Fellow Academy of Art graduate student Johnny Selman has taken on a rather daunting project: design a poster a day for one year, using content based on a headline from the BBC news website. His project is meant to raise awareness of global current events using the immediately more accessible visual language of posters. Ideally the poster for the day intrigues you to read a story you might have otherwise ignored. He doesn’t make it very easy on himself either, as he only allows the use of 10 flat colors and no photography, all within the one day time limit per poster.
If you live in San Francisco, you can come check out the project in person tonight (12/16). Johnny will be celebrating his 100th day out on Valencia Street (between 17th and 22nd) with the first 100 posters displayed in storefront windows.
RED is finally bringing a prosumer class camera to bear and it looks like the release is imminent. While certainly not cheap at nearly $5,000 for the “lens and brain kit”, it certainly makes for a compelling alternative to the Canon 5D MK2. The aesthetics on the RED cameras (founded by Oakley’s Jim Jannard) are a little to reminiscent of those MP3 goggles Dog The Bounty Hunter wears but there’s no denying the quality of the output.
All the of RED stuff might as well be vaporware to me, I know it must exist somewhere but I’ve never seen it in person or even heard of anyone owning or using one of their cameras. Here’s a video of someone actually holding (apparently not using though) a Scarlet. I really like the screen configuration. Does anyone around here own or use a RED? Does it live up to the hype? Do you get free MP3 goggles with it?
I’m soo happy to hear these honest sounds from the new Dntel EPs, lets bury Postal Service in the backyard and pretend we never worked with Ben Gibbard. One listen all the way thru both EPs had me feeling like he really loved what the outcome was on these songs.
Have you asked yourself how the next Toro Y Moi album might sound like? well here’s a taste, a lot more funk and relying on his given talents, no smoke and mirrors just beautiful key work.
The intro to Painted Palms’All Of Us is being played on loop, just those first few notes, I LOVE IT!
I don’t know much about Australian born Reuben Ingall but I do enjoy his loose structure and processing, a nice change of pace for both manipulated string work, not too avant garde and not too trendy.
A handful of talented musicians were kind enough to do a last minute holiday cover song for all of us. Beautiful Bells might have won my heart over with probably the best experimental beat holiday song ever made. While Sun Hammer and Direwires duel it out over Silent Night, both takes will hold your patient ears with warming results. Toronto’s Warren Hildebrand aka Foxes In Fiction does an impeccable job of covering John Lennon and label mate Weed takes on the ever popular All I Want For Christmas and roughs it up perfectly with his notable garage sound. Last but not least the duo The Depot-Tones:
“Attached is a cleaned up, restored version of The Depot-Tones covering “Wonderful Christmas Time”. This was from a 7″ culled from the 45 dollar bin from Cousins Records during a recent digging expedition. The true identity of the Depot-Tones is shrouded in question, and every answer leads to five more questions. The best I’ve been able to figure out is the lead singer lived near Prospect Park and the rest of the band were all employees of the Chick-Inn drive in. This was a holiday promotional item sponsored by the Ypsilanti Chamber of Commerce and given away to customers. This is indeed excellence aged in cuban rum and virgin oak barrels and bottled in containers of crystal.”
Tatiana Plakhova has some beautifully complex work at her Behance page. Loving the complexity and color scheme of these, very dark but still a lot of life.
Nearly ten months ago, I (Shelby) had an idea that was inspired by the design community, one that I became very passionate about. The idea was to create some sort of platform to share what inspires you. We’ve seen it done before, but what I have for you is something I hope and believe you’ll really enjoy.
Designspiration is the outcome of my efforts to realize my idea, evolving into a site occupied by a diverse range of inspiration curated by its users. Designspiration or DSPN for short, focuses on the core principles of sharing inspiration and utilizes some great features; like a search function that works like a Swiss army knife, which I will discuss more in the post. Little did I know when starting this project that I would be clocking in more than 1,000 hours over the past ten months.
If you’re eager to check out the site, you can hit Designspiration.net or Ds.pn. With that said, I’m really excited to share this project and process with you…
This is the S1, Leica’s first digital camera. Introduced in 1996, it was a digital scanning back that could work with various lenses. Each exposure took 185 seconds to complete so had to be shot using continuous light. You might think that such an old digicam would produce inferior results, but apparently it was quite the opposite:
“Though slow, the S1 yielded 76Mb @ 24-bit (151Mb @ 48-bit), 5140 x 5140, 12-bit RGB image files that contained little if any of the artifacting, blooming, and fringing that continue to plague us to this very day” – B&H
And it operated at ISO 50! (the film speed) Pretty good for ’96, and it would only set you back $21,500… I’m loving the look of this thing which stands in stark contrast to the subsequent and far more familiar looking Leica S2 model. The second to last (with the rackmount processor) apparently depicts the “Highspeed Kit” which dramatically reduced the scanning time per image.
Here are some pages from the original brochure featuring some example output from the S1: Page 1 . Page 3 . Page 5 . Page 7 . Page 8
