Pablito
coco frío
I would even go beyond that and say it's an esthetic abomination!
cameras and industrial designers
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I would even go beyond that and say it's an esthetic abomination!
aizan
Veteran
the graphic designer yusaku kamekura did the nikon f.
any industrial design history buffs? i'm familiar with the basics, that what we call industrial design started around 1910 with the deutsch werkbund and then the bauhaus (right around when oskar barnack made the ur-leica), but the effort to blend art and industry goes back to the first half of the 1800s (photography invented in 1826), culminating in the great exhibition of 1851 and the begining of the arts and crafts movement.
any industrial design history buffs? i'm familiar with the basics, that what we call industrial design started around 1910 with the deutsch werkbund and then the bauhaus (right around when oskar barnack made the ur-leica), but the effort to blend art and industry goes back to the first half of the 1800s (photography invented in 1826), culminating in the great exhibition of 1851 and the begining of the arts and crafts movement.
Peter_wrote:
Well-known
Luigi Colani, who designed the Canon T90
i think, he did an excellent job and his design was really groundbreaking. you can say, that the design of most modern slr still base somehow on the T90.
i think, he did an excellent job and his design was really groundbreaking. you can say, that the design of most modern slr still base somehow on the T90.
when you compare the T90 with the T70, i think it was a good idea, that canon hired Colani.
Sparrow
Veteran
... well he could, in much the same way you could edit your own copy, do the layout edit the photos and set the type ... or to-days equivalent thereof, do you think that would improve your product?
If the stylist is a ******* from anyone's relationship it's accounts and marketing that I'd be gossiping about. They've been necessary for a successful product for many years now, just look at the way the retro Fuji X-range have sold ... a triumph of style over function you will possibly think, but improved sales trump all other considerations
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Not the same at all. A book or magazine article is not an entity in the same way as (say) a camera. Books and articles are edited for consistency and to fit into a particular format -- page size, house style. As soon as an editor tries to impose his/her own vision, he/she is succumbing to delusions of grandeur. A good editor knows when to stop. A stylist rarely has reason to start.
Car designs are constrained by technical feasibility and (increasingly) the wind tunnel.What does a 'stylist' (as distinct from a designer or engineer) actually contribute? Similar considerations (without the wind tunnel) apply to camera design.
Making a car, camera or pocket knife fit a particular format may indeed be the result of the marketers and publicists, but without the worthless whores and gibbering egomaniacs who are the average stylists, and whose pandering to the lowest denominator appeals to marketers and publicists, we might have a lot more good design and a lot less abysmal (and largely generic) styling.
Cheers.
R.
aizan
Veteran
which cameras have been subject to styling? nikon f3, pentax k-01, fuji x series? in which cases has it made the camera(s) worse or better, and how?
grapejohnson
Well-known
imagine a karl lagerfeld camera
he did design a camera bag
http://www.net-a-porter.com/product/349276
he did design a camera bag
http://www.net-a-porter.com/product/349276
Sparrow
Veteran
... and who decides on the "particular format -- page size, house style"?
The stylist makes a humble Golf into a desirable Audi TT or VW Beetle and by doing that makes a contribution to both margin and sales. Looking at the photos in Joe's pocket knife thread proved to me that styling is ubiquitous in that area too ... they all looked like something GI Joe would carry to me rather than the ageing spear-point I sharpen the odd pencil with
tunalegs
Pretended Artist
The Nikon F was styled by a designer.
Think about that.
If you think there was a mass market camera made after WWII that wasn't sent to some sort of designer, well known or otherwise - you're probably delusional (or thinking of a very ugly camera).
Think about that.
If you think there was a mass market camera made after WWII that wasn't sent to some sort of designer, well known or otherwise - you're probably delusional (or thinking of a very ugly camera).
giellaleafapmu
Well-known
I have the camera and like it quite a bit for the toy shape and the fact that
is not taken seriously by people when one uses it but I really cannot understand what Marc Newson had in mind. There is no command which naturally falls under the finger which supposendly should use it. Like if Newson had unusuallly large, small, long fingers or was supposed to be used by an octopus or maybe he never made a model and grabbed it in the hands. Then I realized that Marc Newson also designed an airplane which doesn't fly, so maybe I should just put the camera on display as a piece of art. Still I like to use it... Or maybe camera design is simply slow. The Nikon F had a wheel out of place and they had to produce it for years before they corrected it in the F2. Olympus lasted two cameras, OM1 and OM2, with some small command and a flash system which would break before it was corrected in the F3 and F4. They got it right completely with the E-1, so much so that they got scared and they went to a much worst design with the E-3...
GLF
Moto-Uno
Moto-Uno
With all the rather derogatory remarks concerning stylist it gives cause to wonder where
the Harley Davidson motorcycle company would be today without them?
And believe me after a few decades of working on them,I can say that there's been a few times I've cursed them,BUT,the product sales kept me employed.
Begs the question ,does that make me a whore of the designers ????
Peter
the Harley Davidson motorcycle company would be today without them?
And believe me after a few decades of working on them,I can say that there's been a few times I've cursed them,BUT,the product sales kept me employed.
