interactive, Brand Identity, and Video and Motion. Entry deadline for submissions is 12:00 pm on 30 April 2012. More information can be found at the event website here.

My talk entitled ‘Aim Higher’ builds on presentations I gave in Norway, Taiwan, and Spain last fall—the abstract reads as follows:

Our globalized society is morphing rapidly from an information era into an age of ideas—at the same time, we flounder in the uncertainty of tumultuous political, social, economic, and ecological instability—even as our fragile planet accelerates towards the edge of survival.

Designers have greatly influenced the shaping of the over-consuming, hyper-stimulated, non-sustainable world we are in—suddenly we find ourselves thrust into a leading role as necessary change-drivers. This presentation will address a shift in design’s role and the power it holds, share diverse perspectives from around the globe, and offer a challenge to “think about our thinking.”

Winnipeg, Canada

I was delighted this week to receive a signed copy of my good friend’s new coffee-table book, Mike Grandmaison’s Prairie and Beyond, published by Turnstone Press. There’s a book launch and gallery show of some of Mike’s recent photography work on Monday, 7 May at 19:30 in McNally Robinson’s Prairie Ink Cafe. Reservations are recommended—call Prairie Ink at (204) 975-2659 to reserve a table (or join me at mine).

This stunning book features Mike’s breathtaking photography from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, sorted into chapters; The Grasslands, The Wetlands, The Drylands, The Forests, The Mountains, and The Subarctic. Turnstone had asked me a few months ago to write the book’s back cover text, which appears as follows…

Mike Grandmaison’s passionate quest to capture the essence of this great land and his tireless effort to create meaningful, relevant images of lasting beauty have resulted in a truly remarkable, award-winning body of work. Many share my view that his intimate portraits of the natural world and exquisite landscapes are unexcelled, and I am delighted that he has “turned his lens” to the prairies in this collector’s volume.

The fine gallery of light-filled imagery you’ll discover herein reflect Mike’s exceptional eye and uncanny ability to unearth the photogenic in the “here and now”—he finds resonance and beauty in what many would pass by as being commonplace, and he brings a singular viewpoint to his work that is born of intuition, an innate humility, deep respect for the natural world, and an undying attitude of discovery.

ISBN 978-0-88801-393-4

Montreal, Canada

Best wishes to designer colleagues and creative communicators near and far on World Communication Design Day, which is also the 49th birthday of Icograda. This week I took on a new interim role as Acting Director at the Icograda Secretariat, providing advisory and management services and helping to ensure a smooth transition between outgoing Managing Director Brenda Sanderson’s departure and the inauguration of a new Managing Director in the coming months.

Cheers!

Bob Roach is a designer colleague who often shares his thoughts and views on the GDC Listserv, an active “conversation” amongst several hundred mostly-Canadian (and seemingly mostly west-coast) folks who practice or are interested in graphic design. His “musings” today on the relationship between cold and what it means to be Canadian rang so true that I felt compelled to share. Thanks Bob.

“As you west coasters doubtless know, this historically warm and nearly non-existent winter we southern Ontarians have just ‘sprung’ from has left us all grateful to global warming for lower fuel bills, fewer fender-benders, and a taste of what life on the Pacific coast might feel like. Not surprisingly, real estate prices also rose dramatically (see?).

But maybe because of this unexpected reprieve from inclemency, I’ve begun to speculate and muse more about what ‘traditional’ Canadian winter weather really means to us from a cultural perspective. And even a personal creative one.

As a kid, freezing in low-tech gumboots, on my 2 mile walk uphill (both ways) to school, I used to fume about the injustice of being born in such an obviously-flawed climate. Who’s idea was it to make all of us Canadians, “God’s Frozen People,” anyhow? Why, if I ran the circus…

As I matured—er, that is… as I at least, aged—I began to reflect more about the less discussed benefits of living in a land where every year, we are forced to face the God-awful reality that the god of winter weather, at least judging from the package, clearly was not a benevolent god.

