my friend Ani sent me a link today to a site of hauntingly beautiful - glass dry plate portraits of criminals from Australia during the 1920's and 30's.

Looking at them I am struck by their sad beauty, and remember reading a remarkable book by Robert Hughes - the notable art critic (the Shock of the New) and writer. The book is entitled The Fatal Shore - it's an epic account of Australia's founding, and seeing these tragic portraits, I can't think of a more accurate title.

Australia is a typical modern paradise - alive with industry, people and all the crude trappings of success, but it was for a very long time, in fact for most of its history by far, a truly unknown land.

Australia, or New South Wales as it was known then, was all the way on the other side of the world - it was as far away from home as anywhere could possibly be. Imagine that.

To those thousands of luckless souls who found themselves cruelly "transported" away from home - chained aboard Her Majesty's grotesque prison ships - it was a truly terrible fate, the stuff of real nightmares, shackled - in a vast, poisonous continental prison.

Class Cancelled Today - Thursday

March 10th. Sick, acke.. ack.. urp.. gorrrlp .. ewww

back tomorrow.

d1 and 2, visit this marvellous site devoted to
contemporary collage.Then, consider the work of
Raol Hausmann, Joseph Cornell and Man Ray,
do please proceed beyond the shallow edges of the wiki...

click image = more bigger

Hey, photo-contest !... of no known pedagogical value .. ..if you can

identify the chap in the boater, you'll win a prize, a brand new white

iPhone - shiny, expensive, cool ....

graciously donated by famed alumni Wesley Yendrys. Ok, you mumbly

hooligans ...Who is it ? and before you ask it's neither one of the

original Village People, nor is it my sister.

(I thought I was being real witty here, thinking there was no actual

white Iphone, hence, I was safe ... but today I was informed by my

students in that terrible tone that one reserves for complete idiots,

that there is in fact, much to my horror, a white Iphone .... You do realize you monkeys, there's no actual prize right ? and Wesley isn't going to actually donate one, you do get that right ? )

>Johnny - Christmas 1976, see ... nothing changes ... nothing.. he used to put cake mix in his hair, and yes, he then would put his head in the oven to harden it , a right nutter, our Johnny

1 und 2, please review this site - as it's full of fascinating

ideas during a time of stupefying mass/global similarity.

It's rather novel, which admittedly seems at least these

days to be, real adventure (no, it's not a novel, its novel)

anyway this is linked ... check it out

digital warriors 2, your product/ branding assignment is

due soon, btw. witty fish references will not be taken kindly

par exemple ... firmly set in the - "... see ... not that much ever really

changes category " .... the aesthetic concerns of the 16Th cent. French

scribe - whose lovely work we see below were essentially the same as

ours today as we typeset our pages. Continuity, legibility, form, balance,

structure, clarity, and line - all held tenuously together by a slavish

attention to the minutiae and the marginalia. two words you need to know, two words that separate the mutton from the lamb ....

here's two images which couldn't be more culturally

distinct or geographically opposed - one's from Sweden

and the other Thailand .... yet inexplicably they bear

such a striking visual sameness. hmmnn ...

I must admit dear reader that I'm perplexed, ... how

could two so diametrically distinct cultures arrive at

such aesthetically similar solutions ? any ideas ? If

anyone dare suggests Aliens, I'll smack you so hard

your dog will fall over !

here is one of my unfinished, layout examples

for the single page project as you've requested

and like everything else in life, click to enlarge !

remember to consider the critical relationship of

type to the columns, the density of the text on

the page, remember the pictures are not the

central aspect, but the type, it's form and

the way it connects all of the constituent parts is.

consider the overall effect, the manner and way

that the elements hold together, balanced, in tune

like a well laid table ......

click on the image to enlarge

this too

czech out this great site, this is linked !

from the department of wow ...." i never saw that coming " the Grammy's finally got something right, with Arcade Fire's, Album of the Year. A Fantastic album, with such a haunting, troubling perfect title video, directed by Spike Jonze ... which is very Terrance Malik btw

THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

digone here's the link for the photoshop tutorials

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

makes sure you review the sections on 1. making selections and 2. using layers, then repeat ! both are found in the Photoshop CS3, in the getting started section ... so much snow aArrRgggGhhh .....

Mark Weaver's make something everyday
project, visit the site , his name is linked

Retrofuturs is the moniker of Stephane Massa-Bidal. Stephane
is a French illustrator that aims to combine the past, present and future
into each piece. This particular series uses Helvetica masked by objects
that have been removed from photographs.

dig it THE JOHNNY CASH PROJECT

please click on the her name for the

extraordinary tale of Vivian Maier

digital one, assignment one. introduce yourselves to each of these

graphic designers/typographers -look carefully at their work, learn

to recognize their styles, and read about their lives and influences.

