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Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Fauxtoshop
Posted by Steve
This is your big fat brain. This is your big fat brain on viral advertising, for which there is no cure. The headline " You Suck at Photoshop Returns" was enough to drag me in to a web of infectious viral advertising. So, if you are one of the three people (of which I was one) on the planet who has not seen "You Suck at Photoshop," go straight to My Damn Channel and check out (I mean really spend some time with) the travails of Donnie Hoyle, the mythical master of fauxtoshop instructionals. Donnie is the invention of the folks ( Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch) at Big Fat Brain, a viral advertising and interactive firm, which seeks to control hearts and minds (and pocketbooks) by introducing "advanced interactive elements" into the body politic. "You Suck at Photoshop," though not sponsored by Adobe, has certainly raised awareness of the complexities of this integral twenty-first-century answer to penicillin. Advertising | Photography
8/20/2008 7:51:12 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Loco Logoman
Posted by Steve
Look! On the screen! Its a bird! Its a plane! Its Logoman! Faster than a free-source template. More powerful than Landor. Able to transform mere symbols into biting satiric marks. Its Logoman! Who, disquised as Felix Sockwell, the boisterously outspoken, orange jumpsuit-wearing graphic designer for great metropolitan clients, fights a never-ending battle to make existing logos the objects of sarcasm and ridicule. Shown here are a few of his recent parodies: Obeyma and Oyvey. And along with with his faithful Nordic companion, illustrator Thomas Fuchs, he has deconstructed the GOP Pachyderm. (Get your poster before the convention: limited quantities available.)
Design | Election | Posters
8/19/2008 7:36:15 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Happy Birthday Seymour Chwast
Posted by Steve
Don't worry, this space will not, as a rule, be used to shout out an endless litany of birthdays. This one, however, is special. Seymour Chwast does not have a birthday every day. So I thought it only fitting to comemorate this master of pen, brush, and Cellotak, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, author of more than 30 children's books, publisher of the Push Pin Graphic, winner of countless awards, former pipe aficionado, and a consistently pithy and poignant polymath. It is also worth noting that after five decades in the design and illustration business, his imagination hasn't taken a holiday. As an example, check out his quarterly publication, The Nose. The current issue is devoted to the "unreal" (see below). Note: Chwast is pronounced QWAST and means "weed" in Polish. Illustration | Magazines | Design
8/18/2008 7:47:26 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Friday, August 15, 2008
Say What?
Posted by steve
We considered conducting the ICON 5 Illustration Conference podcasts in the nude, but clear heads, good taste, and a limited budget (for only audio, not video) prevailed. So if you're expecting Illustrators Gone Wild, go elsewhere. But if you hunger for some good talk about illustration entrepreneurialism with Mitch Nash of Blue Q; the status of illustration in the museum world with Stephanie Plunkett of the Norman Rockwell Museum; how Starbucks got its name with Stanley Hainsworth, former creative director for the coffee chain; how James Jean helped redefine the look of comics; and what makes Jimbo creator Gary Panter cry, then check out the ICON 5 podcast series. The podcasts feature me in the role of Barbara Walters; they were produced by Citizen Scholar and recorded by Scott Hirsch, with music by Cars and Trains.
8/15/2008 8:10:20 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
Is Nothing Sacred?
