December 2008
24 posts
Brandvertising
Way back when Al and J (al: please say I totally haven’t imagined it was you) visited the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in London. It’s a tiny little thing hanging on a side street in Notting Hill and while it seems a little silly, was actually fascinating. Their site is actually quite limited but I did find a nice little online collection of photos at the American...
HOLY ASS
“Market research can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the egg is a sad...”
– Robert Pliskin
Books
from the Book Design Review
I hate going into a Barnes and Nobel’s or Borders, and not because they are the bookstore to ‘The Man’, but because they always go for the cheapest, newest book covers. I swung by to pick up a copy of Revolutionary Road (someone had said i was like Mad Men and seeing as we are between seasons…) only to find dear Kate and Leo on the...
Mass MOCA, part 1
I went to Mass MoCA while I was in Vermont. If you have never been there I highly suggest visiting. Right now there are at least five amazing shows up.
Sol Lewitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective is a collection of 105 wall drawings in a 27,000 square foot mill building renovated just for this show. The drawings were conceived in the last years of Lewitt’s life, and were executed by his...
2008 typography
Granted this is a little slow on the game, but seeing as it’s the holidays and I’ve been spending the past few days with my family drinking boozy milkshakes (ice cream, milk, bourbon, fresh nutmeg) this is much more of a lazy posting than anything else. The wonderful blog I Love Typography posted a list of their favourite typefaces of 2008.
Also creating end-of-the-year lists is...
Fun vacation things so far…
Great Christmas Party hosted by my dearest friends. An icy frozen mess outside, but was beautiful inside.
Nighttime Nordic Skiing! This was especially beautiful. The snow had just fallen and we were skiing along this frozen stream. Too bad the camera was left inside.
Today we are in Vermont. My cousins live at the top of a mountain, accessible only by a dirt road. They live in between...
Color
In response to Al’s color post today I share my fondest way to kill time on the internet… flickr! The folks at Idee Labs have come up with this keen way to search flickr images based on color selection. I tossed in our purple and, uh, mustard (I refuse to partake in the sangria madness) and came up with a series based on the same theme. Each image offers a click through to the set it...
More End of the Year Lists
Alan Taylor from the Boston Globe has this incredible news picture blog, The Big Picture. I am certainly a visual learner (duh), so seeing news pictures really helps to concrete stories for me. He collects all the pictures, in super high definition, for specific news stories— so all the Getty, AP, Reuters, etc. photos of a particular story in one place. He is now doing the end of the...
photos.
Jo is into posters and I am into super clean photos right now. Super saturated too, so maybe Pantone is on to something! Anyway, Jan Rasmus Voss has some beautiful shots on his Flickr page.
This is what I am sure the past looked like
and I can only hope this is what the future will look like.
p.s I guess this is what 2009 will look like
via Shiny Squirrel
-Al
Free Christmas Music
Free music is always good. Free Christmas album here.
Listen at work. Annoy your boss.
Track 6 makes me really happy.
thanks {frolic!}
-al
Happy Birthday to my Grandfather
My grandfather is kind of awesome. And not in like, awe my grandfather is so cute. He is actually awesome. He is certainly a large part of the reason I love words so much. Here is Frost reading Frost, the only way to hear it. For Bob.
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Love you
-al
Titles
For a while there title sequences were quite out of fashion. Films would begin on a cold open or perhaps with that terribly sexy combo: black background&white text. Actually this movement away from titles wasn’t just a one off in film history - we seem to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the title sequence. Is it destroying the artifice of the “filmic...
Star Wars vs. Saul Bass
-Jo
“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art,...”
– Paul Rand
Swiss Posters
I’ve been fixating on posters recently, though it seems a little for nothing as who gets a career in poster design? Like whatever town is that years Promised Land poster design seems too good to be true. It’s not some magical medium that embodies art for arts sake - posters are still hawking some product on the masses. Still, there is no denying that they offer the best range for...
Color of the Year
Pantone picks a color of the year every year. Mimosa is it for 2009.
Dumb name, but I like the color.* Continuing the fully saturated trend I guess. I have seen a lot of yellow in the past year, but then again, I have seen a lot of this color.
Blue Iris was the it color of 2008. I guess they sort of called that one fine. I bought a cardigan from J.Crew in exactly that color over the...
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada
If anything can be considered my passion it would be city space, specifically the interplay of life and constructed space. Therefore I am always really drawn to artists who monopolize urban space for the public, especially illicitly.
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada makes these incredible charcoal portraits on the sides of buildings. The subjects are local residents, and the walls he uses are often...
Logos →
There is something fascinating about a clever logo. To me it’s the biggest bang for your buck- when constructed well a simple image can have a great payoff.
much more tricky than they appear.
-Jo
via logolog
End of the Year Lists
This time of year, top ten lists are ubiquitous. While many people find them incredibly irritating, my scatterbrain likes their rational grouping and editing. Today’s favorite is definitely Vanity Fair’s Year in Pictures. Who needs to pay for a subscription when all the best photos are neatly placed in a slide show once a year!
This one is just so classically composed and...
“The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.”
– Diane Ackerman