Australian’s like The Canyons have been putting out some great disco as of late, really good rhythm and guitar additions, really gives the songs this authentic non digital feel.
One of my favorite Lusine songs has to be Rushhour, its one of those songs that pays off if you listen to it from start to finish, no patience with the beginning will get you nowhere. Once you get to the 4 min mark you’ll know i’m talking about but the only way to truly enjoy it is listening to the detail in the build up to it, it literally sounds like the a thousand knifes being sharped by your ears while you try to run away from the highest quality low end that monsoons over your precious town.
Eliot Lipp and Leo123 collab again since their original material debut on Ghostly Swim and leak a cutup west coast indie club bomb for their North American tour, real solid work by the two.
Mountains sway the Thrill Jockey catalog up another step on the quality end by unleashing an absolutely phenomenal droned out LP, the real pleasure hear is having the whole LP and playing it start to finish, highly recommend atleast having the song Telescope.
As of this summer I am officially halfway through my graduate design program at the Academy of Art. Unlike a BFA degree, the MFA requires the completion of a thesis, and the second half of the graduate program is dedicated to the development of this. The most recent checkpoint I had to clear was Midpoint; basically a review of your work and skills to date, as well as a clearing ground for your upcoming project. It’s a pretty exciting meeting actually; you place all your work on the table, in front of a faculty committee, and they determine whether you are fit to continue. The main focus of the meeting is your thesis proposition. Before they allow you to embark on a 1-2 year thesis project, they want to make sure your idea is viable and worth pursuing.
I am past the Midpoint stage now and am in a class called Thesis Development this summer. It is a very different class than those that I’ve written about previously. Rather than creating a series of graphic design based projects, we are spending all of our time researching and strategizing how we are going to go about the next few years. I always picture that scene in Apollo 13 when they are trying to get back to Earth and only have one chance to fire their rocket boosters to enter the atmosphere at the correct angle. It is extremely important that they get their aim correct, else they bounce off the atmosphere and careen into space and die. I think of this class as that moment in the space flight; we are aiming where we want to go before firing our boosters over the next year and trying and pull off a successful project.
Above you see a piece created for the class. It is a piece of design, as everything we bring to school must be, but the main purpose of the document is to chart my progress over the next year. It divides the weeks up into sections and outlines what I should be doing when. I expect it to change many times over the course of the coming months (it’s already way off base), but it really helps having a checklist like this to keep tabs on my progress. I have never pursued a project of this magnitude before and the planning involved is unlike any design challenge I have been faced with previously. Most of the time I just open Illustrator and start drawing lines and scribbles until things look cool.
A graphic design thesis is a very interesting concept. The biggest thing I struggled with, as I decided on a topic, was whether my thesis would implement graphic design, and pursue an issue outside the field, or whether it would be about Graphic Design itself, and aim to make waves within the design community. Most projects do the former. We are lucky in this way — because design really can be used to solve just about any problem — but there is the concern that this strategy will be of no relevance to the actual field of study. I still don’t know quite what to make of this dilemma. I have tried to meld the two directions with my project (I’ll discuss details in later process posts), but I am unsure whether it will end up being that much more effective because of this, or if it will fail because I never decided which path to pursue. I guess it’s still too early in the process to know.
Most have heard of The Manhattan Project — the program lead by J. Robert Oppenheimer to develop the first nuclear weapon — but few have seen what’s left of it. Today I came across Martin Miller’s photo essay — Slouching towards Bethlehem — which gives an inside view of the surprisingly intact facility where the project was based. I was immediately stricken by the aesthetics of this massive nuclear laboratory.
I’ve always wondered how much time and thought is put into the purely aesthetic aspects of military/industrial design. Were the engineers who built this place trying to make it look good? Or am I just appreciating the fruits of design born solely from the pursuit of functionality. At any rate, the photos are excellent and whether intentional or not, the design ethic at work in these facilities is amazing. Link
Grain Edit has posted up a very nice Jazz mix by Mike Cina along with a short interview on his thoughts about record collecting and music. It’s always nice to hear what other designers are listening to and being influenced by; it often brings more clarity to my understanding of their work.
Mike also contributed the custom mix cover you see above and some shots of the album covers for the songs included in the mix (a few are shown below). You can check out the interview and download the mix here.