Posted by Steve
Is everything in this presidential race fair game for raucous and rancorous levity? Is nothing sacred? Truth be known, the answer is yes on both counts! If we can’t make fun of our presidential hopefuls (and, more importantly, politicians in general) what difference would there be between the US and North Korea? In such a drawn-out campaign as this, my friends, we can only take so much of the canned rhetoric. We hope the candidates make a surfeit of gaffes so that predatory comics and satirists can sink in their teeth and draw the requisite blood. Thanks to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report these days, wit and humor is on the rise on both sides of the political chasm. So for you to make informed decisions, I have compiled a personal list of the top five satires to date. The winners, in descending order are: 5. This send-up of Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster. 4. The bi-partisan political humor on Jibjab. 3. Robert Grosssman’s O-Man Song by John Simon. Tied for second: 2. The Onion’s “ War for the White House.” 2. Paris Hilton’s response to the McCain ad comparing her to Britney Spears and Barack Obama. And the winner and new champion: 1. Doctored John McCain photos. (see above) (Hats off to Barack Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Barack”)
  DIY | Election
8/14/2008 6:50:02 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Dali and SpongeBob: Surreal and Unreal
Posted by Steve
Continuing our mini-theme of Summer art events in New York, two you can't afford to miss are the Museum of Modern Art's Dali: Painting and Film and Steve Powers' Waterboard Thrill Ride. One is surreal and the other unreal ( or is it?). Can you guess which? The MoMA exhibition is a survey of Dali's romp through cinema, featuring paintings, sketches, and original scripts, as well as large screen projections of his most bizarre imaginings, including the torturous scene from " Un Chien Andalou" and the nightmarish fantasies in Alfred Hitchcock's " Spellbound." For Powers' spectacle, he recreated a Guantanamo Bay-style waterboarding torture scene using robots in New York's Coney Island. (The piece will soon move to the Park Avenue Armory for the Democracy in America exhibition). At the " Waterboard Thrill Ride," visitors are charged a dollar to look through a
barred window while a hooded robot pours water into the face of an
orange jumpsuit-wearing robot. Outside, a sign shows SpongeBob ( isn't he supposed to be gay?) SquarePants saying "It don't GITMO better!" See a video here.
   Museums | Street Art | Videos
8/13/2008 8:07:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Third Degree Byrne
Posted by Steve
This is really hot, and it only lasts for two more weekends. CREATIVE TIME presents Playing the Building: An Installation by David Byrne at The Battery Maritime Building in downtown Manhattan. The building is open Friday, Saturday, and Sundays from noon to 4pm and closes on August 24. Former Talking Head Byrne has converted this landmark building into a mammoth musical instrument. Every part of the Maritime's infrastructure--pillars, pipes, and beams--are hooked electronically to an organ that, when played, triggers vibrations and oscillations that resonate sound. Visitors are invited to play their own tunes ( Chopsticks is a favorite). This event seems to have been drowned in the flood of publicity over Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls, but it should not be missed. For vicarious thrills, check out the videos at David Byrne's website. (Thanks to Eden Ross Lipson for the heads-up.) Museums | Music
8/12/2008 6:40:40 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Monday, August 11, 2008
Great! More Stuff To Collect!!!
Posted by Steve
 Even if you are a congenital collector, mid-century Modern furniture can be too expensive (and large). Vitra's minature masterpieces--beautiful little replicas of all the Eames-designed chairs and more--are still prohibitive at more than $200 a pop. But this weekend, I found an affordable line of li'l modern gems created by Reac/Japan (the Reina Design Interior Collection) while I was at Giant Robot in the East Village, New York. Furniture | Modernism
8/11/2008 5:40:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Friday, August 08, 2008
Olympics '08: Don't Forget Tibet
Posted by steve
RememberTibet.org is an initiative started by Jonathan Barnbrook and Pedro Inoue designed to engage people during (and after) the Beijing Olympics Games through art and design to help raise awarness of China's policies towards Tibet. I asked Barnbrook to explain his goals: What is your long term plan?Our long term plan is, in some small way, to add to the weight of opinion that will change the situation. It's important, though, to not see this as only a design project even though we are asking for creative pieces; it is these pieces that can be used as tools but without getting hung up on whether they are legitimate design or not. Do you think this will make a difference? We will never know. Things aren't as simple as someone putting up a poster and the world will change. But I do believe that things change because of people forcing an issue onto the agenda. What is the inspiration for the animated sequences (shown below)? The animation is the first part of the project. It is there to publicise the web site and encourage people to contribute their own work.The main point of doing this animation is to remind people very simply and clearly about this situation in a balanced way. That is why it is just two people [in the narration] discussing the situation; there is no heroic ranting and we are trying to tackle the grey areas that Chinese government constantly tries to bring to this argument.
