Dance of the Quadcopters

An amazing interactive performance piece using quadcopters. Who needs CGI when you have Cirque du Soleil on your side?

Seven Seconds to Attack

William Morris: The Wood Beyond the World
Photo by Naoko Takano 

A couple links I kept from last week, both from the always thoughtful and readable Craig Mod.

The first is a great article on how online reviews could be made better, particularly on Amazon. What really struck me though was reading it on the same day that Apple announced their new products. Social media, and especially Twitter, were filled with snark and bile, almost all of it completely content free. Just hate for the joy of being a hater.

The reason we are upset by Amazon trolls is that their actions truly damage — both psychologically and economically. And yet these damaging acts themselves are devoid of rigor: Seven seconds to attack that which took 700 days to produce. 

With little effort the attackers attach their bile to something greater than that of which they are capable. This dissonance — venom effortlessly and thoughtlessly spat upon the diligence or precision of a work of art — is from where the tension is born. It’s what enrages us. Especially those of us who create. And so, the factor dividing the “good” reviews from the “bad” is very often, simply, the presence of rigor. Of being thoughtful.

Emphasis mine. The thing that struck me on Twitter, and made me stay away for the rest of the day, is that many of the people gleefully spewing bile, especially in light of their occupations and skill sets, could have made thoughtful contributions and critiques. But they didn't. Sneering for social points has come to take the place of talking about craft.

Which leads me to the next article. Lets Talk About Margins.

Thoughtful decisions concerned with details marginal or marginalized conspire to affect greatness. 

The whole article is a wonderful meditation on having craft matter. Matter a lot. Something I repeat over and over again as I am teaching, is that “The front of a label or piece of packaging will get you an interview. The back will get you the job.” Every mark we make effects every other mark (though, sometimes, the marks we don't make matter the most) and each requires our full attention. Everything, even the bar code (maybe even especially the bar code) and ingredients list, deserve the full attention of our craft.

One of the first lessons I truly absorbed at Methodologie (then TeamDesign) was about the importance of detail, and it came from a conversation about page numbers. The senior designer I was assigned to, Paula Richards, was putting what seemed to me in my inexperience, a huge amount of time into figuring out where the page numbers should go on an annual report. She walked me through the big considerations about where they should go, (the biggest being, don't put them under the readers thumb) and about making sure they were right there when you look for them, but not when you weren't, and then said what has stuck with me all these years. “Every element on the page should be polished like a jewel.”

What would our profession, and by profession I mean all of the disciplines that fall under the large umbrella of visual communications, be like if we all concentrated more on craftsmanship—on polishing each part of a page or screen or level or interaction or installation—than on polishing our snark to score points with our peers?

Why Blacksmiths are Better at Startups than You

Mastercrafts

A great post on Unicorn Free. Watching the transformation she talks about is what has kept me teaching all these years. Getting over yourself—and getting out of your own way—is the hardest lesson to teach (and learn.)

The Emotional Engineering of the Handspring Puppet Company.

"Puppets have to struggle to live."  A TED talk showing the amazing craftsmanship behind the horses in the stage play, Warhorse. I was amazed at how quickly I accepted the horse as real even though the whole discussion was about it being a puppet. Really gorgeous work and performances.

The Queen of Creepy Cookies

Christine McConnel

From The Daily Beast, a great profile of photographer Christine McConnel: The Wonderful Weirdness of Christine McConnell, Queen of Creepy Cookies

I was impressed not only by how hard she works to create her images, but by the fact that Instagram was the vehicle that lifted her into wider recognition. Just like all social media, the key to success there is quality plus consistency, which means she must always be in process on any number of shoots at a time to keep her feed filled.

Owen Gildersleeve's Cut Paper Illustrations

We recently received Owen Gildersleeve's book Paper Cut in the library here at school, but I hadn't checked out his portfolio until I saw some of his latest work in a post on the Brown Paper Bag blog.

His clean, modernist style is super popular right now, and I am really impressed with his hand skills. For me, computer driven cutting machines allow me to do cut paper work the same way that the computer let me throw away my perpetually clogged rapidograph pens. I actually have pretty good handskills at this point in my career, but I don't sit still well enough to develop them to the level that Gildersleeve has.

Something that is often overlooked with cut paper illustration is the importance of lighting. Like so many things with graphic design and illustration, if it is done right, you see the piece, not the technique, but where many cut paper illustrators play up the lighting and use shadow as another player on the stage, Gildersleeve uses super even, directional lighting. I want to see his lighting set up to see how he is getting such even light across his work. I'm guessing he is using a softbox, but I would love to see some behind the scenes shots.

A Plethora of Paper Papilionoidea (and 30,000 Moths)

The must be something in the air, I keep running across scores of paper butterflies. A couple weeks ago I came across this window display at Anthropologie in downtown Seattle.

Designer Carlos Amorales has outdone the window display artists though with his gallery installations of 30,000 paper moths for an installation piece called Black Cloud.

Have you run across large groups of paper butterflies recently, or is it just me?

Massimo Vignelli

This is very sad. Massimo Vignelli has passed away.

