Everything you own … from the car you drive to the kettle that boils your water has been designed by someone. Good and bad design surrounds us and is an intrinsic part of our lives.

So Knitware thought it would be a good idea to talk to someone who could explain why it matters so much.

Cue Dick Powell … one half of the design legends Seymour/Powell and a man on mission to make things better. read full post »

 

 Dick Powell Interview [20:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sir John Hegarty

Sir John Hegarty joins Knitware to talk about the effect of digital technology on brands, craft and design.

Brands in a digital age

I think we live in a very confusing world. Technology is exploding all around us. We don’t need to all go into it, we all understand it. The fact that I’m sitting here blogging is an amazing development in technology and, if you’re a brand, what do you do? How do you navigate through all this stuff? In a way, you can’t. There is no blueprint for saying ‘This is how you do it’ - there isn’t a kind of formula that says, ‘Well you do a TV commercial, from the TV commercial you set up a website, when you’ve set up a website, you start doing that - blogs there, you go into video games…’ It can be a multitude of options.

In the end, when you’re in a world like that all you can really do is simply say, ‘Nobody really knows, so what I’ll do is try and think of better ideas.’ That’s the only guarantee. The guarantee is to say, ‘Actually I might be wrong in choosing that medium, I might be wrong in starting there, I might be wrong in doing that. But what I can do, what I do know, is if I have a great brand idea there’s a greater and better chance that that will communicate and get through,’ - and that’s the only guarantee. read full post »

Quick. Go to Wildcard.jp.org. I don’t even know how I found it. It just appeared in my browser playing that weird music. No idea what it’s about but it’s really lovely to use. I recommend really letting rip.