Looking for something fun to do on Thursday, April 12 at 7pm? Come on over to the Apple Store, Lincoln Park. We’ll be sharing our creative process and lessons learned in our evolution from being employees to freelancers to business owners. We’ll also reveal what it’s like working with your spouse, how we present our ideas to clients and more. These events are always free and open to the public. Make a night of it—bring a friend and grab some dinner nearby. Let us know if you plan on going through our Facebook event. We hope to see you there!
Over the weekend, we watched a documentary on Charles and Ray Eames called Eames: The Architect and the Painter (available on Netflix). It gives great insight into who they were as individuals and as a couple. Kyle and I have always known them for their furniture, but didn’t realize they had done other things like reinventing the splint for wounded soldiers during WWII and making films — one film being the Power Of Ten:
Do you remember this? We had no idea they did this film. It immediately brought us back to Junior High and watching it in class. I hadn’t seen it since. And look! The picnic people are right by Soldier Field.
This documentary is really inspiring for us. We never thought we’d be a husband and wife team at work… it just happened. So seeing another husband and wife team like Charles and Ray just hits close to home for us. The film lets you in to their relationship, which had its good times and bad, but he needed her just as much as she needed him. Together, they produced brilliant work that was both structurally sound and aesthetically beautiful.
Watching the film reminded me of British-born Andrew Byrom (above, with his wife and son), another thinker and designer who is greatly influenced by the Eames. Andrew creates experimental typefaces out of things like Band-Aids, drinking straws, steel railings, neon lights and kites. He’ll see something while out in the world and it will remind him of a letter… like when he looks at a chair, he sees a lowercase h. At some point he wonders what the rest of this alphabet will look like. And so begins his process of designing the typeface and usually building a 3D form to go along with it.
To hear more about Andrew’s process, check out his TED talk at UCLA last year. To get a glimpse of his more personal side, this interview is a great read. I was lucky to have Andrew as a design professor during his 6-year stint at NIU. He now splits his time between teaching at California State University, creating experimental typefaces, designing for various clients and playing with his 3 sons.
Thanks to Ohn Ho for sharing the interview with Andrew Byrom
We’ve been invited to speak at the next Creative Mornings in Chicago on January 27th! We’re excited, nervous and surprised all at the same time. We’ve been thinking about what to say and thought it’d be best to ask you – What do you want to know about Knoed? It can be anything, but try to keep it PG :). Use the hash tag #knoedtalk or send us an email at info@knoed.com and we’ll answer the 3 most asked questions in our talk. Sign up begins on January 23rd at 11am here.
I thought this video was really well done and worth sharing. I’ve texted while driving a few times, but seeing this has completely changed my mind about it. It’s sad, but inspires change.
The Window Seat is a place to sit back and observe the world around us. This site is a collection of things that inspire us, affect us in some way, or simply make us smile.
The Window Seat is curated by Knoed Creative, a Chicago-based design studio.