It was Massimo who taught me one of the simplest things in the world: that if you do good work, you get more good work to do, and conversely bad work brings more bad work. It sounds simple, but it’s remarkable, in a lifetime of pragmatics and compromises, how easy it is to forget: the only way to do good work is simply to do good work. Massimo did good work.

The First Color Index

271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.

It actually reminds me more of the Color Index and similar color selectors.

I'm always telling my students you can't have enough books full of color swatches. They often chafe during early projects when I limit them to a color or two but by the time I let them work in full color they have discovered what we all discover. Color is hard. It can visually support a message, or detract from it. Guide the eye or muddy the water. Pop or dissolve an entire piece into cacophony.

10 Rules for Writing First Drafts

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Neon Signs

This short feature reminded me of documentaries about letterpress and sign painting. So much skill and craftsmanship being replaced by technology yet holding on anyway just because the craftsmen see value in what they do.

The Graphic Design of The Grand Budapest Hotel

Image: 20th Century Fox

Designer Annie Atkins calls doing the graphic design for The Grand Budapest Hotel her dream job, and I would feel the same way. I love doing the research and creating the look of a specific time or era (this might be why I teach the History of Graphic Design….) This sort of immersive, historical revival is one of my favorite types of graphic design projects. These sorts of projects are sadly are few and far between (see Craig wards article on Why Minimalist  Design Posters Miss the Point for a run down of why these sorts of projects are so rare in the real world.)

Parallax Scrolling is Not Just Cool Scrolling

Everyone knows how important I think using the correct terms for things is. I just ran across an article on parallax scrolling by an author who has the same reaction to those "40 greatest examples of design trend X" when they pertain to parallax scrolling that I do when they pertain to Typography. Basically, "Gaaaah. That's not an example of that!"

With the "40 greatest examples of typography" sites, they are almost always full of lettering and calligraphy with no typography in site. Cool stuff visually, but a huge mislabeling of completely different disciplines as typography.

In the case of Parallax scrolling, the sites shown in those roundups are seldom actually parallax. They are often very cool, but moving planes over one another is not parallax any more than lettering made of hot dogs is typography. Parallax requires a viewpoint and the examples he links in the article make the difference really clear.

I think my favorite is the example from from agency Madwell in New York. The way the buildings move across each other to change the viewpoint in a cityscape is amazing. Another super cool example of cityscapes changing viewpoints is in a site promoting our very own Space Needle!

So, now you won't confuse just regular cool scrolling with parallax scrolling.

There will be a test later.

Ghost Signs

Photo: Ash Bishop, Brilliant Sign Co

Gorgeous victorian signage discovered under layers of plaster in a newly converted bar would be cool enough, but in a fun coincidence the new signage for the bar, Casa Blue, echoes the type from a hundred years before.

Cool Stuff From Around the Web

Metal Lion by Selçuk Yılmaz

How the Main Titles for the "Black Swan" Became a Work of Art.

Star Wars High School

7 Package Design Trends You Should Know About

The Art of Competitive Aquascaping.
Who knew this was even a thing?

The Hammered Metal Art of Selçuk Yılmaz

B E A U T Y - dir. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro from Rino Stefano Tagliafierro on Vimeo.

Paper 1 for Visual Communications: History and Issues

Explore the idea of the Mechanizied Eccentric* (links to a pdf). How is it a change from traditional forms of entertainment and how does it influence contemporary work. How have the themes explored in the Mechanizied Eccentric essay become part of our combined experience? What themes have been left behind?

Use a live performance (theatre, music concert, etc) that you have attended recently as well as the videos shown in class to support your thesis.

Cellphone's Dead – Beck

Einstein on the Beach

Etienne De Crecy

All papers should be in correct MLA style. Hand written papers will not be accepted. 

*For an introduction to László Moholy-Nagy and point in time in which he is writing this article, read page 17 of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.

You will need to read this, think about it, read it again. It is not a difficult read, but it is very conceptual and you want to make sure you understand what he is saying so you can talk abut it.

Rebirth of The Doves typeface

The original Doves type was crafted by punchcutter Edward Prince from drawings of Nicolas Jenson's 15th-century Venetian typeface. There were a number of recreations of Jenson's type during this time period, William Morris's "Golden" type among them, but Doves is considered to be the most faithful to the original Venetian forms.

Doves was created for The Dove Press in 1899 and the press was very successful, fully selling out printings of its work before they were even produced. Not long after the turn of the century though, the partners in the press, Emery Walker and Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson had a falling out and the press closed. Their terms of contract specified that Walker should have possession of the type should the business dissolve. Cobden-Sanderson could not bear the though of someone else using 'his' type, and over the course of 5 years, starting in 1913, he made hundreds nightime trips to the closed shop, each time taking away more of the type and matrices to dump in the Thames. By January of 1917, the deed was complete. The Doves type was gone, seemingly forever.

A century later, Doves lives again, now in digital form, thanks to the research and painstaking efforts of Robert Green from Typspec.

The 1934 Belchfire Runabout

Cutaway illustration by Claude Lacroix

Everything you need to know about Donald Duck's car.