Do yourself a favour, check out the astounding

work of Brad Holland. his name is linked.

Especially those of you uber-hipsters, who think

you're too cool for school .... dare you to look !

From the Heatherwick Studio in England, the UK

Pavilion at the Shanghai Worlds Fair, 2010.

yes, it's a building. click the image to enlarge, it's amazing

D1 & D2 both, please watch this very short, interesting video

commemorating 40 years of editorial illustration at the, link

Palindrome

This new sign for the V&A is wonderful. The museum commissioned

Troika to make a sign for the tunnel connecting the museum and South

Kensington tube station, and it’s bloody gorgeous.

It’s a kinetic sculpture of rotating parts of the museum’s logo (in itself

a wonderful thing, by Alan Fletcher in 1989) so that it reads at first from one side, and then fromthe other. I did wonder at first whether the V& A on Fletcher’s original logo were actually rotationally symmetric, and no, of course they aren’t, but for a sculpture like this the alteration to make them work like that isn’t at all noticeable.

Go and watch the video (or of course, visit the museum instead of baking yourself in Cuba or Miami) to see it in action. It’s so simple and yet so clever, whoever came up with the idea must have been quite pleased with themselves, and justifiably so.

"Typografische Monatsblätter" is a Swiss

business magazine, dealing with questions of

printing and typography. Its frequency was

monthly formerly (hence the name!) and it is

still in print up to date – now on a bimonthly

basis.

"Typografische Monatsblätter" were founded

1933. Since 1952 they are published together

with "Schweizer Grafische Mitteilungen" and

"Revue Suisse de l’Imprimerie". TM discusses

questions of the developping printing technology,

also – and for designers all over the world even

more interesting: Swiss designers and especially

Swiss type designers were regularly writing in

the magazine.

The famous type-criticisms of Max Caflisch

were released here, Jan Tschichold or Adrian

Frutiger were repeatedly writing for TM. Best

known Swiss designers were contributing for

decades: Wolfgang Weingart, Jost Hochuli,

Helmut Schmidt, Hans Rudolf Lutz, Emil

Ruder – just to name a few.

D2, don't forget - Project One, Magazine layout/mockup, Project Two -

product design and branding, Next, project Three - Film Title design .....

get to work or start running...

not your helvetica

Design like your life depends on it.

Because if you're doing it right, it does. from http://twitter.com/AngryPaulRand

this weeks movie of de week. I'm workin on my own bass bike

as we speak. My hip hop buddy -DJ Wesley Bowtie Gansta is helping

me wit de tunes, big up Brooklyn.

Peter Saville designs new England football jersey































Given the team's pathetic performance over the summer it's perhaps not
the best time to be asking long-suffering fans to shell out £49.99 ($80cdn) for
yet another new kit. In the accompanying press blurb, manufacturers Umbro
say that the design "takes its inspiration from the more formal classic shirts
of England’s footballing past. Umbro has developed a new longer, more
open neckline for the shirt, building on the square neckline that was designed
for the away shirt but allowing additional movement across the chest,
keeping its shape especially when a player is running."

Saville's contribution is somewhat minimalist. A graphic of multicoloured
crosses sits on the shoulders which is, apparently, "evocative of the basting
stitches synonymous with bespoke tailoring". They are also meant to represent
the diverse nature of modern English society, which should give the Daily Mail
plenty to get its teeth into.

England's footballers will be wearing a new home shirt for their match against
Bulgaria on September 3, (4 -0) for UK ya ! ) won in their Saville sweats.






















To those complaining that he "did nothing", Saville's brief from Umbro was
strictly confined. He was asked to suggest some ways in which colour could be
incorporated into the design of the shirt (the basic look and shape of which
had already been determined) while still keeping it predominantly white.

To those of you complaining that the design won't be visible from the stands
... that's kind of the point. It looks all white from a distance, then the detail is
revealed close-up.

Saville's proposal was that the pattern of crosses would cover the entire shirt
and not just the shoulders.

A number of different geometric forms were considered by Saville and Paul Barnes,
who worked with him on the project, based on the micro dots and other symbols
that some menswear designers have been incorporating into their fabrics. Among
the shapes considered was a plus sign, which Barnes then suggested could be
transformed into the St George's cross.

Digital II - this is why (see video & links) we are going to make a collage ....

Bewilderingly, it's commonly overlooked and viewed as a simplistic, or clumsy way of working - but in actual fact - it's a fantastically creative tool, and a great method to make images, just ask Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters.

Collage, unlike so many other ways of working today - has at at its heart - improvisation - a kind of visual jazz - where you don't really know which way it will go or where it will end.

