Hasisi Park

• Posted by Alex M 30 July 2010

Hasisi Park’s photography is genuine, honest, insanely personal and, perhaps most importantly, 80–90% completely weird. She also has one of THE BEST biographies on the internet.

Monika Wyndham

• Posted by Alex 30 July 2010

I’d hazard a guess that Brooklyn creative Monika Wyndham is a confident sole. By the looks of her online personality we have an experimental, throw-myself-into-anything type, who isn’t afraid to lay her colours on the line for all to critique. As I’m on a prediction drive, I’d stick my neck out and say that when she finds her niche it’s going to one that everyone’ll want to unzip. Here’s a shot from her Store Design section, which is well worth a scroll through.

Taryn Simon

• Guest posted by TheGreenEyl 30 July 2010

In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon reveals what lies
unknown in the realms of government, science, security and nature. The photographs
are formal, carefully lighted, however the toneless captions give the images their
defining weight.

Chris Woebken: Nanofutures

• Guest posted by TheGreenEyl 29 July 2010

What happens if nanotechnology starts to replace existing materials? How do we interact with this world? Using seeds as a simulation for smart dust, this video visualizes new interactions such as breaking, sharing, throwing away and mining data. These new interactions not only generate new behaviors but might also redefine our relationship with products.

Neville Brody: The Anti-Design Festival

• Posted by Alex 29 July 2010

There’s little doubt that the vast majority of you have heard of design legend Neville Brody, but you may not have heard of The Anti-Design Festival, Neville’s latest cultural comment. In short and to quote their site, “As a response to 25 years of cultural deep freeze, the Anti Design Festival will attempt to unlock creative fires and ideas, exploring spaces hitherto deemed out-of-bounds by a purely commercial criteria.” A truly fascinating idea, and one that’s objective is to engage thought and discussion, so, to kick things off, we spoke to Neville himself about the ideas behind the festival, and how you can get involved yourself… (Read more)

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky

• Posted by Alex M 29 July 2010

There are people you identify as ‘creatives’ because a) it’s impossible to label them as being just one thing or b) because, in all honesty, their work is a sucker-punch of ridiculously wonderful stuff you less than understand and don’t know how to describe. Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, then, is a ‘creative’ whose work mixes installation, conceptual art and photography so seamlessly that you’ve no idea when one thing ends and the next begins.

Bernhard Hopfengärtner: Hello World (a visual code for Google Earth)

• Guest posted by TheGreenEyl 28 July 2010

Hello, world! is a real installation for the virtual globe of the software Google
Earth. A Semacode measuring 160×160 metres was mown into a wheat field near
the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18×18 bright and
dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”. The ambition was to
have an areal view of the code integrated in Google Earths’ regular database. The
project was realised in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture
flight in the following month.

DIS Summer Trends

• Posted by Alex M 28 July 2010

According to DIS magazine, this year’s summer trends include multi-level denim shorts, flash drive belly chains and velcro. I’m pretty sure that, having seen this, you’ll never look at fashion the same way again.

Nika Kupyrova

• Posted by Alex 28 July 2010

Do you remember those beautifully made, scientific illustrations you found in textbooks that showed intimate close-ups of the hair on your scalp or arm? Perhaps not, but either way this installation by artist Nika Kupyrova reminded me of them, and it’s organic, free-form dismantled plastic flowers and computer cables are nothing less than enchanting. Whether you knew of her work before or not, now’s your chance to go and explore the rest.

Dunne & Raby: The Statistical Clock

• Guest posted by TheGreenEyl 27 July 2010

The description of this project on Dunne & Raby’s website reads: “The Statistical Clock checks the BBC website for technologically mediated fatalities: car, train, plane, etc, and pulls them into a database. Each technology has its own channel. The clock checks it every minute or so, and each time it finds a new one it speaks it out loud… 1, 2, 3, etc.” The Statiscal Clock is part of the series “Do you want to replace the existing normal?”

Margaret Durow

• Posted by Alex M 27 July 2010

Margaret Durow is twenty years old, which perhaps is important and perhaps isn’t. Either way, her portfolio is a ridiculously accomplished selection of photographs both dreamy and personal. Wanting to discover a little more, we asked Margaret a few questions… (Read more)

Miles Donovan

• Posted by Alex 27 July 2010

For one reason of another, the superb portfolio of Miles Donovan has never appeared on the blog (embarassed look). But, never fear I’ve made amends this morning, and what better timing than to tell you about a bit of an update to his personal site? Packed with tons of well selected and composed layers, Miles’ experience makes him nothing short of an editorial master.

Thomas Thwaites: The Toaster Project

• Guest posted by TheGreenEyl 26 July 2010

The Toaster Project chronicles Thomas Thwaites’ attempt to make an electric
toaster from scratch – literally from the ground up. Starting with digging up the raw
materials from abandoned mines around the UK, then attempting to process them
himself at home, and finally forming them into a product that can be bought for just
£3.94. Thomas’ toaster cost £1187.54 and took him nine months to make. Photography by Nick Ballon.

Dave Tree: Bombay Bicycle Club

• Posted by Alex 26 July 2010

Now a few of you may be familiar with Dave Tree and Ben Axtell’s fantastic Watch Listen Tell that we covered back in September, and this project, conceived in the same vein and directed by Dave Tree is a blinder. For the launch of Bombay Bicycle Club’s new album, Flaws, there has been a video shot (with the audio recorded live) live for every track on the record. The results are stunning and the quality remarkable. Here’s the title track to get you started, and you can buy a special edition CD/DVD combo with all the videos on now.

