Archive for April, 2008
Monday, April 21st, 2008
I've been really busy at work lately, mostly because three us moved into a design-centric office and I got a new rig. Between that and some freelance work this weekend, I've been too busy to think of a proper blog post, but not, however, too busy to post to Twitter. It seems like this has caught on with my circle of friends in a big way pretty recently, and as such I've been paying more attention to my once-neglected account. In case anyone is interested, here's my account. Drop me a line in the comments if you have any good Twitter anecdotes or feel like sharing your ID.
Tags: twitter
Posted in Internets | No Comments »
Muxtape
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
It's already had a fair amount of blog hype, but I finally created my muxtape today. 12 songs chosen more or less at random; were this a real mixtape, considerable more time and effort would have gone into which songs were picked and in what order. The service itself is pretty decent, it's nice to click on tapes randomly and discover something new -- but I really wish it wasn't broken up by track, and was instead one long mix (or, to be needlessly accurate, two). Oh well.
Tags: mixtape, muxtape
Posted in Music | 1 Comment »
Animal Collective – Water Curses
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Pitchfork.tv just debuted this new video from Animal Collective, it's the titular track from their new EP "Water Curses." The record is solid, basically feels like an epilogue to last year's epic "Strawberry Jam" album. The video is nice too, lots of big blocky pixels.
I've been working on a couple more design-centric posts. Gotta avoid video-dump syndrome.
Although if you're in the mood, the aforementioned Pitchfork.tv is a really nice resource. Only one week old, but already a ton of killer content. One to bookmark.
Tags: animal collective, pitchfork
Posted in Music | No Comments »
The Death of Jennifer Sisko
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I'm currently smitten with this painting by Brandon Bird. This may be old news to a lot of you, I remember first seeing this site years ago and I'm guessing its popularity peaked when his Law & Order Coloring Book was featured on Conan O'Brien. I'm personally more impressed by the pop culture-inspired paintings though, especially the ones (yes plural is appropriate) based on Star Trek: DS9, my sci-fi guilty pleasure. The painting is not for sale, although it looks like there are still prints available. Very tempting...
See also: Letters to Walken and No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford.
Tags: brandon bird, ds9, painting
Posted in Art | No Comments »
GTA IV Trailer
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
I admit it, I'm really psyched for the new Grand Theft Auto game. Kudos to Rockstar for using a Miles Davis "Birth of the Cool" track too.
Tags: gta, trailer
Posted in Video Games | No Comments »
Fred Thomas – Old News
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Former Ypsilantian Fred Thomas, of Saturday Looks Good to Me (and a bunch of other good bands), recently pulled a Deerhunter and started keeping a nice mp3 blog under the band name City Center. The offerings have been pretty good so far, sounding a bit like Animal Collective or Atlas Sound while still being very much Fred Thomas songs. A recent post announced a new cd of rerecorded old songs titled "Old News," I picked up a copy today and it's really good -- I didn't think the original recording of "When You Fuck Things Up With Your Baby" could be any more fucked up and beautiful but it totally is. Accompanying said post was an mp3 of the one cover on the new album, "Living Waters" by one of my other favorite bands the Silver Jews.
Download Fred Thomas - Living Waters (the Silver Jews)
Fred has instructions for buying the full cd on his site.
Tags: fred thomas, mp3, silver jews
Posted in Music | No Comments »
Process: My Bigfoot poster
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
A few weeks ago we got the word that the AIGA: Detroit (American Institute of Graphic Arts) was hosting the third fourth iteration of the Urban Forest Project, and that Media Genesis had been selected to produce two of the posters. For those that don't know, the Urban Forest Project (first held in New York City in the Fall of 2006) is an outdoor exhibition of posters dealing with issues of the environment, specifically trees and their importance in our ecosystem. Denver hosted the second Urban Forest Project shortly thereafter, and more recently Baltimore was the lucky host.
After researching some of the posters produced for both the New York and Denver projects, Matt and I began sketching out ideas for what we would produce. The brief mentioned using trees as a metaphor, but we both noticed that previous designers had taken this very literally and we began brainstorming ways around the "tree trap."
