The beauty of the flying shoe
September 23, 2009 | Tags: graphic design, high art, illustration, inspiration, publication design
Browsing through the inspiring gallery of winning designs from the Society of Publication Designers’ 2008 competition, I came across this image, a Merit Award winner in the front/back of book category by designer/art director Eva Spring and illustrator Alli Arnold:
Aside from the charm and simplicity of the image, what struck me was the shoe – straight out of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Shoe:
Of all the great things about the painting, nothing is better than the shoe. And that shoe was on my mind because I’d seen it this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum Yinka Shonibare exhibition:
A good idea is a good idea, wherever you steal it from.
Fun and games for typomaniacs
September 22, 2009 | Tags: arial, fun, games, helvetica, typography
It’s impossible to study typography without turning into a bit of what the great Erik Spiekermann calls a typomaniac:
[It's] an incurable if not mortal disease. I can’t explain it, I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it. … Other people like looking at bottles of wine or girls’ bottoms, I get my kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit.
For incurable typomaniacs and those just starting down the road, here’s a trio of font games you’ll find a lot more fulfilling than Minesweeper ever was. In the bad, bad old days.
Helvetica vs. Arial
Do Tekken-style battle (sort of) as the hopping, high-jumping Helvetica against the Microsoft-imposed mediocrity of Arial.
The Rather Difficult Font Game
Big, clean, pretty font identification practice from the good folks at I Love Typography. Rather difficult, as it turns out.
Deep Font Challenge
Font ID meets the old carnival shooting gallery. Timed and progressively more difficult. Great fun. In a really, really dorky way.
Typography porn
August 20, 2009 | Tags: graphic design, type, typography
I hadn’t had a proper fix since Alki1’s International Typographic Style photo set on Flickr. Then I ran across the blog of Jessica Hische, a Brooklyn-based designer and illustrator who specializes in hand lettering. Really pretty hand lettering.
Wordpress NYC logo competition
August 19, 2009 | Tags: identity design, logo design, NYC, wordpress
WordCamp NYC, a two-day conference of WordPress users, designers, developers, educators and enthusiasts in NYC, is still a few months off — Nov. 14-15 — but the event’s logo competition deadline is coming up fast: Aug. 31.
It’s too good a chance to pass up. As the call for entries points out, “if your logo is chosen, it will appear on hundreds of attendee t-shirts, on web sites receiving millions of hits, and on all the printed materials at the actual event in October.”
Click here for full rules.
More ‘pointless babble’ on Twitter than, well, anything else
August 18, 2009 | Tags: marketing, self-promotion, social media, Twitter
Twitter poll shocker — or not — from a cleverly tech-news-making study by Pear Analytics: more tweets fall in the category of “Pointless Babble” (40.55%) than any other (News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Conversational and Pass-Along Value).
There’s plenty to dispute in the categorization, methodology, and meaning of the results, but one of the most interesting results was accidental, namely:
Our initial hypothesis that we intended to prove was that Twitter was being used predominantly for self-promotion. These are tweets that are trying to push a product, service or have a distinct “Twitter only offer” of some kind.
Surprisingly for Pear, only 5.85% of the tweets they tracked (2,000 public tweets over two weeks) fell into the “Self-Promotion” category.
A selfless lot, Twitter users. Or else it’s evidence that some of the ten-thousand odd self-proclaimed social media gurus ready to charge hundreds of dollars an hour to tell small business owners how to tweet their way to success may know a little less than they pretend to.
Pear plans to repeat the study each quarter to track trends. It’ll be interesting to watch.
Download the full results here (PDF).
Being as big a fan as I am of Wordpress — which powers this site and many others I’ve built — I couldn’t miss the opportunity to share a little guidance I recently offered a web designer friend who’s new to Wordpress via e-mail:
The best place to start if you want to use WP as a blogging tool within an existing website (and on many other WP how-tos) is the relevant article in the WP Codex, which can be a little dry but is quite thorough.
An incredibly useful general info source is Smashing Magazine, which as you know is the no. 2 most popular and best-loved web design blog after A List Apart. Smashing is very WP-friendly and has a whole host of WP resources and tutorials here.
The best way to understand WP from the inside out is in two steps.
