Stefan Sagmeister

http://www.ted.com/speakers/stefan_sagmeister.html

Stefan Sagmeister is no mere commercial gun for hire. Sure, he’s created eye-catching graphics for clients including the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, but he pours his heart and soul into every piece of work. His design work is at once timeless and of the moment, and his painstaking attention to the smallest details creates work that offers something new every time you look at it.

While a sense of humor invariably surfaces in his designs, Sagmeister is nonetheless very serious about his work; his intimate approach and sincere thoughtfulness elevate his design. A genuine maverick, Sagmeister achieved notoriety in the 1990s as the designer who self-harmed in the name of craft: He created a poster advertising a speaking engagement by carving the salient details onto his torso.

“Sagmeister’s CD package designs are what poetry is to prose: distilled, intense, cunning, evocative and utterly complete. His intentions have set a new standard.”

I.D. Magazine

illustration – singh twins

http://www.singhtwins.co.uk/GALLERY%20.html

illustrator dj elliot burford

Elliott Burford Art director/DesigElliott Burford Art director/Designerner

http://www.elliottburford.com/index.php?/graphics/sketches-from-a-20-something-life/

The Life Mixtapes
(2002–present)

The Life Mixtapes at an essential level function as a radio show for my (supposed future) children. Around the time of my birthday each year since the age of 18 I have recorded an approximately 3 hour ‘radio show’, where as the host, I run through and play a selection of songs that were listened to in the previous year of my life, commenting on how they were discovered and any memories associated with them. Each edition also comes with a separate recording, which serves as an aural diary, detailing in rough chronological order a summary of notable events and where possible, recordings of myself from earlier in that year.

Having worked in Australia and the United Kingdom for a number of years, a wide variety of clients have enjoyed his creations, ranging from tattoos, typefaces and annual reports to business cards for one man start-ups or brand identities in super size multi-national corporations.

He also creates drawings, photographs, short films and (generally terrible) music.

Elliott currently lives in Treviso, Italy, as a resident with Benetton’s communications research centre, Fabrica.

40 Beautiful Examples of Minimalism in Web Design by sixrevisions.com

http://sixrevisions.com/design-showcase-inspiration/40-beautiful-examples-of-minimalism-in-web-design/

1. Typographica

2. Theme

3. Squarespace Blog

4. Chama Inc

5. GOOD

6. Buffalo

7. Jason Santa Maria

8. monty lounge industries

9. Berit Sømme

10. JeffCroft

11. el Candor

12. La Fábrica

13. design by silnt

14. Black Estate Vineyard

15. Pixelcraft

16. RIKCAT

17. Pixel Umbrella – Nick Robinson

18. Poccuo

19. Klipp og Lim

20. cabedge.com

21. Ole Martin Kristiansen

22. siteInspire

23. Opdyne Design

24. Vudumedia

25. MediaFlex

Ten Things I Have Learned

Ten Things I Have Learned Part of AIGA Talk in London November 22, 2001 http://www.miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/essays/es3.html

1 YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE. This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle. 2 IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB. One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said. 3 SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM. This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life. 4 PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past. Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal. 5 LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE. Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’ 6 STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED. I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide. But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose. 7 HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN. The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how – that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy. 8 DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY. Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty. Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine. 9 ON AGING. Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’ 10 TELL THE TRUTH. The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

illustration – Dust La Rock does rapper covers

director – wes anderson

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-3-20090406

Part 1 covers Bill Melendez, Orson Welles, and François Truffaut. Part 2 covers Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester, and Mike Nichols. Part 3 covers Hal Ashby. Part 5 will be posted on April 13.