One night before falling asleep the phrase "Reason to Save the Trees #____" popped into my head. This seemed like a promising start; it was a blank canvas to come up with bizarre and off-the-beaten-path ways to subvert the "tree trap." I remember having a few impossibly ridiculous ideas at first, but the one that stuck was that of a homeless Bigfoot. This intrigued me. Bigfoot = funny, but Bigfoot with a bindle = comedy gold.
The next day at work I drew this:
I was excited about this direction, so I started to work in Illustrator. After a bit of drawing around I realized that if he was holding a sign instead of a bindle, there would be a great opportunity for a second joke inside the sign. Pretty soon I had this:
After messing around with some type treatments in Illustrator, and being generally unhappy with the results, I decided to move everything in to Photoshop. Generally Illustrator is the preferred app for print work, especially large posters, but in this case I wanted to try some things with layer grouping and blending effects that I felt more comfortable doing in Photoshop. After a couple missteps I decided to put the image in a frame, with the text outside it. Because this would be hanging on street lamps, I put all the text underneath the image. Bigfoot's sign was still blank, so I polled some people on what Homeless Bigfoot's sign should say. My girlfriend came up with "Will Verify Existence For Food," so I scribbled this on a piece of paper and scanned it.
Finally I had something that resembled a poster:
It was right around this time that we had our first internal critique involving me, Matt, and Antoine. It was a generally positive crit, although some very good valid points were brought up. One issue was the separation of text and image (I agreed that the layout seemed lifted from a Far Side cartoon). Another was the complexity, there were after all three "jokes" in something that most people would only glance at as they walked by. Not only that, but they were in a strange order:
Back in Photoshop I did my best to address these issues. Rachel suggested I replace the text in the sign with "Homeless and Hungry," which I really liked because it brought the text and image together and also simplified the layout (two jokes instead of three, basically). To accommodate this I had to move the text to the top, which I was skeptical of doing but if there's one thing I've learned about design it's that you have to be willing to experiment. Your gut feeling isn't always right, and your design isn't sacred, so you might as well experiment.
The obvious thing that felt unresolved to me at this point was the "Would Be" text. It was just sitting there, not doing anything for the design, but I was getting a little frustrated and couldn't see a better solution.
A few days passed and I came back to it. It felt off. It was awkward to read, and there was still too much going on. I decided then that my mantra from that point on would be "simplify, simplify." I took out everything that I thought was unnecessary, including previously-untouchable elements like the sign and the "Reason" text. I also decided to scale back on the number of colors used. Again, nothing is sacred and you have to be willing to get rid of things you think are good but just aren't working. After a bit of work I had it boiled down to this:
I felt close now, but the text at the top still bugged me. I reduced the number of colors more and went back to an old design stand-by of mine, the banner. For the first time, it felt finished.
But not for long. I left it alone again, came back to it, and this time it didn’t look as resolved as I remembered. If my mantra was “simplify,” why was there still that graphic noise in the background? I had tried to avoid gradients up until this point (for some reason, possibly involving my design education and preference for analog vs digital) but I tried it on the background and really liked the result. Antoine mentioned that the removing the “Reason #” text confused my initial message, that being that there are hundreds of reasons to preserve our environment, and after some consideration I agreed and brought it back. The banner moved to bottom, some colors were changed, and finally:
It was done.
I’ll post pictures once it’s printed and hanging up outside.
Tags: bigfoot, Design, poster
Posted in Portfolio, Process | No Comments »
Hamish Muir
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
The poster above is a new print by British designer Hamish Muir. I met Hamish a couple years ago while studying abroad at the London College of Communication. We got along really well, initially because I mentioned Pavement while listing my favorite bands. Hamish was one third of famed 80's design trio 8vo, and more recently designed the rather gigantic Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture.
You can purchase the print here.
via Swiss Legacy
Posted in Design | No Comments »
April Fool’s Prank
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Click the image above to view pictures and video of our epic April Fool's prank. Luckily Matt was pretty gracious about it; he made the image above actually.
Tags: april, fools, prank
Posted in Lulz | No Comments »