Begs the question ,does that make me a whore of the designers ????
Peter
Spicy
Well-known
after YEARS of pondering for long hours at the drawing board, laboring wearily long into the wee hours of the morning, day after day, making no distinction between weekday morning and weekend evening, the designer put the last, perfection-approaching touches on his REVOLUTIONARY new design, and, decreeing it FINALLY ready at long last, unleashed it upon the world...
He had transformed the hideous abomination
into something GLORIOUS, deserving of godlike worship
Nobody had ever seen anything leica it before...
He had transformed the hideous abomination
into something GLORIOUS, deserving of godlike worship
Nobody had ever seen anything leica it before...
stephen.w
Established
There was the Walter de Silva-designed M9 Titanium, and reportedly Jonathan Ive has been commissioned to design a once-off version of the M typ 240 to be auctioned off for charity.
mugent
Well-known
I think the problems occur with designers is when they are designing for designs sake, i.e. the Pentax K-01, the design of this camera was not a means to an end, but a goal in it's own right, like the Hasselblad Lunar, which is why it's gone wrong.
Good design is more than skin deep and the cosmetics that we end up with are almost a side effect of the process.
Good design is more than skin deep and the cosmetics that we end up with are almost a side effect of the process.
sevo
Fokutorendaburando
All relevant post-WW I cameras have had designers control their design - the attention to design (and Bauhaus style self-restricted design at that) was one of the keys to the success of the German camera industry, imitated by everyone else.
What we are talking about is hiring "top brand" external design bureaus to make over the external shape, after the in-house designers had made the camera. A phenomenon that grew fashionable in the late seventies that generally did not do cameras any well. Whether it is the brutalism of Porsche (kind of Bauhaus, but past the red line where form loses any function), the batmobile-like zoomorphism of Colani and Giugiaro (which created cameras as hard to hold on to as a wet eel, once the anti-slip surface coating wore off) or the silly pranks that were sold as "designer edition" cameras, like the Olympus Ecru (the camera equivalent of a Alessi teapot, all funny shape and no function), that type of body styling generally has the same bad taste qualities as hot-rod car tuning...
Sparrow
Veteran
... personaly I think the Neue Sachlichkeit was about as objective as any other style ... that is not very, that classic Wassily B3 chair is as much flummery as Gustav Stickley's adjustable ... and about as difficult to manufacture.
One cannot draw such assertions from the facts, it is much more complex than that.
One cannot draw such assertions from the facts, it is much more complex than that.
sevo
Fokutorendaburando
As far as style goes, to some extent yes, but it is different from most other design traditions in that it generally shunned skeuomorphism and ornamental decoration. That still leaves enough room for non-ornamental decoration (as evident in many of the more famous objects of the style) - but they substituted smooth white panels for the convolved leaf shapes of the preceding decades.
And when it comes to design, beyond style, it also marked the start of large scale usability studies at a scientific level - which did make a lot of difference.
Sparrow
Veteran
... it's years since I studied it but if I recall it started as a response to British industrial design of the late 19c (modernism with a small M), Hartlaub was he called? and was seen domestically as an Anglo-American movement and by the time Neue Sachlichkeit had become the Modernist Bauhaus there was also an equivalent and opposing German Arts and Crafts movement ... which by the nature of its national pedigree survived the national socialists, as the Bauhaus could not.
The British Industrial style was never really recognised in the UK ... thanks largely to the writings of John Ruskin, people often think objects are later European works, if they think about them at all
As I said I don't think one can hang a "Design Purity" sign round any styles' neck really
The British Industrial style was never really recognised in the UK ... thanks largely to the writings of John Ruskin, people often think objects are later European works, if they think about them at all
As I said I don't think one can hang a "Design Purity" sign round any styles' neck really
sevo
Fokutorendaburando
If you mean G.F.Hartlaub (a Bauhaus activist who wrote one of the first books on Bauhaus history), he cited British engineering (from the exposed struts of the Crystal Palace on) as a major influence. The difference might be that the British designers that could be considered part of that "functional" movement thought themselves engineers, and tried to eliminate style without fully considering that their work constituted a new, different style rather than none.
The German Arts and Crafts movement ("Jugendstil" and its successors) preceded Bauhaus by some 25 years, by the way, and was dominant in the twenties - in its early years, Bauhaus was a left-wing fringe movement, it really only made it into a global, almost universally accepted design paradigm though the forced emigration of most of its participants.
Sparrow
Veteran
Yes, I pretty much agree on that assessment ...
... I think it was that movement, the Functionalists is as good a title as any, that prompted the reaction from the Arts and Craft people both here and in the then newly unified and "modern" Germany. I think the Neue Sachlichkeit was just the counter reaction ... like the Expressionism to Impressionism to Pre-Raphaelism
My point was that the output from the Neue Sachlichkeit/Bauhaus was not pure design at the time, those connolised leather and precision bent steel tubes were beyond the industrial production available at the time, the arts and crafts solid wood frames had more purity in the day.
(BTW I personally dislike Morris and Sanderson and the like and reject Ruskin's view of the whole shower)
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