via colourlovers
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| Image from Hearing Color: Neil Harbisson, Cyborg |
Read the rest here.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Color Communication: When You Say X, Your Designer Hears This
via colourlovers
Read the rest here.
Odd Color Names Offer a Primer in Marketing
via nytimes“If you heard the words “Tempest,’ ‘Turbulence’ and ‘Tornado Watch,’ you might head for the basement — fast. Paint manufacturers want you to head for the living room. In a redoubled effort to capture consumers’ attention in this sputtering economic recovery, some paint companies are hoping to distinguish their brands with names that tell a story, summon a memory or evoke an emotion — even a dark one — as long as they result in a sale. What they do not do is reveal the color…”
Alessandro Novelli’s The Alphabet
via felt and wire“In just over a minute, Alessandro Novelli captures his (and our) love for typography and animation in The Alphabet, a spelling video inspired by children’s hornbooks..”
Read the rest, and watch the video, here. P.S. Can you spot the typo?
Business Cards of the Day
Four cards I discovered on a recent trip. Freeze Frame Reality has used a nice spot gloss varnish. The Art Out of the Box card reminded me so much of the local equivalent to it [Artbox Studios] and I just had to laugh at the similarity. The next card, well, is self-explanitory: I buy. ’nuff said. Dog Gone Walking is my favorite in this series of finds [both sides of this card are shown, along with a close-up]. Clean design, nice muted color choices, sophisticated typography along with a touch of humor on a topic that can make me go on a rant.Click on the images for a larger view.
Heavenly Typography
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| From Urania’s Mirror: Monoceros, Canis Minor and Atelier Typographique, 1825 |
“Some people see faint outlines of unicorns in the heavenly constellations and others see dogs, or the canis minor. Yet Mr. Jehoshaphat Aspin looked up and saw a celestial type studio in the stars with a unicorn (monoceros) jumping over it…”
Read the rest here.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Art of Sleeping in a Box
pointed out by a fairy“Start from simple sleeping on your back…or on your side…”
Read the rest here. Makes me smile.
Paige Bradley’s Expansion
via notcotPaige Bradley’s artist statement on her sculpture Expansion, “From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a container already built for us to fit inside: A social security number, a gender, a race, a profession or an I.Q. I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in, rather than what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies? Would we still be able to exist if we were authentically ‘un-contained’?”
More images of Expansion can be found here.
Don’t Fear the Internet
via imprint“…Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer have started a wonderful little site explaining to beginners what production for the web is all about. Young designers, take heed: this is not optional information. It’s rare that a web shop would be willing to hire a designer who has no idea how HTML/CSS and JavaScript work together. Friendly and easy to understand, these guides are a good place to start.”
Be sure to visit here.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Typeface Software
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| This is my face as interpreted by the software. |
“The design of typefaces is founded upon principles from the days of metal type, when creating individual fonts was a laborious process and constrained by physical requirements. Most digital type design follows those same conventions, but technology gives us opportunities to make type design more spontaneous and personal. The Typeface software translates facial dimensions into generative type design.”
Learn more about it here, and download the software to generate your own typeface.
The Ampersand, part 2 of 2
“From its ignoble beginnings a century after Tiro’s scholarly et, the ampersand assumed its now-familiar ‘&’ form with remarkable speed even as the Tironian et stayed rigidly immutable. The symbol’s visual development is perhaps best documented in a formidable piece of typographical detective work carried out by one Jan Tschichold, a graphic designer born in Leipzig in 1902…”
Read the rest here.
Image to the Right: Collected ampersands in Jan Tschichold’s The Ampersand: its origin and development (1957). Notable here are (1) Pompeiian graffiti; (8) an insular majuscule ampersand from the 7th century Book of Kells, and (13) an 8th century Merovigian ampersand, already recognisable as the modern ampersand form.
Paper Peaucellier Linkage
via robives.com Newsletter“Invented by Monsier Peaucellier in 1864, the Peaucellier linkage is a simple mechanism created to convert rotary motion into straight line motion. Now, almost 150 years later, you can download and make your own working paper model. A fascinating paper model to download and make.”
Find out more here.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Vintage Office & Art Supplies
via letterology
See more examples here; and even more, including pocketwatches and locks, can be found at at Vintage Collective's Flickr site.
DART St. Louis
via designobserver“…Last April, as a part of STL Design Week, the St. Louis creative community was invited to FK Photo, a well-known commercial photography studio. Inside their sleek 12,000 square foot rehabbed warehouse in the city's midsection, more than 250 designers, art directors, photographers and illustrators took turns throwing real darts at a large projected map of the city. The intersection where the dart landed became their destination. The dart-thrower had a month to find his or her assigned corner of the city and return with a photograph that made that spot come to vivid life.
Each dart throw brought a donation of $5, with the proceeds going to Rebuild Together St. Louis, a local affiliate of the national not-for-profit dedicated to revitalizing local neighborhoods. The Throw Party raised over $2,500 for the organization. A month later, the community came together again for the Presentation Party, where all of the photographs were revealed to the public... ”
Read the rest here, and learn more about DART St. Louis here.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Images of the Day: My Other Car is a Broom
I just discovered today that the broom rack for our car that we’ve been using for years can also be used for transporting mountain bikes as well. Life is good!
I’ve known about My Other Car is a Broom for quite some time, and love most of the products at Northern Sun; but I especially love this one.
