See Peter Saville’s classic Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album design set in motion as a music visualizer for the track She’s Lost Control.
archive for September 2009
This morning I was woken by the cacophonous buzz of traffic helicopters buzzing over my head. I asked myself, “why why why?” After a hot shower, I turned to Monty Python for a more philosophical answer to how the world works.
Book Worship is an appropriately named blog that is dedicated to one person’s growing collection of books whose designs he finds graphically interesting. The designer/author happens to have fantastic taste.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank’s photo collection America. Images from the book, which is an iconic document of the nation in the 1950s will be on display until January 3.
Here is a wonderful interview with book designer, David Pearson of Penguin Publishing UK fame. He discusses his new venture - White Books is a small publishing project dedicated to releasing beautiful editions of classic literature.
Luxury brand Hermes is responsible for the design of a yacht unlike any ever built before. Apparently, the floating vessel that is clearly a symbol of extreme wealth and excess is made to be super eco-friendly. The ship accommodates twelve guests and a crew of twenty which means there is exactly 1.6 people that fall into the “help” category for each snob. It’s also pretty ironic that the boat’s name, WHY (short for Wally Hermes Yacht) is proudly written in large type across the front deck which overlooks the ships pool.
While going through some notes, I came across a quote from Mark Twain that I am quite fond of.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
I’ve found the perfect piece of Brooklyn real estate on the market to call home. Now I just need that 25 million dollar loan.
Sports apparel manufacturer Puma has created an iphone application that makes it a little more fun to check how your stocks are doing.
I’ve always found people who walk on the beach with metal detectors to be amusing to watch. I had no idea that these folks have clubs. One member of a British metal detector club recently uncovered more than 1.345 gold and silver relics hidden on a farm that date back to the 5th century. It is believed that the collection’s value will be well into the millions - half of which the finder will keep. Maybe I should add metal detection to my weekend activities list.
I love Will Ferrell and I love this PSA for protecting health insurance execs.
I adore both Brooklyn and spicy foods. So why not celebrate both? The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Chili Pepper Fiesta takes place October 3 from noon to 6pm.
NYC public housing rules are now outlawing people from owning large dogs. The ban goes so far as to name specific unwelcome breeds including rottweilers, doberman pinschers and of course pit bull or pit bull mixes. I find this scenario to be problematic on many levels. Such measures amount to plain old discrimination and propagate misinformed and misguided views about these animals. On the very block where I live, we have several pit bulls that couldn’t be any more loving. I myself owned a rottweiler for fourteen years who earned the love of all of my neighbors. It is clear that these rules were enacted out of fear, but reading between the lines it is not hard to see that the fear stems not from the animals themselves but rather the owners. Some folks are terrified of young people of color and even more when they own a pet that has been unfairly portrayed as a vicious killer. Smells like good old-fashioned racism to me.
Meet Ed Houben, a sperm donor who is responsible for 46 children and counting - lovely.
If you’ve traveled by plane in the last few years, you’ve most certainly noticed a dramatic shift for the worse in customer service. Airlines are scrambling to find ways to cut costs and increase profits. A company called Design Q has an absolutely abysmal idea on how airlines can make more money on shorter distance flights. They propose that airlines rethink their current seating layout and provide the customer with something more like a jump-seat. My guess is that the first airline to actually put such an offensive and stupid design into practice is the next airline to go out of business.
Alain Robert aka the French Spider Man has an odd hobby/career. He is an urban climber who has made a habbit of scaling skyscrapers without the aid of ropes. He has scaled 85 towering buildings around the world.
I’ve lived about a mile from Flatbush and Fourth Ave. for nine years and have never once seen the dancing traffic cop. Now I feel that my life in Brooklyn won’t be complete until I see him.
Here is an inflatable house of worship.
These ex-advertising creatives have turned lemons into lemonade.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with images and masks that celebrate Dia de los muertos. Here are some particularly cool fashion photos using the theme.
Good news. It seems that Urban Outfitters have joined forces with the Impossible Project to save Polaroid film from a sad demise.
While doing some research, I came across the death masks of a few historical figures. Some even date back to the 1300s. It’s truly fascinating to look at the cast of a person who lived several hundred years ago and realize that you are essentially seeing exactly how they looked in their final moments.
Here is a photo collection containing 204 images that compares places in Normandy during WWII to what it looks like now.
Check out interviews with some of the most established documentary filmmakers talking about their occupation at the Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary site.
What do the first seven notes of Rich Astley’s Never Gonna GIve You Up have to do with students attending MIT?
A few nights ago, I caught on television Brian Lehrer’s interview with DJ Spooky from a year ago. The timing coincided with Spooky’s book and CD of collected essays - Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture published by MIT Press. This very notion of sampling culture makes for a fascinating and timely discussion.
Particularly because I was born in The City of Brotherly Love, I am with all of my heart absolutely ashamed with Philadelphia today. It is an atrocity and an insult to Ben Franklin’s legacy of founding the first American library in Philly that the cities politicians would allow their public libraries to close. Perhaps I don’t know the political climate in the state of Pennsylvania well enough, but I do know that it is simply unacceptable to allow the greatest record of our culture and past to be treated as though it were so disposable.
HBO launched a new image campaign with a website dedicated to a rather surreal film plot line.
I’ve been looking for a new hobby and think I just found my inspiration in Rufus Hussey aka The Slingshot Man.
The public testing of the HAL robo-exoskeleton suite brings people one step closer to actually being robots. I figure that we may be just a generation away from kids telling parents that when they grow up, they want to be an android. Swell.
The crypt directly above the one in which Marilyn Monroe eternally rests was recently up for auction on ebay and brought in several bids in the millions.
As a New Yorker, I’ve become very comfortable with the idea of living in a small space. Adapting to this kind of environmental restraint leads to creative thinking, and a sort of practical living in which one must consider what and how much they consume. The notion of building a home 1,000 square feet or less, like those in the coffee table book, Tiny Houses is quite intriguing. I’ll gladly take the house in image #2.
The Movie Title Stills Collection site is a wonderful reference resource in which design frames from film credit sequences are searchable by year.
Whether or not you realize it, the corporate visual environment that you live in has at it’s best been designed by a few select people. Ivan Chermayeff is one of those people. With his partner Tom Geismar, he has designed the identities for some of the most known brands worldwide. He has done this with an intellectual sense of elegance and class that has always proved an iconic result. His identities for NBC, Chase, Mobil, PBS and Barney’s New York are all case in point examples. Here is an interview in which a very experienced Chermayeff gives greater insight into his work and process.
Here are some interesting thoughts on the unrivaled success of Craigslist, despite it’s no bells and whistles approach in a consumer world that demands more, newer, faster, now.
These days, I find that I am consistently having discussions about technology and the semi-permanence of media formats. Will books be replaced by ebooks? I don’t think so. The existence of scrolls dating back thousands of years is a reminder in a digital age that sometimes analogue means longevity. Just before typing this posting, I was chatting with a friend about the best way to backup up my hard drives. And yesterday I had a discussion addressing the concerns of shooting video in a format that is purely digital without a tape medium. This ongoing dialogue will certainly shape what our future looks like and how far into our past we will be able to dig. That said, when I found the the Lost Formats project this morning - it seemed rather timely.