Notes Design

John Maeda! John Maeda! hit the stage this morning wearing a super snazzy crumpled silver jacket (or maybe the iron didn't work in his hotel, but no matter: he wears it well). "I'm getting kinda tired of talking about simplicity, actually," he says, "So I'm going to do complexity." I feel a major Maeda crush coming on.

Maeda grew up working in his father's tofu factory and like all creatives, his parents told him not to be creative. Instead he majored in math at MIT, but he just so happened to start working when computers got visual. He became a self-professed "icon master" until he discovered Paul Rand. And realized how bad he was at design. So he went to design school. He started learning how to make his design work move and flail about on the screen and his design teachers told him to stop it. And it was right around then he noticed a now-famous quote from Rand: "A Yale student said, 'I came here to learn how to design, not to learn how to use a computer.' Design schools take heed."