Top Ten Threads 2008  

Lest ye forget--
Spanky's immortal creation, Di Frutta.

For me
laughably crap replicas:
http://www.designaddict.com/design_addict/forums/index.cfm/fuseaction/th...

there were more of them, but...
there were more of them, but the titles that come to my mind are definitely
Visual Research & the Designer
minimalism or nothingness
🙂

How could
I forget Gianni!

In terms of sheer size, I...
In terms of sheer size, I was amazed at my George Nelson clock thread.

for me it has to be
Clear winner
Fake wegner signature
Followed closely by
Laughably crap replics
Simon

For Me :
minimalism or nothingness
and ditto Simon's two choices 😀

Don't forget
the Gold Eames Chair thread with the patchwork Eggs and the kid in the highchair with his legs sticking through the DCM.

Come to think of it....
The George Nakashima bruhaha was rather entertaining, too.

I liked the minimalism or nothingness thread alot...
but it's easier to tell you which threads I don't like. Aside from the usual visitors that ask for identification of stuff which are really just background noise, I really don't like the past-focused, backwards looking threads. I am far far more interested in design for living now. The threads that blather on and on and on about repro's and knock off's, or the atrocities commited by ebay sellers to classics, don't do much for me.
I love to hear about what people are doing to their homes like LRF's awesome stoneworks project. I also love participating in discussions about a dilemma that someone's trying to solve in their space.
I also really enjoy it when folks like SDR, Koen and DCWilson get all philosophical about the role of design i nthe modern world and whathe future could or should hold.

I never caught
the rocket ship chair thread. Tell me that isn't a patent drawing for a plastic squirt gun (water pistol). . .
They were usually made of colorful transparent plastic. Anybody remember ?

minimalism and nothingness...Some points for another manifesto...
Since so many mentioned "minimalism and nothingness," I went back and reread it. Yes, I think we can be proud of that one. Many contributed substantially. It had a great existential premise. It had all the give and take and surprising twists and turns that characterize the best of the DA experience. And when it twisted off into Pawson and the monastery, it seemed to go global in that the thread began to encompass BOTH the existential and the spiritual. When the discussion of Pawson switched a light on in me, then the thread also became an act of personal growth for me. In turn, I felt I got to know several of you in a much more substantial way in that exchange. And any time I can talk with Koen about something important to design, I feel enriched.
But there is another one that probably stands out even stronger in my memory for shear unexpected mind opening. It perhaps did not matter much to others but it excited something profound and lasting in me. It was Gustavo's "Some points for another manifesto." Everything about what he wrote, the way he wrote, what he had to say, the photo he included, it was just the most unique and exhilarating and liberating thing I have ever read on a screen. As everyone probably knows here, I love word language the way designers love form language. What Gustavo wrote and pictured in that thread was profound in a way I can still not fully explain. All I can say is that he showed me that language could enter a frontier between narrative and design. It could be both in a way that it never occurred to me as being possible. If you go back and read what he wrote it was really quite remarkable.

pt. 2
Poets like Ezra Pound first got the idea, the idea being to take poetry spatial, but never took it very far. Charles Olson and some of the Beats have tried to go farther, at times to take poetry beyond verse, and forms and the musical and the visual into this strange threshold between language and the spatial. Olson, in the Maximus poems, began to call it field poetry. The spatial distribution of the words across the page became part of the structure of the poem. Moving the eye around the page became a poetic act no longer limited to painters. But these attempts never worked for me. They always seemed lifelessly graphical. Still born spatial concepts. Bad poetry. But Gustavo some how, however briefly, transposed language into design. It was and remains positively fucking amazing to me. I tried to riff with him just a bit, but I could not duplictate it. And I can usually at least mimic something adequately. What he did may never matter to anyone but me, but I know that somehow, someway, he designed with language. No one has EVER designed with language that I know of before. Its still one of a dozen or so most amazing things I have ever read...and I have read voluminously. Gustavo, I know English is not your native tongue, and I know sometimes you struggle with it when you use it, but in that threat, you took English to a magnificient place that its never been before or since. It was amazing...a freaking work of art thrown down in front of us that is so far ahead of its time that I cannot believe it. I have great antennae for language. What this thread said is out there in our future. It is coming. This is the ur-poem of something collective and big and looming. I can't tell you how or why, but Gustavo's was the first.
So: I vote a tie between what was one of the longer threads of the year and what was probably one of the shorter threads of the year.

Maverick
Poor Sarah Palin can't win anything. My vote for the sheer fun is "Maxilampus and her vitriolic diatribe on the Sarah Palin thread," the thread that nearly destroyed us. But my top vote is for "laughably crap replicas".