While on a family vacation over the summer, we took the kids to Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, CA. I was unloading our kids from my trusty Honda Odyssey minivan and noticed a strange sighting: 6 white SUVs parked on the same street. 3 on one side, 3 on the other. At quick glance, I thought […]
Design
Color Trends: “Battleship”
Later in the blog, I want to illustrate a completely unexpected color trend of today, but first let’s dispose of this idea that 1) color trends are constant and that 2) color trends are predictable. They are not. It was easy to point to color trends in previous decades of American culture: turquoise in the […]
The World Agrees: Emojis are the Best / Worst Thing Ever
Today we are overwhelmed with the written word. Websites! Social media! Emails! Apps! Messaging! I’m going to guess an average adult reads 40,000 words each day. All this flying across multiple screens through each minute of the day. This is unlike anything in human history. Because it is impossible to comprehend such a volume of words, we need a new visual language to enhance what we already have. Emojis allow us to quickly grab attention and communicate emotion in a way that we never could before.
10 Fundamental Differences Between Design Gurus and Legit Designers
To become legit at anything takes time, passion, and humility. It means caring about something long after everyone around you has lost interest. It may not bring quick fame or fortune, but your gifts have tremendous potential to mend a society and culture that has battered by greed and vanity.
2020 C8 Corvette, a Harvard Case Study without an Ending
I really didn’t want to write a blog about a Corvette. As a designer, I respect the Corvette’s beginnings, back in the 1950s and 1960s when we were flying into Outer Space and flying down the roads in Space Age cars. But, I came of age in the 1990s, and by then, the Corvette didn’t […]
Understanding Productive Tensions
There’s a beautiful, productive tension between fundamentals vs trends. This tension informs everything that we do here at smithHOUSE, everyday.