One of the names is jumbled, mixed up on purpose. If you can deduce

who it is, extra marks ..... she's part of a famous design couple and

an influential company/magazine specializing one might say in

type. due second class. please, no showing off, digital one only !

fyi, cleeek to enlarge

Westvaco, a printing concern, produced a collection of books/journals, meant as inspiration for designers, printers circa 1952. Largely designed by Bradbury Thompson, they're a riot of invention, visual wit, and sophisticated cultural and art historical references.

A wonderful summation of late cubism merging with the Swiss school , one which as well, predicted contemporary design 35 years early.

like totally my best ultra totally most favorite totally

genius new bookcover design by, by David Gee.

the brilliant book covers of David Drummond

I meant to post this for Remembrance/Armistice

day but forgot, it's quite remarkable isn't it?

fyi -you'll find, strangely enough, that should you

provoke the beast by clicking on him, he'll get larger

The Pleasure and Danger of Augmented Reality

Parag and Ayesha Khanna on November 19, 2010

Smart phones. One can’t imagine life without them. Ah, the endless convenience: looking up a restaurant on yelp, finding out a movie’s rating on rotten tomatoes, seeing that cute guy’s profile on Facebook. But to be honest, they’re not really that convenient. Every time you need information, you have to take out your phone, open the browser, type in a search, browse the results … after a while, even a smart phone can seem like a heavy dumb tool. Wouldn’t it be better to just look at a movie poster at the cinema and see its ratings appear next to it? When a beautiful woman talks to you at a party, wouldn’t it be great if her Facebook page with her interests and background pops up on the side too? You needn’t pine in despair: augmented reality will make these scenarios possible for you within a decade.

Augmented reality adds an information layer on top of everything in front of your eyes. How? By making you wear glasses that have tiny video cameras in them. These cameras “see” the world on your behalf and livestream it to the inside of your glasses. You feel like you’re watching the world through transparent glasses, but in fact you’re seeing a movie of the scene in front of your eyes. You could run around the whole day and never notice the difference between wearing these glasses and not wearing them: the glasses show you an exact replica of what your eyes would see. However, the advantage of having glasses is that now you can add software intelligence to them. These glasses can recognize an object in front of your eyes using image recognition software, search the Internet for information on that object and add it to the image display you see. The process of "recognize, search, add" is almost instantaneous.

One can immediately see the value of augmented content. Just imagine being a tourist in Paris and having a quick history of the Eiffel Tower displayed next to it. You’d never need holiday guidebooks like Lonely Planet again! The potential to transform the experience of education is full of promise. Instead of just reading about dinosaurs, your children could actually see small 3D dinosaurs walking on the table in front of them. But having augmented reality also has its cons. If a violent homophobe walks into a bar and his augmented reality glasses identify a person as being gay, it could become a potentially dangerous situation for that person. (To learn more about the latest augmented reality glasses priced at $2000 work, see this article and associated video on Singularity Hub)

Augmented reality adds content to a live streaming video, but it could just as easily remove content as well. This is known as diminished reality, and researchers at the Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany have developed software that can remove objects from live videos. So for example, say you had a massive fight with your ex-boyfriend and never want to see him again. You could program your glasses to remove him from your line of vision. If you walked into a restaurant where he was sitting with his new lover, the software in the glasses would remove him from the scene so that you would never know he was even there. (For technical details on how the software works, see a brief article here). Definitely watch this amazing video on how the software works.

Diminished reality can have many productive applications. Architects can imagine what a site will look like after a building has been demolished, for instance. At the same time, it can also become a destructive tool for spreading apathy in society. “I don’t want to see any homeless people on the street,” you may decide, and the software will keep deleting the poor lying on the sidewalks and you will never feel compelled to do anything about the stark income disparity in your city.

Augmented and diminished realities are going to become commonplace as image recognition becomes more sophisticated, and the circuitry and cameras become smaller and cheaper so that they can be embedded in the eye as contacts and become affordable for everyone. (See thisarticle by Babak A. Parviz whose lab at University of Washington is working on augmented reality contact lenses) These technologies can enrich our lives in a multitude of ways, but they can also forever lock each of us into an alternate reality of our own making.

sorry this is a few days late...

1918 Toronto, Bay and King streets Armistice Day


click for more clarity

Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the end of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning — the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." While this official date to mark the end of the war reflects the ceasefire on the Western Front, hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire.

They had hoped, it was the war to end all wars ...

In some ways the visual Arts and in particular Graphic design, have long played a pivitol role in the mechanisms of War. Propaganda, has always been used - for good or for bad, to articulate a nation's motivations, to define or defile an enemy, or to incite a nation to Peace or to War. here are a few examples from the First World War.

click to enlarge
















for more information about the First World War go to www.firstworldwar.com

‘Music For The People’ art directed and designed byBig Active and featuring

light paintings by Berlin based artist AndreasNicholas Fischer. The eclipse

theme running throughout the imagery creates a grand and jarring visual

statement echoing the spirit of the album’s expansive direction.