Sybil Ludington’s Heroic Ride
via delancey place“In today's excerpt - with all deference to a former governor from Alaska, not only was the purpose of Paul Revere’s ride to warn the revolutionaries of an impending British attack, there was another heroic ride of warning twice as long as Revere’s. The rider was sixteen year old Sybil Ludington…”
Read the rest here. More on Sybil can be found here.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Lytro: Tech That May Change Photography Forever
Pointed out by my father-in-law. Info below via fast company:“So what's the fuss all about? It's called light field, or plenoptic, photography, and the core thinking behind Lytro is contained neatly in one paper from the original Stanford research--though the basic principle is simple. Normal cameras work in roughly the same way your eye does, with a lens at the front that gathers rays of light from the view in front of it, and focuses them through an aperture onto a sensor (the silicon in your DSLR or the retina in your eye). To focus your eye or a traditional camera you adjust the lens in different ways to capture light rays from different parts of the scene and throw it onto the sensor. Easy. This does have a number of side effects, including the need to focus on one thing. This adds complexity, and, if used well, beauty to a photo.
But Lytro's technology includes a large array of microlenses in front of the camera sensor. Think of them as a synthetic equivalent of the thousands of tiny lenses on a fly's eye. The physics and math gets a bit tricky here, but the overall result is this: Instead of the camera's sensor recording a single image that's shaped by the settings of your camera lens, aperture and so on, the sensor records a complex pattern that represents light coming from all the parts of the scene in front of it, not just the bits you would've focused on using a normal camera. The image is then passed to software which can decode it.
And this is where things get freaky. Because the system captures data about the direction of light rays from the scene, it can be programmed to ‘focus’ on any depth in the photo--years after you took the original image.”
Read the rest here, morecan be found here, here, and here. Visit the Lytro Picture Gallery here.
Guide to Food Ingredients
via vrg“The Vegetarian Journal’s Guide to Food Ingredients is a partial listing of common food ingredients taken from an ongoing VRG food ingredients project. The objective in this booklet is to provide an easy-to-read, useful list of ingredients commonly found in many foods and beverages that indicates whether they are vegetarian, vegan, or non-vegetarian. The guide is unique in that we place emphasis on the commercial sources of ingredients most commonly used today while mentioning other possible sources of ingredients.”
Find out more here. A free app available for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad can be found here.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Email Everywhere: 25th Anniversary Of Listserv
via fastcompany“To join an email list before 1986, users had to wait for someone to painstakingly adjust the code to include them. For Eric Thomas, that was too uncomputerized for a computerized system. So he created Listserv, the first automated email-list-management software. It's still used to send group emails, though a lot more of them—30 million emails are sent using Listserv each day, a huge leap from 25 years ago, when electronic mail was just taking off.”
Read the rest here. The L-PSDSGNR listserv that I host for designers at Penn State has been in existence since January 21, 2000 and currently has 105 subscribers.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Images of the Day: The Commute Home
While sitting and enjoying our supper outside, I happened to spy the evening commute of our local sprite-like companions. Since it was forecast rain and thunderstorms throughout the day, they were wearing their rain-capes. Below is what we captured before they disappeared into the elm tree and apparated away until tomorrow.
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| Supplying a bit of aid and assistance. |
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| The moment: A hidden kiss |
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This is just a little spooky looking. |
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Everything is a Remix: The Elements of Creativity
via brainpickings“…Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix project is one of the most important efforts to illuminate the mechanisms, paradoxes and central principles of creative culture in modern history — an ambitious four-part documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation, reflecting my own deep held belief that creativity is combinatorial….”
Learn more about the Everything is a Remix project here.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Image of the Day: Baltimore
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| The closed Public Works Museum, housed at a former pumping station, in Baltimore’s inner harbor district. A few ampersands spotted in the area can be found here. |
Friday, June 17, 2011
Artful Lettering
“Using Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black fountain pen ink and a Soennecken 70# writing pad, we see graphic designer/calligrapher Frank Ortmann skillfully render some fine-looking letters for the the cover artwork for the record Max Goldt, L'Eglise des Crocodiles in 2011. First we look over his shoulder to see him pencil in some slanted guidelines for the letterforms with the use of a simple handmade guide. After he carefully pencils in each letter of his layout, he selects an antique extra fine pen nib used for copperplate writing and inks in his letters while applying various degrees of pressure to create the thickness of each stroke. Lastly he scans the image and does the final edit in Photoshop to create the lovely work of lettering seen on the album cover…”
Read the rest and watch the video here. Be sure to drop in to iampeth where you can find endless examples of rare penmanship books to peruse.
Dropp
via imprint“Finally, a social application worth looking into: Dropp untethers you from the website-as social-destination concept. This little app does something neat: lets you leave messages in real-world places, wherever you go, for others to find. You can leave your messages for everyone, or for specific people, and when their iPhones, also running Dropp, come near, they’ll get an an alert. You can leave behind little messages, pictures, prizes for a surprise contest, treasure hunt clues, the possibilities are pretty cool to consider. The app is brand new, and as such still feels kinda 1.0, but I would expect updates and additional functions to happen rapidly. It’s free for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad from the App Store.”
Find out more here.
Arem Bartholl’s Google Map Installations
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| Map at ‘Gateways,’ KUMU, Tallinn, Estonia, May 2011 |
via designobserver
“…Bartholl’s Map installations involved setting up a large physical version of the pin in several locales, at the exact spot where Google Maps assumes to be the center of the city.”
Find out more about the installations here.
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