Anderson’s scavenger-hunt aesthetic stands him in good company, alongside Quentin Tarantino, David Gordon Green, James Gray, and the other Anderson, P.T. But what makes Wes Anderson distinctive is the sheer range of art that has fed his imagination—not just recent American and foreign films, but films from 30, 50, even 70 years ago, plus newspaper comics, illustrations, and fiction. The spectrum of influence gives his work a diversity of tone that his imitators typically lack. It is a style of substance.

rushmore = charlie brown

crush on teacher = crush on red haired girl

childish strips

- rushmore – pause on phone to run across bball court to block a layup

- royal tennabuams and toys

- life aquatic has rec center

- darjeering is summer camp

wes anderson = Scorsese

- slow motion to show emotion

- overhead shots

- the whip-pan, panning to most important thing on wall  or person

wes anderson – Richard Lester

- juvenile acts, running towards rec center pool = racing shopping carts

wes anderson = Mike Nichols’s second film, The Graduate

- age gap love stories

- quick dialogue

- structure

- deadpan comedy of manners (the celebrated “plastics” moment)

- dark-night-of-the-soul melodrama (Ben’s revelation to Elaine that he’s sleeping with her mother, the high point of which is an unfocused close-up of Elaine that slowly sharpens again as she absorbs the reality of her predicament)

- over-the-top farce (the climactic melee at the church, ending with Ben grabbing a huge cross, swinging it at the wedding party as if warding off vampires, then using it to seal the doors and trap them inside the building).

music:

the graduate – simon and garfunkel songs

ashby:

- a genuine affection for underdogs, losers, and eccentrics, a vivid sense of the absurd, an ability to intertwine comedy with tragedy

j.d. salinger:

- Max Fischer, could be Holden reimagined as a Type A personality.

- self-aggrandizing lost soul, a tortured adolescent whose abrasiveness seems partly traceable to the death of a beloved family member (Holden’s brother, Max’s mother).

Anderson’s films, like Salinger’s stories, are filled with loquacious, combative, often hyperachieving individuals who seem fully formed and secure in their identities but who reveal themselves as deeply damaged—by class anxiety, social expectations, and family dysfunction.

- They are too smart by half, and both artists let us know that their characters’ intelligence affords no insurance against despair or death.

- Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic is a middle-aged Max Fischer, desperately trying to defeat death with art

- The hyperverbal Whitman brothers of The Darjeeling Limited are haunted by their dad’s funeral, literally carry their dead father’s baggage around with them

- Both artists have a knack for what might be called “material synecdoche”—showcasing objects, locations, or articles of clothing that define whole personalities, relationships, or conflicts.

comic stories – Tales of Mere Existence

The need to be cool is lamented in Tales of Mere Existence. © Lev Yilmaz.

Tales of Mere Existence

AgentXPQ

Joined: September 07, 2006

Last Sign In: 3 hours ago

Videos Watched: 6,576

Subscribers: 53,061

Channel Views: 717,743

PLEASE READ: 2 of my videos, “What would penis do?” and “How I found out about girls” are CONSTANTLY being listed as “No longer available”. It is my suspicion that people are listing them as inappropriate or something, which is of course pretty absurd. I did not delete them, I’ve just listed them as private until I figure out what to do. -Lev

Name: Levni (Lev) Yilmaz

COMIC BOOK WITH DVD OF ANIMATIONS FOR SALE ON MY WEBSITE

I am on MySpace, under: tales_of_mere_existence

Country: United States
Website: http://www.talesofmereexistence.com/

Rereading old Life in Hell collections recently, I was please to find myself reacting exactly as I did when I first read them in the ’80s; at any given moment I was equally likely to drop the book and a) giggle or b) have a good brood. Matt Groening’s SoCal-blues comic creation could carry me along on the lilt of its amusing language and dorky graphics, and suddenly do a soul smackdown with Creative Self-Expression checklist items like “Write several unsold screenplays, then move back to Idaho.” A good man feeling bad, Groening as cartoonist in the early 1980s was simply a funny guy who wasn’t afraid to take his darkest thoughts to their logical conclusion.

Cartoonist/animator Lev walks a similar walk, although his talk, he insists, can be stilted, especially at parties. This Bay-area artist suffers the hipster disease so many of us share, the need to be cool in a crowd followed by the “I shoulda said” lament on the drive home. To heal himself he began doing Tales of Mere Existence, a series of films and comic strips at once universal and painfully personal. Tales of Mere Existence, a four-minute suite of short shorts currently making festival rounds and also available as a DVD from the artist’s IngredientX Website, is a collection of spoken narrations that Lev animated in real time by drawing caricatures in ink or pencil on some sort of translucent paper over glass, while filming it from the opposite side.