TheGreenEyl

• Posted by Alex 26 July 2010
• Part of Guest Posts

I first came across the work of TheGreenEyl at the 2009 Designs of the Year exhibition, where their brilliantly intuitive and inclusive Appeel piece was displayed. Since then I’ve been intruiged and have kept tabs of their brand of interactive, audience-centric design practice. Their picks for their five posts this week are fantastic, and worth tuning in at noon every day to check out. For now, have a closer look at their work, and see what they have to say for themselves…

Non Format: Even Your Friend

• Posted by Will 26 July 2010

The unstoppable Non-Format update with this music video for The Chap and their single Even Your Friend. Created using various stock photography alongside their own the hypnotic movement and creations put infront of you is well worth 3 minutes of your time on this Monday morning.

Things – Bumper Edition

• Posted by Alex M 24 July 2010
• Part of Things

I’ve been away for the last two weeks, baking, and have returned to what could easily be described as a mountain of printed material. To celebrate, this week’s Things is a little larger than usual, filled with all sorts of stuff I’m convinced you’d do anything to get your hands on. (Read more)

Crumpler

• Guest posted by Stewart Smith 23 July 2010

Crumpler is a tool that allows one to fold over Adobe Illustrator vector drawings as if they were paper. It is Jürg Lehni’s latest addition to Scriptographer, a plugin for Illustrator that enables users to create new drawing tools and functionality through the use of JavaScript.

Steven Burke

• Posted by Alex 23 July 2010

Great update from French illustrator Steven Burke. I m usually seduced by his great brand of illustration for fashion, editorial and beyond, but this time round I was especially taken by this 3D piece, Poor Little Trees, bluntly described as: “Acrylic on dead wood, variable dimensions.”

Stefan Kjartansson: Cumulus & Foam

• Posted by Will 23 July 2010

Some typefaces have films made about them (Helvetica), some typefaces are ridiculed (Comic Sans) and others appear from nowhere and gather momentum like Cumulus & Foam, the typeface pictured that has gradually been gathering attention across the blogoshere. It is also the first typeface I discovered that had its own Facebook page (but I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll find other).

Described as “the most beautifully grotesque font of our time” we had to find out more and went straight to the man who designed it, Stefan Kjartansson. (Read more)

Ginette Lapalme

• Posted by Alex M 22 July 2010

First time around, I was worried that Ginette Lapalme’s website was some sort of drug-induced hallucination, full of characters I’d either hug or immediately run away from. I think I had to close my eyes for a while, in an attempt at ‘getting a grip on things’. But it exists, in real life, and after numerous views remains just as mind-bending and outrageously colourful as initially experienced. Have a look, let your heads wander…

Pop! Faces

• Posted by Alex 22 July 2010

Ever fancied screwing up the King of Pop, or crumpling Brad Pitt? Well you’ve been saved the trouble thanks to Pop! Faces, a simply executed, well photographed set of crumpled up pages of celebrities. Doesn’t set your world alight just to read, but that’s the beauty of a great creative idea. Effortlessly successful.

Iker Ayestaran

• Posted by Will 22 July 2010

Really nice work from Iker Ayestaran, very classic in it’s look and feel but that doesn’t make it any less special. The piece pictured makes you wish you were on beach doesn’t it…

Aaron Rayburn

• Posted by Alex 21 July 2010

Aaron Rayburn and a band of seventeen other Portland-based creatives set themselves the task of creating a collaborative project as a single unit, and the results are magnificent. Their outcome, on display at the Littman Gallery is a giant piece of type using 14.2 miles of string, outlining 25 letters on 2,500 eyelets, strung by hand. Aaron explained things a little more, and also sent us through some more pics… (Read more)

The Ride

• Posted by Will 21 July 2010

Not content with being named designer of the year (in the consumer magazines category) at the PPA magazine awards last month for his work as Art Director of UK Wired, but Andrew Diprose also self publishes The Ride with his brother Philip.

The Ride is a magazine about bikes by people who love bikes, the only difference being that you won’t find any reviews or race reports, just personal stories of bike related content accompanied by great illustration and photography. We caught up with Andrew to find out more… (Read more)

Katja Mater

• Posted by Alex M 20 July 2010

Katja Mater constructs buildings from books, takes pictures in the dark and celebrates the RGB colour space. She deals, so she says, with “the possibilities and impossibilities of photography,” which means, I think, that whatever she creates is ace.

Hackers and Painters

• Guest posted by Stewart Smith 20 July 2010

Paul Graham received his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard and studied painting at RISD and in Florence. Best known as a programmer and venture capitalist in the US. (Among other things he invented Bayesian spam filters.) His 2004 book, Hackers and Painters, concerns itself with makers who must not only decide what to make, but how to make it. Both artist and engineer. It’s great conversational fodder for anyone running their own small graphic design studio, but particularly so for designers dabbling in the digital. While I disagree with some of Paul’s conclusions his efforts to demystify are admirable. And the chapter on being a nerd in high school brings a bit of comfort.

Michael Please: The Eaglman Stag

• Posted by Alex 20 July 2010

Oh my word, this looks truly astounding. Michael Please has just graduated from the Royal College of Art with a masters degree, and considerable expertise. The Eaglman Stag is a dark cerebral comedy about a mans obsession with his quickening perception of time and the extreme lengths he goes to in order to counter the effect, the irony is the amount of time this must have taken to put together is mind-boggling.

Stop what you’re doing and indulge in 47 seconds that will make you spend a whole lot longer trying to find the full version.

Femke Agema

• Posted by Will 20 July 2010

Lovely work from Amsterdam based fashion designer Femke Agema and her latest project Totem. Using totem poles as a starting point for the collection the general inspiration for the project came from the cropped and edited images that people use for social networking sites and the shift this has led to in ‘real’ human relationships.

Totem is being exhibited until the end of August at the Moooi Gallery in Amsterdam (Westerstraat 187).