The works of these two painters (first linked to via the prolific Neatorama), remind me of M.C. Escher (and a handful of other artists and visual tricksters), in a sort of user-friendly, low-calorie way.

 

Goofy, playful, graphics-laden 3D isometrics and sections permeate the work of Josh Keyes.

And the pop surrealism of Robert Gonsalvez reminds me of a cross between René Magritte, Norman Rockwell, with a dash of Maxfield Parrish.

[via Neatorama here and here]

An interesting piece in the International Herald Tribune about the current fascination with the Georgia font (not familiar? hint: you’re reading Georgia right now).

A ton of blogs uses it. The new New York Times site uses it. If you sit in front of a screen for most of the day, chances are high that most of that time was spent with the font burning inobtrusively into your retinas. What you might not have known is that Georgia, along with its sans serif sibling Verdana, were created at Microsoft back in 1996 to be screen-friendly typefaces for the nascent web-browsing masses.

Read the article here.

From illustrator Thomas Fuchs’ collection “GOP100 - Deconstructing Dumbo,” produced around the time the Republican Convention invaded our fair city of New York in that depressing summer of 2004.

It’s now part of a self-published book; get your copy at New York Imposter.

[via Neatorama]

Michael Bierut has written a post in Design Observer describing the recent mini-protest at this year’s National Design Awards (held annually by the Cooper-Hewitt) by five prominent designers (Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, and Georgie Stout, all from 2×4; Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister), who declined an invitation by Laura Bush to attend a breakfast at the White House for the occasion. It’s a principled gesture, and one I support, but it remains a gesture, and its ultimate futility recalls a quote by Deleuze in the preface to his collection of writings Negotiations (substitute “design” for “philosophy” where, or if, appropriate):

… philosophy’s always caught between an anger with the way things are and the serenity it brings. But Philosophy isn’t a Power. Religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television are powers, but not philosophy. Philosophy may have its great internal battles (between idealism and realism, and so on), but they’re mock battles. Not being a power, philosophy can’t battle with the powers that be, but it fights a war without battles, a guerrilla campaign against them. And it can’t converse with them, it’s got nothing to tell them, nothing to communicate, and can only negotiate. Since the powers aren’t just external things, but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations with, and a guerrilla campaign against, ourselves.

The design elite, like philosophers, speak in a rarefied language whose meaning is only communicated within tiny, isolated circles. They speak of politics but do not impel any direct force upon politics.

Adam Hanft wrote of this phenomena in a terrific piece for The Huffington Post a couple of months ago. He calls it the ‘creative curse,’ defined in this way: the groups that are most creative and contributory to the arts are the lease effective in the political sphere.

As perpetual outsiders, liberals have constructed an ecosystem — an architecture of desire and hope — that seeks to influence the culture artistically, to re-imagine the world through drama and fiction and poetry. The conservative movement has taken a completely different approach, and has been wildly successful at it. They aren’t interested in the alchemy of philosophy into art, but the muscle of philosophy into practice. They’ve made the two last struggles of the last 50 years — against Communism and now against terrorism — into national theater with clear protagonists, heroes, enemies and values. It’s not sophisticated or imaginative theater, it’s not draped in ambiguity and moral complexity, but it’s theater nonetheless. Fox News is Death of a Salesman for conservatives. Reagan’s “Morning in America” was a national opera.

…

Liberals have been patterned by the Creative Curse, and it’s haunting them. If they want to become not just the dominant political segment — but the dominant turbine of ideas — they need to extend their energies to the levers of the larger culture, and write a narrative that is as creative politically as aesthetically. When the conservatives mock liberals as “elite,” what they’re really saying is that they put on performances that satisfy each other’s narrow frustrations or longing or anger. Meanwhile, while the left is constructing plays that are, in [Tony] Kushner’s term, “watchable,” the right is constructing epics that are winnable.

 

Here’s a site that points to the future by remixing bits of the past — in this case, old, Victorian lithographic images from Dover Publishing (at least that’s whom the designer/programmer/animator Caleb Johnston credits for the illustrators).

The site’s navigation scheme is fairly straightforward and idiot-proof. In a nutshell, roll over something clickable and then click on it. The meat of the experience, moreover, is what happens upon the click, which is per usual a swirling, spinning, throbbing, flashing rush of animal parts, plant matter, calligraphic type, women in petticoats, and Olde English gentlemen under tophats. The experience pretty deftly evokes the obsessive thematic delirium that grips you in depths of a drug trip. Speaking theoretically, of course. Ha.

