Richard Perez / Skinny Ships

Article link: Richard Perez / Skinny Ships

This article shows off some work by Richard Perez, a graphic designer from San Francisco.

I think his work looks amazing! The typographic work, particularly, but the illustration work is equally as good. I feel like it's not only good visually, but it's a great inspiration for other people's work.

An Autumn Story in chalk

Article link: An Autumn Story in chalk

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

The article was about the video, which is a stop-motion music video using chalk and chalkboards. I found this to be extremely amazing. Not just because I love stop motion photography, but the fact that they can be so consistent in their drawings! It's just astounding.

A million blind squirrels

Article link: A million blind squirrels

In this article, Seth writes about an old idiom: "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then." He says that, "You shouldn't pick your strategy by modeling someone else's success. The success might have been strategic and planned, but it's just as likely to be a matter of blind luck. Someone had to get that big deal, and this time it was [that squirrel]."

I find this to be very realistic, but scary at the same time. It's realistic, because not everyone gets "their big break," and at the same time, that's scary, because what if I'm not the "lucky squirrel"?

CR Annual Best in Book: Nokia viNe

Article link: CR Annual Best in Book: Nokia viNe



This article and video are about "Nokia viNe" a new application by R/GA which lets users post what they're doing, media-wise, using geo-tagging. The video was done by Airside, a design firm in London. I really liked the video! It was playful, fun and informational.

Makita marketing idea is full of holes

Article link: Makita marketing idea is full of holes

This article is about a billboard by Makita that shows off pointillism done by power tool.

I think it looks amazing! Then again, pointillism always amazes me, and the fact that they did it with the drill they're trying to sell (well, I assume) is great.

Is Design Too Important To Be Left Only To Designers?

Article link: Is Design Too Important To Be Left Only To Designers?

In this article, Bruce says that Ann Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, points out that "business, the humanities and even physics (at MIT) as embracing design and using it without much input from designers" and that "discussions about Design as a Literacy, Design as a Discipline, Design as a Way of Knowing were under way at various universities—without much input from designers or design educators."

This doesn't really bother me as much as it seemed to bother Ann. I think designers use design, but I'm sure other people can come up with great designs that designers can then use and modify.

Paper: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis, known for creating a new type of art called generative-art known dynamic abstraction, started out in Littleton, Colorado. He was always interested in art, but didn't really do much with it while in school.

At the end of 1992, he moved to New York and eventually attended Pratt Institute where he worked on Design and Illustration. His classmates got him into working on the web in 1995 using Netscape 1.1, but didn't get serious about it until Netscape 2 came out in early 1996. By the end of 1996, when Netscape 3 came out, he was already teaching himself HTML, Javascript, PERL, DHTML and CSS.

Also while in Pratt, he played around early versions of Flash including Futuresplash, the program that came before Flash. However, it wasn't until Macromedia came out with Flash 4, which introduced ActionScript, that Davis really got into the program. When asked, he says that he is a designer, or an illustrator. He's often said that "I’m trying to remove the graphic designer from graphic design.

Using his skills of a programmer, he uses a combination of Illustrator and ActionScript in Flash to create pieces of art that Davis has described to be "Beautiful Accidents." First, he creates vector images in Illustrator and imports them into Flash, making them objects. Then, using the code he first learned (HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc), he writes a program that picks random combinations of vectors from parameters set by Davis. The number of vectors, colors, and parameters are endless, and therefore, so are the combinations that Flash creates. Davis then picks the ones that work the most and continues to work with them to create a work of art.

A poster design done for the band MingDynasty

These "Accidents" have produced many pieces of art, including two websites: Once Upon a Forest and Praystation. Davis also has many clients, including companies such as BMW and Motorola, and musical artists such as Kanye West and MingDynasty. He has recently collaborated with Miquelrius, a stationary company, to produce notebooks featuring his illustrations on the covers.

A screenshot from Once Upon A Forest

Both Once Upon a Forest and PrayStation were websites put up by Davis to showcase his art. Once Upon a Forest features twenty-three different pictures to be scrolled by clicking on an arrow. All of these spectacular images capture your imagination and interest with different designs, patterns, and colors. Most of the images consist of one or two colors and their variations. PrayStation, on the other hand, has at least three different versions on the Internet, all of which have news, updates, and projects from Davis.

Davis is also known to "hide things" in his art, mostly personal references. In an ad for Motorola, he has illustrated a picture of a girl, who is his daughter. Near her head, is the number "4" and the letter K, both references to his daughter, whose name is Kelly and who was four at the time the advertisement was commissioned. There letter "z" is also found many times all around over the work, a direct reference to Motorola and its code name for the phone.

The forementioned ad for Motorola

Davis has also been apart of a few international exhibitions, including one Barcelona and one in Rovereto, Italy. In 2007, Davis' exhibit in Barcelona was an installation for OFFF, a three day festival that shows off top artists, designers, and studios of digital media. It featured nine large posters that were installed in light-boxes, which really showed off his work and how the light worked with it. In 2008, Davis was commissioned to create eight panels of his work. However, this time, instead of creating them in color, he only made line-art of his work. He set up the paper on the panels and asked the other attendants at the festival to color them in. Davis has called the project a "great social experiment."