First, just do a fresh install somewhere on your own site, download a few themes from one of Smashing’s Wordpress theme galleries or the official WP gallery, and start messing around, adding plugins, making sample posts and pages, sticking widgets in here or there. The WP 2.7+ backend is incredibly intuitive and requires virtually no explanation for basic functionality.
Once you want to get in under the hood and figure out what to do with the PHP and CSS files in the Appearance>Editor to make fully customized sites with real CMS functionality for clients, read through this great Themeshaper tutorial.
When you understand all the pieces of the puzzle that go into a typical theme, you’ll understand how to do just about anything you like.
Prescient Media puts Baconfest Chicago online!
July 8, 2009 | Tags: bacon, baconfest, food, new work, web design
Drop in on the freshly-launched website of Baconfest Chicago — and if you can, drop in on the festival itself on Oct. 25!
This isn’t the first Baconfest in the country, but there isn’t a square inch of America where it fits better. A dangerously delicious time guaranteed for all.
Prescient Media designs for The New Lines
June 27, 2009 | Tags: graphic design, music, poster design, The New Lines
As brutal as the New York weather has been in recent weeks — and promises to be for at least another week — the rain last Sunday was just sporadic enough to let much of the Make Music NYC festival go off as planned: 850 concerts of every conceivable type in every corner of the city, especially outdoors.
The New Lines, a Brooklyn-based band that plays reverby, melancholy, melodic pop influenced in equal measures by Stephin Merritt, Broadcast, and Joy Division, had a pair of concerts at the festival. Mastermind multi-instrumentalist Hewson Chen asked Prescient Media to produce a poster in the old Bauhaus spirit for a pair of concerts it played that day.
If you were around Williamsburg/Bushwick that Saturday night or Sunday, you may have seen the result:
Stunning Flash websites
June 13, 2009 | Tags: Flash, music, showcase, web design
Last week’s Adobe newsletter included a list of bleeding edge Flash websites and asked readers whether any might be early candidates for site of the year.
For my money, the most exciting of the bunch is a sort of interactive music video for a lovely song called “Soy tu aire” by Spanish singer Labuat. Eye-popping, unexpected, and genuinely moving all at once.
Big kudos to Herraiz Soto & Co., the interactive ad agency that created the site.
The Blackheart Gang’s ‘The Tale of How: The Book’
June 3, 2009 | Tags: animation, Blackheart Gang, F5, high art
I had the very good fortune to attend the F5 Fest digital media conference in NYC in mid-April, and am still recovering from the overwhelming presentations by some of the best of the best in the business — not to mention the open bar from roughly 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. each day. (More on F5 to come in future posts.)
One of the oddest and most inspiring presentations came from a trio of illustrator/designer/director/musicians from South Africa — Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz, and Markus Smit — who call themselves The Blackheart Gang.
They got the world’s attention in 2006 with a 4-minute animated masterpiece called The Tale of How:
While we’re waiting for the other two parts of a promised trilogy (including The Tale of Then and The Tale of When), and the gang mostly occupies itself with some very high-profile paying gigs for its sister project, Shy The Sun and appearances at digital media conferences that seem always to be compared with MTV Video awards presentations, the Tale of How now has an unlikely presence in the offline world: a coffee table book.
I grabbed a few copies from the gang’s producer, Nina Pfeifer, before she left New York. It’s every bit as stunning as the film:
Characteristically, the gang describes the book this way:
If we were to imagine that a coffee table was a person, then the Tale of How coffee table book should be considered to be some sort of fabulous wig or magical hat that the above-mentioned person could wear out to parties and things. Theses Parties will probably share very little resemblance to your average “birthday-cake-and-balloon” jobs.
It’s a beautifully printed and constructed 40-page book, with handwritten verses from the film on the left-hand pages and full-page illustrations on the right. It comes with a DVD of the film and other extras, and “makes a great present for children and widows alike.”
The only bad news: the online shop where the book is for sale has been up and down. Write the gang and tell them you can’t wait!
UPDATE: Shop is now online and working fine. Order early and often, and don’t overlook the gorgeous prints from the book for sale too.
UPDATE 2: The guys tell me the big book shipment was delayed and their shop will be offline for a week or so. Patience! It’ll be worth the wait!