Make sure you make an effort to bring interesting source materials to class, as I will notice.


Capitu - Abertura from Carlos Bêla on Vimeo.

Credit Where Credits Are Due: The Present

It’s hard to imagine why these and the other exceptional title sequences have never been recognized by the Oscars. We would like to urge the academy to create this much-needed category. In the meantime, we’ve gone ahead and selected the title sequences that should have been nominated for 2008. During the nomination process, we happened upon an interesting trend: filmmakers, more and more, are plunging viewers right into the action and then ending with elaborate title sequences, which serve as epilogues or bonus tracks. Without further ado — or a badly scripted joke — our nominees for Best Achievement in Film Title Design:













 

a wonderfully funny *- motion typography video - click on the X

for the link - courtesy of the divine Miss Z - warning *xrated language !

my new schedule and here's the

link to my class outlines should

you need it - and like everything

else in nature, click to enlarge

Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood throughout the Day Inferred from Twitter

The scientific study "Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood throughout the Day Inferred from Twitter" [ccs.neu.edu] illustrates the varying mood in the U.S., as inferred after analyzing over 300 million tweets that were created over the course of the day.

Various density-preserving cartograms and a time-animated video were produced to capture important large-scale trends.

The researchers analyzed all public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009, and filtered those whom orginated from a US location and those that contained words included in the psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words, resulting in a collection of 300 million tweets.

Through a natural language processing algorithm called Sentiment Analysis, each tweet was assigned a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. Out of the resulting data, they then calculated the average mood score of all the users living in a state hour by hour which formed the basis of a series of time-varying mood maps.

One of the interesting patterns shows how the West Coast mood follows the same pattern as the East, with a 3-hour time-zone delay, indicating that Each Coast experiences the same time-dependent swings. Weekends were observed to be happier than weekdays.

The peak in the overall tweet mood score is observed on Sunday mornings, and the trough occurs on Thursday evenings.

This is the nexus where informatics flourishes - where graphic design and statistical information collide. On a more philosophical note - is

there something here that is rather unsettling about all of this, something which is setting my radar off ? hmmmn ....

clique aux muy enlargo los imagio

Charles Joseph Minard’s famed carte figurative of Napoleon’s march to Moscow is considered by most to be one of the finest maps ever produced. It’s elegant, it’s clever, and it’s clear. Edward Tufte said that it “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” It's also a sad terrible glimpse of Napoleon's vanity and the indifferent, featureless cruelty of War if you can see inside the lines. Have a look, it's all there .....

Pencil sculptures: miniature masterpieces carved into graphite by Dalton Ghetti

There’s a boot. And a church. And a bust of Elvis. And “Chain,” in which the middle of a pencil has been transformed into a 23-link chain. He has about a dozen works that have been framed and almost as many waiting to be mounted for display. Last year, after two and half years, he finished a line of 26 pencils, with each letter of the alphabet carved into the tip. His current projects include a handsaw and a single rice-grain-sized teardrop for every victim of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

charmingly cheeky crisps - "like crisps but better !!"

For all of you suffering summer brain freeze -

John Cage tells us that not knowing where to

begin is a common form of paralysis.

His advice: begin anywhere !

another "wish I'd thought of that" design by Stéphane Massa-Bidel

Tobias Wong, Witty Designer and Conceptual Artist, Dies at 35 (sadly)

interesting work, do visit, this is linked

do have a wonderful summer - and if you go a traveling, try to remember to

take both shoes this time, and always, always, always, try to wear clean elephants, in case your in an accident. So be safe, and remember to play nice ! btw.. if any of you monkeys can name all of the paintings in order in this video, all , not like many, or nearly sorta almost all, but all, as in every single one ... well, you'll win a shiny new iPad ! Mr. Wesley Yendreys, has graciously offered to donate a brand spanking new iPad to the winner. (yes, that is his real name)

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

digital two 2010 inflagranti delicto

so good, you'll look twice. if you can explain it,

it's extra marks dude

courtesy de le féeriquely brilliant Ms.Taline

Perhaps one of the last things made by hand, (ok, maybe I'm being a trifle dramatic here) but these works definitely required a pre-digital mind, an imagination as it were.

Homo Hablis, the first tool user, required both invention and adventure, things were made by hand and over time.

These artists had both the curiosity and the independence of mind to shape the work by hand, and that shows all the way through.

Especially in the way that the work doesn't look like everything else.

So much we do today is virtually indistinguishable from all else, and it just appears utterly familiar. A numbing visual homogeneity, featurelessly ubiquitous, a faux hip, strategically outré sameness.

