Designed by Will Hall, Bible Fight lets you pit your favorite biblical figures against each other in an epic battle. It’s not available on the app store (refused by Apple), you can still play it at adult swim. Combining two of our great country’s favorite things − christianity and senseless violence – it’s no wonder it has over 13,000,000 hits!
The other night, before I watched the Boxtroll’s (a terrific film, btw), a preview for a new Wizard of Oz played. Just before I FF, I realized it was an in-depth look at character development from the vision of a little girl who’s never seen her favorite film, only listened. Between the set designers, puppet makers, and director, a lot of heart went into this.
The “making of” is here and the finished spot can be seen here. And a link to the site is here.
This is how you produce earned media – a great cause, executed at the highest level. Well done Xfinity.
Exquisite food photography abounds. Open any cookbook or magazine and you’ll see an endless food parade of beautifully stylized desserts (and every other type of prepared dish). IKEA’s cookbook, Homemade is Best, took a decidedly different approach – beautifully displaying the individual ingredients in a hyper simple and graphic way. Well done Carl Kleiner
This VFX exploration of crowd dynamic by Dave Fothergill is creepily memorizing, The software used, Miarmy (my army), is a “Human Logic Engine for crowd simulation, AI & behavioral animation, creature physical simulation and rendering.” Okay… just make more zombie movies!
With such an economy of line work, it’s remarkable how well illustrator Richard Perez has captured these characters likenesses.
Visual Skin, a Romanian based creative firm, created this dream-like projection of The Flying Dutchman, a cargo ship that sunk on its maiden voyage in 1749. The image is created with two intersecting planar projections onto streams of water from water jets. When the wind picks up, the ship apparently comes to life; its sails filling and the vessel swaying. Check it out if you can make it to the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture.
Seamlessly integrating the live and virtual, the dazzling dancers from Adrien M / Claire B Company use interactive projection mapping to create art of modern dance and beautiful digital illusions. Hypnotic clip here:
Greeting me each morning is a stunning birds-eye photograph of one of this planet’s’s wonders.
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Bogda Mountains, China
Tulip Fields, Lisse, Netherlands
Hoover Dam Clark County, Nevada / Mohave County, Arizona, USA
Grand Prismatic Spring Yellowstone National Park, Teton County, Wyoming, USA
Shipping containers in Portsmouth, Virginia from one of our favorite photographers, Alex MacLean.
Lamberts Point Pier Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Stelvio Pass Northern Alps, Italy
I find this technique the Japanese developed to repair broken pottery really beautiful. Called Kintsugu, it means “golden joinery”. Lots of stuff about it around the web. I’m seriously considering about breaking something just so I can try mending it with this DIY Kintsugu kit.
Negotiating fees can be tough. Clients generally want finished work quickly with a clear ROI and you want to deliver great work and provide value. But developing creative is notoriously difficult to gauge. You may come up with brilliance quickly or it may be a slog – with round after round of executions, client AA’s and the dreaded “scope creep.” How can you possibly estimate fairly?
I recently downloaded the eBook pdf, Breaking the Time Barrier, by Mike McDerment (free, and no sign-up or other info required!). It’s a simple story in which a newbie designer seeks the counsel of a veteran to better understand how to value and price ones work. I’ve written countless proposals and thought we had a pretty tight system. Well, I may be re-thinking some aspects. A few areas Mike details made me think more critically of our approach – and I’m only halfway through! This should be required reading for any designer in business for themselves.
This week’s round up of vital and necessary productivity [mac] apps.
> PAPARAZZI – Not infrequently I need to review and present webpages – full top to bottom pages – outside of a browser. Paparazzi saves me precious time – no longer do I need to assemble multiple screen shots or pdfs into a single page. Just pop in a url and you can quickly save out a SINGLE file of the entire page – virtually any length> you can even batch capture pages with a text file of urls! brilliant.
> SKITCH – Skitch is sanity. The ease in which I can now simply grab, annotate and send a screen shots has enlightened my workflow. Pure zen. Also available for mobile devices. Now part of Evernote.
> WORDMARK.IT – Type in a word or phrase and this site will set it in every font loaded on your system – instantly.
> HIPSTER IPSUM – Oh. You need a little dummy text for your mockup? How quaint. Move up to the artisanal brooklyn cool of placeholder copy.
> RESPONSIVE DESIGN TESTER – Neat site that quickly displays how your site design will look in a variety of sizes
> MAIL TO SELF – This iPhone extension adds a button that allows you to email content to yourself from any app.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve probably designed close to 1,000 business cards. Now this guy comes along and shows me the proper way: spend 20 years designing one card! But it does show: Die-cut, embossed, foil stamp plus a bonus pop-up – stellar! And he comes across with such warmth and compassion. And hurling “Strathmore” as an insult, priceless.
Now this card is impressive:
This delightful work is from artist Gaku Nakagawa. Based in Japan, Gaku is a practicing monk and a full-time illustrator. I really love his style. The simplicity of line and shape, the harmonious color palette and the overall feeling and energy. Really beautiful. I’ve worked with Dutch Uncle (Gaku’s rep) before with Leandro Castelao, who is also terrific.
Picasso may have said “good artists copy, great artists steal”, and unquestionably, building on what others have done before – to create something new – is how progress is made. But the designers on this site are simply blatant thieves passing off the creative of others as their own. But beware – the logo po po are now watching!