These micro-stories move fast and hurt good, as Lev goes for laughs in fearless ways that shock you even as you quietly nod your head in recognition. Unforgettable is a 45-second sequence called “Jealous” with frankly pornographic renderings of fourteen different couples copulating, under the narration “I try not to think about my ex-girlfriends too much, but when I do, I know that THIS is what Carol and her new boyfriend do and THIS is what Lisa and her boyfriend do and THIS is what Veronica and her boyfriend do and THIS is what Emily and her boyfriend do and THIS is what Mary and her boyfriend do and THIS is what Kara and her boyfriend do…”

Running the gamut from goofy to depressing, these introspective shorts dwell on subjects from guys who quote Monty Python to Tommy Hilfiger underwear, homemade haircuts, and the Theory of Popularity. Lev is a funny sombitch — go see his E.T.-related short 1982 on his Website and you’re sure to wish you had had him for a friend that year. Secure in the confidence that indeed he has the comedy chops, he has now, like all smart comic personalities, freed himself of them. Like Don Hertzfeldt’s Temporary Anesthetics and Scott Dikkers’ Jim’s Journal, Tales of Mere Existence is taking Lev beyond getting the gag to where he can focus on getting under the skin.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. On Saturdays he goes whale-tipping with a group of ne’er-do-well marine biologists.

photography – Kevin Bauman

100 ABANDONED HOUSES

This entry was posted Friday, 3 April, 2009 at 10:37 am

100 Abandoned Houses is a series project from photographer Kevin Bauman, which exploits the fact that Detroit has lost nearly half of it’s population in the past 60 year.

Check out 15/100 houses after the jump:

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Tags: 100 abandoned houses, art, detroit, kevin bauman, photography, population

UC Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive Research Award Announcement

Research Award Announcement

2009-2010 UC Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive Visiting Researcher Award

The UC Irvine Libraries is pleased to offer an award of $500 to one individual to use the research collections in the Southeast Asian Archive, part of the UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

The Southeast Asian Archive was established in 1987 to document the experiences of refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who came to the United States, and especially to California. The Archive’s strengths include materials relating to the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants in the United States (and to a lesser extent, worldwide), refugee camp and other experiences of the “boat people” and land refugees, the development and progress of new ethnic communities, and the culture and history of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. There is a special focus on materials pertaining to Southeast Asian Americans in Orange County and California. Holdings are in English and in Southeast Asian languages (primarily Vietnamese), and include organizational records, personal papers, books, periodicals, and a wide array of unique and ephemeral material. For more information about the Southeast Asian Archive, consult the website.

The award is intended for a researcher who lives outside of Orange County and is not affiliated with UC Irvine. Faculty, students, and independent researchers are encouraged to apply. Research should be conducted between June 2009 and March 2010. Shortly after visiting the Southeast Asian Archive, the recipient must provide a one-page statement of his or her research findings, which may be edited and used in the UC Irvine Libraries’ publications. The award is intended to generally defray expenses for traveling to Irvine and conducting research in the Southeast Asian Archive. Funds will be distributed in two installments, before and after the completion of the research project.

The application deadline is May 15, 2009. Applications will be judged according to the relevance of the proposal to holdings of the Southeast Asian Archive, the proposed outcome of the research, and the qualifications of the applicant. The recipient will be notified before June 1.

A generous gift from an anonymous donor has made this annual award possible.

Send the following information to spcoll@uci.edu.

1. Up-to-date resume or CV
2. Applicant name:
3. Address:
4. Telephone:
5. Email:
6. Title of project
7. Brief description of proposed research (no more than 500 words)
8. Collections or items that you anticipate using and how they are relevant to your proposed research (no more than 500 words). For information about the collections’ strengths, make sure to consult the following page: http://www.lib.uci.edu/libraries/collections/special/coll/seaa/strengths.html
9. Proposed outcome of the research (no more than 500 words)
10. One letter of reference from someone familiar with your research
11. Proposed dates for visiting the Southeast Asian Archive

More information about traveling to the UC Irvine campus is available at http://www.lib.uci.edu/libraries/collections/special/about/visitor_information.html. For more information about the Southeast Asian Archive and the award, please contact Christina Woo, Acting Southeast Asian Archive Librarian, at cjwoo@uci.edu.