Davis usually relates his concepts with those of Jackson Pollock's. Pollock was a 20th century painter, who changed what the world thought about painting by using different techniques, such as splashing paint onto a canvas that was nailed to the floor. Davis said that "I’m [not] a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods." This is similar to how Davis works, because he doesn't necessarily draw all his works, but instead uses Flash to generate the pieces of work and works with those generations until he gets an image he likes.


Works Cited:

Davis, Joshua. Joshua Davis | Studios. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://www.joshuadavis.com>.

Davis, Joshua. "Joshua Davis' photostream." Flickr. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuadavis/>.

Davis, Joshua. "Motorola, RIZR." Joshua Davis | Studios. 8 Feb. 2007. <http://www.joshuadavis.com/projects/motorola-rizr/>.

Davis, Joshua. Once Upon a Forest. <http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/>.

Davis, Joshua. Praystation (Version 2). <http://ps3.praystation.com/pound/v2/>.

Hoxsey, Rich. "Flash Forward." The International Design Magazine. 7 Feb. 2008. <http://www.id-mag.com/article/flashforward>.

Kirsner, Scott. "The Chaos of Joshua Davis." Wired. Mar. 2006. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.03/joshdavis.html>.

Malmberg, Elise. "Joshua Davis: Infinitely Interesting." Apple. <http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/joshuadavis/>.

Spear, Josh. "SpearTalks: Joshua Davis." Josh Spear. 14 Dec. 2007. <http://joshspear.com/item/speartalks-joshua-davis/>.

Japanese space-saving kitchen appliance

Article link: Japanese space-saving kitchen appliance

This article is about an appliance in Japan that saves space in the kitchen. The article thinks the "thing is friggin' absurd!" but I personally like appliances that have many different functions. Plus, it's kind of cute!

How to make money with SEO

Article link: How to make money with SEO

This article highlights two ways to make money using SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Seth calls the two different ways the Yellow Pages (Find a keyword and do whatever you can to 'own' that word on Google) and the White Pages (It involves owning a keyword that you already own).

He even provides a step-by-step mini-tutorial:

1. Make an incredible product, offer a remarkable service.

2. Associate a unique term or trademark with it. (Something that isn't generic, and preferably, not a crowded search term already).

3. Assuming that you do #1 and #2, you'll end up owning that word in the search engines. If you don't, revisit the first two steps.

The hard part, of course, is making something people choose to talk about. The good news is that this is under your control, which is better than the alternative.

The first question every web site designer must ask

Article link: The first question every web site designer must ask

This article answers the question "Do you want the people visiting this site to notice it?"

Seth writes that the answer is "Yes" only for artists, musicians and web 2.0 companies, but that the answer is "No" for everyone else. He write that:

The purpose of the site is to tell a story or to generate some sort of action. And if the user notices the site, not the story, you've lost.

Amazingly, this means that not only can't the site be too cutting edge, clever or slick, it also can't be too horrible, garish or amateurish. It's sort of like the clothes you want the person giving a eulogy to wear. No Armani, no cutoff jeans.

I think this was a really enlightening question for me, personally, because now I know I need to work on finding an inbetween.

SLAP Widgets: virtual controls you can touch

Article link: SLAP Widgets: virtual controls you can touch

This article is about "SLAP Widgets" which are plastic and silicone objects that are used with a multi-touch table/screen that allows people to control interface values through physical push buttons, sliders, knobs, keypads and keyboards. SLAP Widgets were created by RWTH Aachen University in Germany with UCSD in California.

The article writes that "As seductive as [multi-touch screens] are, there are still times when the tactile feedback and accuracy of physical objects are still preferable," and I completely agree! Sometimes, actual keys are better than touchscreen keys.

It's harder to hire great people in a tough economy

Article link: It's harder to hire great people in a tough economy

This article from Seth's blog says that the reason that it's harder to hire great people in a tough economy is because "it's noisy." He explains by saying "Lots of organizations have used the downturn as an excuse to trim people who weren't producing."

Seth also provides a link to an article called "Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn".

Tim Gough interview

Article link: Tim Gough interview

This article is an interview with the illustrator Tim Gough, whose work, to me at least, looks amazing. The article itself is quite enlightening to his inspirations and his style, but I also liked the illustrations that were displayed in the article.

He says that he wants to "rid the world of dull illustrations" and he certainly does that!

Package design, good and bad

Article link: Package design, good and bad

This article gives two points of view on packaging design: the good and the bad. On one hand, the article provides a link to the BBC, who said that the packaging design for Easter Eggs is excessive packaging, because "It is going to taste the same whatever box it comes in" but on the other hand, the article also provides a link to the 2009 American Package Design Awards.

On one hand, I must agree with the BBC quote, that "It is going to taste the same whatever box it comes in" but on the other hand, I love buying things that look nicer than other things, even if they'll have the same content, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.