Or was he?

There’s something about seasonally delineated climatic switches that builds an awareness, connection and respect for some quality of our land that goes way beyond the weather-chats and charts that we all small-yak about when things drift out of the comfort of room temp zone.

There’s the visual transformative nature of winter. We sentimentalize it, but nonetheless it’s there, and very powerful in its scale and awesome, often terrifying beauty. But how many of us take the time to really study it for it’s full range of wonder and awe— and respect?

Digging deeper, we get into the whole transformative power that the “cold, lean months” impose upon our social and behavioural structure. As a species that did not evolve in these climes, we become keenly aware of the dependency and better survival odds we owe to such adaptions as community, sharing, safety and all the infrastructure we (and our ancestors) have invested to maintain these supports.

It might even be argued that the classic Canadian winter is one of the strongest influencing factors that forged and distinguishes us as a society with values markedly different from our southern neighbours. It’s hard not to be humbled by the collective power of community if you’ve ever had an engine fail while driving somewhere between Moosejaw and Saskatoon, mid-January, and looked up to see a plow, and a couple of good Samaritan drivers pull over to help. Not sure you could say that kind of feeling is as universal south of the 49th.

I guess I’ve come to view the Canadian winter as the introverted sociopath of seasons. On the surface, it’s inhospitable, cold, and unforgiving. But given the proper time, and mood— it can be dazzling in its generosity of spirit.

Anyhow, that’s my muse for today. If anything, it should teach you to never mix antifreeze with good Scotch.”

.
Poorly Drawn Lines is updated every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s created by Reza Farazmand, who draws comics and writes things.

Thanks to my friend Bob Roach for the link.

Edmonton, Alberta

I have always hated bus-wrap advertising (as well as bus-bench advertising for that matter)… I consider it to be a crass “mental invasion” and an exploitative, unwelcome form of visual pollution. For this reason alone, I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude at the inept “unveiling” of the Alberta Wildrose Party’s campaign bus earlier this week during a pre-election event, what with the “questionable placement” of party leader Danielle Smith’s photo on the side of the vehicle.

As might be imagined, the “far-right” Wildrose Party (who make the Conservatives seem like Liberals, according to some) has more than its share of detractors—this public relations faux pas went viral within hours, sending ripples of mirth across Canada. Below are a few other examples of bus-wrap fails from around the globe…
.

Winnipeg, Canada

Designer colleagues from across the country were commenting today (on the GDC Listserv) about the wonderful old signage that adorns many of the buildings here in the Exchange District (where Circle is situated). I’ve now spent nearly 36 years surrounded by these fading facades… and I have to admit, they really do grow on a person.

Shown above are a few samples from a Flickr collection by Bryan Scott, whose photography I have blogged about previously here and here. All images © Bryan Scott.

Toronto, Canada

“A series of site-specific, portrait-based works that combines the abrasive charm found in the distressed surfaces of modern cities with the intimate familiarity of the prominent features of the human face. As the walls and surfaces of the city define its physical character and spatial identity, the faces of its inhabitants provide the city with its personality, disposition and magnetism. The fusion of these two entities will simultaneously expose the frailty of urban architecture and to a certain extent human existence, while conversely exploring the idea that beauty lies in the scars, wrinkles and blemishes of places we live and people we meet.”

—Dan Bergeron (aka fauxreel)

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Many thanks to the event’s volunteer organizers and all the folks who have expressed interest in more information about the talk I gave at TEDxManitoba on Thursday. Solace House is the super-insulated passive-solar home I designed and built in the woods of eastern Manitoba in 1980, and that I’ve been living in (without a furnace) for the last three decades.

My talk is now on YouTube; you can watch it here.

You can also access most of the visual resources and notes from my talk in a Facebook album entitled ‘Solace House’ that I’ve set up here. (I’m on FB at www.facebook.com/welcome.change ).

(thanks to Richard Ray for the photograph)