This past month has sort of flown by, I’ve had my head down working on some new posters (one of which you saw a preview of recently) and trying to sort things out around the house. If you’ve been following along you’ll know that I recently got the Epson 9900 large format printer and have since spent a lot of my spare time trying to make a home for it upstairs. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time (as has Alex) bringing together the various supporting elements needed to produce, cut, package, and ship the prints. You’d be surprised how much space all that stuff takes up, the result is that I lost my dining room and now eat at the coffee table in front of the TV. I’ve been kidding myself that I’d eventually move the whole printing operation downstairs into the main studio but today I finally put that delusion to rest and went to Ikea to get some shelves and make it official. Unfortunately I got started a little late so the mess you see above will have to wait until tomorrow. If you look carefully you can catch a couple unreleased prints that will be showing up here very soon.
On the music front I’ve been trying to make some headway with the album, which has been slowed a bit by the printer project. As for shows, I’m heading up to Salem later this week for the Emerge-N-See Festival. I’ll be doing a live Tycho set out in the woods (along with Flying Lotus, Daedalus, Plastician and many others: info) where I hope to make good use of this fiberglass ATA flight case (below) I scored at a garage sale this weekend for $30! I was just walking to get coffee and my neighbor had this thing just sitting on the sidewalk; she also threw in a poster case for $10. On the way back I bought a kitchen scale that looks like a prop from a 70’s episode of Price Is Right for $1. The guy I bought it from tried to trade it for the case which he said would “fit his Moog perfect”. Unfortunately for him it will fit mine better.
Here is the 4th installment of “Images From Where? and By Who?” So we all download and save images of items, graphics and photos from the internet daily and some of the time you have no idea where to give credit besides maybe the guy that posted it first or second randomly on a blog. I ‘d like to get some answers on a few of these but also just post some interesting pieces that we come across that might have been sitting on our drives for awhile that are go to for inspiration or just found randomly on a forum with no info attached and just look great. Either way hopefully the point that gets across here is that they are inspiring in some sort of way to you as well.
The first one has to be my favorite album cover of all time but only when someone takes a photo of the vinyl sleeve and it catches this pearly yet worn look and then a slight hue of yellow over the whole thing. Who ever thought of the idea of simply just photographing this white helmet but having that mirrored visor wins an award in my book.
I remember finding this NASA illustration and it inspiring me a lot for awhile for Moodgadget material, I could of gone without the blue and orange crayon background.
I am pretty sure this “cubes on a waterfall” was an advertisement and if it was i’ll buy whatever they’re selling…especially the cubes.
Dubstep has been manhandling the electronic scene lately in the States and i’m sure in the UK its even more intense than that and has been for quite sometime now. I think its finally spreading into the “normal” listeners ears, I say it that way so I don’t get too much crap from the true dubstep heads that have been following dubstep since the 90’s or whatnot. Guardian also known as A Setting Sun did a nice job of with this mix by showing the range of how dark to poppy the sound gets plus really capturing a few of my personal favorites.
TRACKLIST Ramadanman – Bidding War Skream – Babylon TRG – Move Dis Hijak – Nightmares RSD – Forward Youth Untold – Dante 2562 – Kontrol Benga – Crunked Up Dizzee Rascal – Round We Go Kode9 – Ping Loefah – Bombay Squad The Bug ft Killa P & Flowdan – Skeng Benga – E Trips Magnetic Man – The Cyberman La Roux – In for the Kill (Skream Remix) Pinch – Punisher (Loefah’s SE25 Remix) Skream – Trapped in a Dark Bubble Bar 9 – Midnight Benga – Evolution Plastician ft Skepta – Intensive Snare Boxcutter – A Familiar Sound D1 – Cocaine Kode9 – Magnetic City Flying Lotus – RobertaFlack (Martyn Remix) Martyn – Right? Star! LD – Woodblock Zomby – Test Me for a Reason
You may recognize Alex Koplin(not to be confused with the Alex who writes for this blog), aka H34dup, as a frequent commenter here. I was checking out his blog today and came across this wonderful image which I just mistook for a vintage piece that Alex had simply blogged about. But after reading on I realized that this was actually created by Alex for Typcut. I see people use textures and aging techniques all the time, but they’re usually pretty transparent and obvious. This, on the other hand, is spot on authentic. Loving the color, type, and composition. This would feel right at home on my kitchen wall or a wine store in the Rhône.
I’ve spent a good portion of my career working on distressing and aging techniques. It’s one of those things that you just shouldn’t even be doing unless you can totally nail it (and that’s not to say I’ve always gotten it right; I cringe at the sight of some of my older stuff). I see people try to use Photoshop brushes to achieve this sort of style but I think if you’re using brushes to distress, you need to turn back because that path leads nowhere. Who knows, maybe it’s possible to get decent results with brushes, I’ve just never never seen it done. That is to say, whenever I see work done with brushes, it always screams “hey, look at these brushes”. Anyways, Alex’s piece is a great example of how to do it right. Now here’s the part where Alex comments and says he did use brushes and I look like an idiot.