     Advertising | Animation | Propaganda
8/8/2008 8:01:11 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Patti Smith, Rock Journalist
Posted by Steve
Reading the review of Steven Sebring's eleven-years-in-the-making “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” the new film about Patti Smith, I was struck by this quote: If you want to know about punk, what it was like to play CBGB when it
mattered (or on its final night, as Ms. Smith did in 2006), look
elsewhere. The same goes if you want to know what it was like to be on
top of the world and on top of the charts, to watch Robert Mapplethorpe
get his nipple pierced, sit at the feet of William S. Burroughs, and
shack up with Sam Shepard at the Chelsea Hotel.When I was the 18-year-old art director of ROCK magazine (early '69), I worked with Patti, an associate editor and staff writer, and then a totally unknown rock "fan," who let it slip only on one occassion that she knew Sam Shepard and never spoke at all about Mapplethorpe. She did, however, drop Todd Rundgren's name often, and repeatedly talked about how much she wanted to meet Dylan. During her brief stint at ROCK, Patti wrote a few stories (see below) about her love of 45 rpm records and her rock 'n' roll brothers. Her journalism was more poetry than reportage, but each of her articles contained a real passion for her rock obsession. Nonetheless, after only a few issues (two months), she was fired by the editor who wanted less of an ethereal dreamer and more of a hardnosed reporter. I didn't see or hear about Patti again until three or four years later when she was the rock star she always dreamed of becoming. Honestly, I would never have guessed.    DIY | Magazines | Music
8/7/2008 6:08:39 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
When Left is Right
Posted by Steve
I am liberal enough that I can embrace the political right when its humor is funny. And while I don’t agree with the ideological impurity of the disturbingly witty The People’s Cube, I’ll blog to the death their right to be right. (While this may seem too extreme, I am a liberal after all.) Founded by Oleg Atbashian, who moved to the U.S. from the Ukraine in 1994, where he worked as a “propaganda artist” for the Soviets, The People’s Cube is a political satire website and “people’s blog” that grew out of Communists for Kerry, founded in 2004 by the Hellgate Republican Club of New York (and was an alternative to Billionaires for Bush). Atbashian questioned why liberals blamed America for the world’s ills and decided to mount his own protest. He built a language of satire based on parodies of Soviet-era iconography, and most recently, TPC has lampooned Senator Obama (and continues to lambast Senator Kerry). While The People’s Cube churns out the satiric sausage on a regular basis, its cousin Che-Mart adds to the counter-revolutionary insurgent hilarity with scores of audacious products featuring T-shirts of that over-commercialized consumptionary Che Guevara. I guess, for every action there is a reaction. Right? Or Right on?    Election | Propaganda
8/6/2008 11:18:54 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Shooting The Canon
Posted by Steve
Those who study design history have for years learned about the "canon," the core figures (people and objects) that have significantly contributed to graphic design practice. For almost as long as the canon has existed, it has been challenged as being too Modernist, Eurocentric, print-oriented, classically trained, Bauhaus-born, Pentagram-driven, male-dominated, and a dozen other canards. It's true that the canon was established by the few who exercised control over the field, and there is much room for expansion. History is ongoing, as it should be, and the canon should be shot at on a regular basis. In its current issue, titled "Beyond the Canon," EYE magazine takes the established record to task, not by defaming what exists, but with a selection of new candidates, including off-the-radar entries ( see here). This issue marks the first under its new self-owned, independent management, and the launch of their new blog, which, among other things, features a short post of my own "Beyond the Canon" offering, a Deco Kodak package design. Incidentally, here's another candidate for the canon, the original 1968 EYE, published by Hearst.
 Magazines | Packaging
8/5/2008 6:53:53 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
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