Commonality is fine for sheep in a meadow, or bishops at sea, but don't you think your work should at least appear to be as different as the artists which deign to made it ?

In today's instant digital world we seem to have somehow lost the inclination to and the joy of manually creating , nor do we any longer appear to have the patience to do things by hand, or evidently, the skills to.

Handmade objects seem kinda sentimental, fetishistic and clumsy, as if amateurish and unreliable.......

It's remarkable really that the last video entry - Peter Gabriel's visionary "Sledgehammer" video, which is from 1986, still shines as brightly today as it did upon its release. Our poor, assailed species (homo ineptus, I made that bit up) descending deeper into a sticky mass brand idolatry - rife with instant/disposable personality or brand cults, and subject to the inexorable merging of the synthetic/digital life-substitutes like twitter, farcebook, pornorama etc.

Will we forget how to make things ourselves ?, or slightly more sinister - will we lose the desire to?

I mean, dudes, do you think there's such an overwhelming distinction between your umbilical reliance/attachment to your texting devices, than between Neo's symbiotically hardwired connection to the unknown Matrix ?

You can giggle all you want, but it's not that much of a literary absurdity really, there are far too many parallels to be drawn to discount the idea out of hand.

Next time you twitter the entire known universe detailing your absurdly banal daily events, ask yourself this - how different is it really from that - to the grotesque imaginarium of Neo and his band of digital monkeys ?

This summer, do something actually radical, use your hands, make a birdhouse, and just maybe you'll save your soul.

Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages

Designer Steven Heller traces the evolution of the tiny symbols for
each Olympic sport since their appearance in 1936. the image is linked

click moi and read or else !

Design Montreal Open House 2010 Once again, Montreal designers and architects open their doors to the public. As usual, visitors will have the opportunity to meet the winners of national and international design competitions in their work surroundings. Architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, industrial designers, interior designers, landscape architects and urban planners will show off their latest achievements using models, drawings, photos, video screenings, interactive installations and more. The event offers a diverse line-up of programming, including some activities that are brand-new this year. Members of the public will be able to soak up the sights and sounds of the city thanks to themed walking itineraries offered as podcasts, explore the works of emerging designers, enjoy exhibitions by graduating students in the various design and architecture disciplines, and visit art and design landmarks in Montreal. In addition, a wide range of family-friendly events is planned, with entertaining and educational activities for young people aged 10 and up. oops..... sorry this is so late

put down that game console and get outside, here's the link

dear hipsters, you don't really need that new skate deck, or infra-red
iPad, or even Halo 14, just get an good axe. All the cool kids have them.
click the big X punk ....

“You can’t help wondering about some experts in the future examining trace remains of a pristine Best Made ax, smartly decorated, never used.
Will such a thing tell a story about just what it was that we worshiped?”

- Rob Walker, The New York Times

Even the seemingly mundane, the lowly web site loader - can be full of ingenuity and wit. click the pic & dig it, thanks to Kirill.

Dig1 - considering type as a matter of form rather than text.

This letterpress poster by Cameron Moll was handcrafted character
by character over the course of roughly 100 hours. Characters from the
Bickham Script Pro, Engravers MT, and Epic typeface families form the
edifice featured in the artwork, the Salt Lake Temple.

Each poster measures 16"x24" and is printed on Crane Lettra Pearl paper.
Letterpressed by Bryce Knudson of Bjørn Letterpress in Provo, Utah.
his named is linked

Greetings Earthlings, here's but one of a million or more remarkable images found in Washington's Library of Congress Digital Collections.

There's a vast array of subjects (say Vast Array in a Pirate accent, go on you know you want to..) that you can visit, either in person in Washington, or online using this link. You can download for free, differing size files up to and including archival quality images at almost 900 dpi, or roughly lets say 50MB files, nearly any size you want on any subject. From the Atom Bomb, to early Jazz.

It's an amazing resource for images, history and ideas, and they encourage you to visit.

Likewise, in London at the V & A Museum or Paris's Bibliotheque National, you can sit at a large weathered leather top table, hand a staffer your request card, and they will bring you the actual object you seek, by hand, wether it's a faded sepia photo, fragment of ephemera, old and famous book, or some notorious document.

They are a truly amazing places, in fact they're national treasures. You can spend the afternoon going through Conan Doyle's original manuscripts, Lewis Carrol's pictures of Alice, or Napoleons love letters to Josephine.

Certainly better than standing in line at Euro Disney you putz. See the world, to know the world. AAAArrgghh ...

oh .... click on the image or I'll smack you