The compositional and motion work are really astonishing, both aesthetically vivid and technical seamless. Given Flash 8’s video alpha and clip blurring cabilities, it’s difficult — and probably pointless, really – to tell, in several transitory instances, whether Johnston is employing some expert tweening or playing pre-rendered video. That ambiguity, however, belies a clear trend towards the convergence of rendered and pre-rendered animation on the web (currently represented by the respective capabilities of After Effects and Flash), a convergence which will be realized soon enough. The two factors that determine how soon that is are 1) how well Macromedia will integrate with Adobe’s mother borg, and 2) how that integration aligns with the rate of advance in home computing processing power. What say you, Moore?

Anyway, strong, strong work!

(ps. and the sound design — by Dallas Johnston — is boss too)

This t-shirt gives expression to the massive political groundswell … of graphic designers opposed to the war(s). Drop shadows, as you know, are their own form of carpet bombing. If you know it, you’ve abused it — it’s the crude but effective daisy cutter in the designer’s toolbox.

For 30 bones here.

[via BoingBoing]

The magnetic knitted katamari ball. Just keep it away from hard drives and credit cards. These are for sale here.

I dunno what it is, but there was something about this one-armed tree-sweater that filled me with pathos …

The Wooster Collective has a post regarding Adidas’ brilliant viral street poster campaign in Berlin for their recently launched Adicolor paintable shoes:

We love the new campaign that adidas launched recently in Germany for adicolor.

Here’s how it works:

First, adidas put up a series of mostly white flyerposters - branded with the adidas logo - that subtley encouraged people to tag the billboard and basically fuck it up.

But then, days later, they came back to those same ads and placed another poster over it. The new poster features the adidas adicolor show, now with the original tags from the previous poster incorporated into the show design.

Of all the recent street campaigns we’ve seen lately, this is our favorite one by far. It’s extremely clever, but most importanly it fits the brand perfectly. It takes advantage of the street to the fullest. And most of all, it turns the tables in an absolutely brilliant way that is extremely impressive.

We’re sure that not everyone will agree with us, but whoever came up with this idea is really fuckin’ smart.

Fuckin’ smart indeed. More photographs and info here.

Some web-magic to rub your belly late into the night …

1. Justin Swindle’s Soulwire is possibly one of my favorite portfolio sites of all-time, with a few qualifications. Some aspects of the interface sacrifice usability in favor of slickness — for example, the text-cycling gets a little old, and mousing over constantly scrolling, 10-pixel high buttons (you are essentially chasing small, moving targets) requires a little too much dexterity and coordination when it really needs to be about a buttery-smooth browsing process – but there are simply too many flourishes here that endear my own stylistic predilections, such as the creamy motion design, the sweet, crispy rollover sounds, and ahh, that wallpaper background (ooo, that changes color!).

If anything, a good incentive to get my shit together and update diametrik, now approaching 1.5 years of age, which is practically geriatric in web years …

2. I get the Schoolhouse Rock reference (I think …), but that’s really where my understanding begins and ends. In terms of its WTF?-bonafides, Kid America Club might properly belong in the webzen category per the previous post, but it’s too heavy on art direction and production to qualify as ‘zen.’ Prepare to be befuddled.

3. So dry, it’s parched; Lifelong Friendship Society, where commercial motion graphics meets Dada.

 

I picked up The Book of Probes from the always excellent Reed Space while wandering the LES a couple of weekends ago. The book could easily be one of those vaguely pretentious, eyecandy / Big Idea books that stimulates your impulse-buy nerve, and then gets put on the shelf or on the coffee table once you get home, never to be opened again. Those art books that disappointingly turn out more farty than arty … 

It’s the sad fact that the über-hotshot designer David Carson, who put together the visuals for the book, for me represents the worst of that pretentious, pseudo-artistic/literary tendency due to his work for the erstwhile late ’90s magazine Raygun (a magazine whose graphic anarchy pushed itself to the very edge of legibility). Yes, Carson’s art direction was certainly eye-popping and unprecedented (upside-down, backwards copy, articles that begin on the cover, articles written in some kind of since-clichéd ’broken typewriter’ typeface, etc), but it was in service to writing that was utterly disposable, even shoddy. Nothing transcendent came out of the relationship. Raygun was in the end all skin and no brains …

But in support of the evocative, epigrammatic writing of late Canadian media mystic Marshall McLuhan (of ‘Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’ fame), Carson’s aggressive design sensibility is given a second life, and the two elements on the page (MM’s words and DC’s visuals) find a clear and powerful synthesis.

Another recent impulse purchase that escaped coffee table purgatory was the fabulous book Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places, a survey book of primarily graphic artists (such as Ryan McGuiness and Pleix’s Genevieve Gauckler) who are moving their flat media into the volumetric.

From the book description:

‘From surface and into space is the overlying design trend these days. Graphic designers and urban artists are creating objects and interiors, moving into art galleries and museums worldwide. Designs, artworks and illustrations are emerging into the third-dimension increasingly featuring ornamental and sculptural objects. Hidden Track documents this movement introducing protagonists and their spaces that are taking current visual culture out of the underground to the the level of high culture.’