I’ve been following Dan McPharlin’s work for a few years now, ever since his miniature synthesizer models started showing up on Matrixsynth. I fell in love with his perfectly crafted, perfectly photographed (seriously, the photography is almost cooler than the work itself) paper music machines. But after being introduced to his graphic/illustration work he quickly became one of my favorite artists. His illustrations are very reminiscent of another favorite of mine, Roger Dean, and are evocative of that prog-rock driven 70’s sci-fi art scene that, when done right, is just downright incredible.
So it’s been great to see Dan’s work start popping up all over the place, like here, here (Prefuse 73 cover), and here (Jakub, you really should have know better!). Beyond the visual beauty of his work, it’s just great to see someone being creative with such a novel medium. He brings the mind and eye of a designer to a world previously reserved for 60-somethings hiding out in their basements building model railroads. To see him wrap all this up and successfully translate that future-past-that-never-was aesthetic into commercial projects is a good thing indeed.
You can check out more of Dan’s work at his flickr.
On a side note, he’s posted some shots of his home/work-space here. Are you kidding? Amazing. My house looks like it was built of scraps from a 19th-century Troller Boat that ran aground in front of a hippie commune. Seriously, parts of a boat were used in the construction of this house, I am sure of it. Anyways, I am disorganized at best, slovenly at worst and I don’t think I have the skill set to keep such a meticulously minimalist situation like that up for any length of time. If I win the lottery I will get one of those modernist prefabs and put it in front of this house. I’ll then carefully place completely unusable angular furniture and German-designed objects all around it. Finally I will place a single synthesizer with wooden endbells and an analog sequencer on a white table with a molded plywood chair in front of it. When people come over I will tell them that’s where I get all my work done and then I will sit them down at a walnut coffee table with various important looking design books stacked neatly on top of it and expound on typography theory and then chastise them for not understanding the difference between kerning and leading. After they leave I will go back to my real house and eat a sandwich in my basement and watch Adult Swim and then not clean up the plate for a week or so.
The May edition of the ISO50/Tycho newsletter is out! You can view it here. If you’d like to receive them automatically, you can sign up here.
Also a quick correction. If you received the email version of the newsletter, some of the dates for the upcoming Tycho shows were wrong, here are the correct dates:
Just a quick heads-up that I’ll be battling it out with Folkert & Atley from But Does It Float today at 12pm PST. I think our styles will make for an interesting match, and looking forward to keeping my undefeated (2-0) Layer Tennis record intact. Don’t miss it!
These pin-ups are from the amazing Vintage Knob collection. There’s plenty more of these to see over there along with the more basic fare: close-ups of audio/visual equipment sans hot girls. That Marconi one up there is the best thing I’ve seen in a while; wall size print coming up as soon as they deliver the 9900. Seeing stuff like this always gives me mixed feelings. It just reminds me of the wealth of beautiful images out there that are just lost to time. Can you imagine being able to get the original negatives to these shots and do serious enlargements? It’s nice that sites like The Vintage Knob are making these available in some form, but 72dpi Jpegs just don’t cut it for print output.
If you’re a designer you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of The Golden Ratio. People often invoke the idea to explain why something is inherently well laid out or pleasing to the eye. I have heard people say they see it in some of my work, but I’ve never knowingly tried to pursue it. And that’s apparently the whole point; even if we don’t consciously know it, they say we are constantly seeking it out. When the Golden Ratio presents itself to us we subconsciously recognize it because it supposedly mirrors the proportions of our own human form.
Load of crap? I thought Yoga was a load of crap but now my knee is better. But for the record, I still don’t believe in wizards and/or gemstones, except in medieval times when both apparently worked great. Whatever the case may be, this guy sure seems to think everyone’s favorite ratio isn’t all that golden. Keith Devlin wrote an article for The Mathematical Association of America entitled The Myth That Won’t Go Away and in he he posits that the entire concept of the Golden Ratio as it pertains to aesthetic appeal in humans is a falsehood perpetuated by centuries of myth. He does concede, however, that “the appearance of the golden ratio in nature…is real, substantiated, and of considerable scientific interest”.
I came across the article in @AisleOne’s Twitter who, as it happens, is a proponent of the application of the Golden Ratio in web design and typography. For the record I don’t really have an opinion either way, just haven’t studied it enough. But I thought it was interesting to hear a dissenting viewpoint on the subject given that everyone else I’ve ever talked to about it only sang it’s praises. Makes for an interesting debate I’m sure, anybody have any opinions they’d like to share?
By the way, when I was searching for an image for the article I came across the poster you see above via Myleftisyourright. You can also find some other cool stuff in the same gallery.
ISO50 is back online after the server apparently took a much needed 24 hour nap, hope you didn’t miss us too much…
Anyways, before the outage I had planned on posting this amazing prefab home from architects Horden Cherry Lee. The “Micro Compact Home” is a joint Japanese/German project and it shows. You really can’t go wrong with that combination and you also can’t go wrong when your new home is delivered into the mountains by some Swiss helicopter. Awesome. Loving that antenna too, or is it a flag pole? Either way it makes the whole thing about 100 times better.
Spring is finally creeping into town (although very slowly here in San Francisco) and I’ve been way into the AA tri-blend tees this year. So I printed up a modified version of the Vuela Print on Heather Grey tees for your sunny weather enjoyment. As always, you can get yours over at the ISO50 Shop. I’m also clearing out a lot of the older designs to get ready for summer so you’ll find lots of shirts marked down 20-30%. All marked down shirts are the final pressing of that particular design/colorway.
On a related note I’ve been spending a lot more time trying to learn the ins and outs of product photography. I’ve been shooting the products for years but I’ve never spent enough time worrying about the color accuracy of the output. After all this time working with cameras you’d think it would come easy, but I was surprised to find how difficult it was to get good shots when the goal is creating a color accurate representation of an inanimate object. With my creative photography I’m always trying my best to make things appear inaccurate and I guess old habits die hard. For the shots above I used a tungsten photo bulb/can light along with a Quad CF lamp from Calumet. I had been using 3 lights but it turned out that hitting the subject from the right side and front with lights and letting some natural light in from the left (there was a window there) made for better dynamics so I’ve been sticking with the 2 light setup.
The last couple product shoots were the first times I’ve used a Gretag card to calibrate the camera color temperature under the lights. That and shooting in NEF RAW really went a long way to getting a solid foundation, but there was still a lot of work done in post. Having the calibrated monitor definitely helped at that point, but the real key I found was changing my own perception of the image and training myself to see it in a different way than I’m used to. I always catch myself slipping and trying to make the shots look interesting or enhanced and then have to step back and realize that this needs to be a literal representation of the real object. At any rate, I’ve got a ways to go (can’t even imagine how they get all those high end fashion shots) but it’s been surprisingly interesting learning the subtitles and nuance of a new kind of photography. It certainly is it’s own art form. I’m sure a lot of you have some product photography chops, feel free to share any of your tricks of the trade in the comments.
Also, I know I’ve been promising it for a long time, and I assure you, a very detailed post about color calibration is on the way. The project has sort of taken on a life of it’s own and I’ve brought Alex on board to help with research and production. We’re going to be shooting an interview with a color expert in the next couple weeks and we should wrap the post soon after that so stay tuned!
I posted on the Brionvega TS522 portable radio a while back. Now here’s the perfect companion, the Brionvega Doney TV. It is, of course, way expensive (edit: apparently not, around $300 actually, thanks sean) and way hard to get a hold of. And if you’re looking for something even more future-retro, there’s also this concept (if that’s the remote laying there, I’m sold.
Here’s another shot of the TS522 for good measure…So Rams-esque:
