It occured to me that I haven’t once posted a video in this blog, so here’s the lovely Gradations by Daihei Shibata, a short video of hard colors and pointy shapes fading into soothing gradations and graceful curves.
This video was featured in Dezain-ah, an NHK E-Terebi program for children in Japan. From the video’s Vimeo page:
When we gradate the boundaries between two polarized things, the two become smoothly connected. By blurring the various boundaries, we can find complexity, diversity, and richness of information.
As Shibata explained further on his own blog:
Behind the theme of “blurring boundaries,” it started with the curiosity of trying to do the exact opposite of the original function of design such as abstraction and simplification of information (for example, making complicated things easier to use and complex concepts easier to understand). It’s also a little antithesis to my own act of “design.”
Focusing on information that would otherwise be stripped away from the normal design process, I used trial-and-error to find richness and new value, and came up with the idea of making simple things complicated.
Gradations are generally soothing, except for the one about the curry rice. There are people who mix their curry with their rice and those that like a hard boundary between the white rice and the brown stew.
I’m on the latter camp; I want hard boundaries on my plate of curry rice.
