Found a rather cool icon+caption over here (a Chinese design blog), which I have translated into English as above. It was originally intended as an avatar picture for chat software like MSN Messenger. I guess most designers can somewhat relate to this?
Sure, we have seen a fair share of crop-circle art before – here’s something equally amazing, but done on sand instead of crops:
Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in sand. At low tide on wide beaches Jim searches the shore for a wave tossed stick. After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws– laboring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles. The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground these environments are seen as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim’s motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.
Pretty cool (it’s a pity these art pieces are all temporary though), eh? Tonnes more, and some processes on the artist’s website.
Dassault, which is the conglomerate behind popular professional 3D softwares such as CATIA and Solidworks, are putting another big step forward with their (coming) debut of 3DVia, which is a web-based 3D modeling interface for people to create CAD models:
3DVIA is the newest of the 6 Dassault Systèmes brands. Its mission is democratizing the usage of 3D so that everybody can use it in its everyday life, either at work or at home, through the web. Our objective is to give you the power of 3D.
This is certainly a radical branch from its stable of sophisticated (certainly with price tags to match) softwares traditionally only operated by professionals, be they designers or engineers. This is all about increasing the accessibility of 3D software: free (accessible to more people), online (accessible anywhere) and easy to use (accessible in terms of learning curve). In a world where many are increasingly immersed in virtual worlds – be they games like WOW or universes like The Sims (I still don’t get Second Life though) – giving people a foothold in creating 3D artifacts online seems really logical.
It is certainly worth thinking of the implications of a move like this – what does it hold in the future, if it succeeds? What if 3D literacy is as common as computer literacy? What would that imply? Think of how the PC overthrow the mainframe computer; or how blogging opens up mainstream journalism. It could be a case of massive rapid prototyping, where each person creates their own products around them as easily as creating a Facebook profile today. Or products can be developed like a Wiki or open-source software, with each participant crafting a specific part (this is already sort-of happening with BugLabs).
How would designers evolve? Would technical operators of traditional 3D softwares becoming extinct, just as we don’t see many computer operators around anymore? The designers who succeed would then be people who can readily harvest the massive growth of a 3D-literate online populace – how would you position yourself to be the next Bill Gates for 3D?
Designed a truck before? How about a bag? How about both (nearly, anyway)? FREITAG, known for making bags out of used truck tarpaulins, is organizing a design contest for the truck tarpaulin. The design would first be used on trucks for 5 years, until they get cut and harvested into limited edition bags.
Kind-of like a subversion of host-and-parasite, cause-and-effect, don’t you think? Bags that started off picking whatever waste was available is now in a strong enough economic position to try to alter it upstream. Fortunately in this case the tarpaulin do get used just as any others – so the core spirit isn’t that much off yet. Here’s FREITAG’s reason for this competition:
They still exist, the <undesigned> truck tarps. Colors, signals, stripes, circles and bars form words and messages. These <undesigned> truck-tarps form the basis for the production of FREITAG bags.
However, the truck-tarp <diversity of species> is endangered. Increasingly they are being used as moving advertising space, wallpapered with uniform advertising campaigns. With the <Design-A-Truck> contest FREITAG is making the first moves to preserve transit graphics.
Head over if you will!
Once in a while, you get an ad that transcends the very definition of an ad. One that is so remarkably and creatively different from the pack, it shines. I think this is one of them.
The product is as typical as any – a facial cream. You can already picture how an ordinary ad for this would be – a pretty (fair) model rubs the cream into her palm, uses it, and the slow-motion sideview take of the water splashing her face, which leads to an end cut-scene extolling the virtues of Brand X cream, and your life becomes perfect.
But this one manage to narrate it through a series of four short movies (or long ads) – the story can either be cheesy or touching depending on your point of view – but the ad scores brownie points for me when they were able to laugh at themselves: ridiculing the very medium of an advertisement while being on an advertisement. It also doesn’t make it seem like magic will ooze out once you use it like most ads would have portrayed – so there’s an element of honesty there as well (wow!). It’s Thai-produced, so you’d recognize their almost trademark exaggeration and comical humor as well.
They have managed to produce one that in my opinion, even draws people to want to watch it, to “can’t-wait for it to be screened”. That is some feat indeed!
If you’re a typographer and just find it hard to communicate the value of your work (“Oh, so you choose fonts for a living?”) – here’s an excellently-produced video that may help give a quick explanation of the artistic level in true typography. Well actually, it’s rather likely the response would still be more like “Ah, so you choose pretty fonts for a living!”, but at least the video would probably make you feel the worth of your work more.
“Typography is what language looks like”.
How do you market Viagra in Saudi Arabia? That might sound like an uphill, if not impossible task. Fortunately, creativity loves to gobble (real or imaginary) constraints for food – there is simply nowhere creativity can’t penetrate. Check the video out!
Looking for a new car? How about this one – at 230 miles per gallon, it’s got quite some good fuel economy (relative to most cars which range between 15-30mpg). Seats two and guarantees stares down the street as you drive it. For me it really looks like someone’s vision of the future came true – the overall look of it would quite closely match what some futurists have sketched out some time ago (except cars still can’t fly…).
Jan Chipchase spotted over at his blog the usage of digital pricing tags in a supermarket in Tokyo. As he noted, there are many possibilities enabled by this new pricing information:
Why? The ability to dynamically change prices based on contexts such as time of day, customers in proximity, levels of stock, or the weather that you experienced five minutes ago creates so many opportunities. Small sign. Big implications.
Of course there’s also additional other conveniences like electronically updating your price, which means your staff won’t have to manually switch tags; or maybe prices of all chains of megamarts are fed back to a central server in real time, to make sure the there are no errant pricing in franchisees; or perhaps they mega ‘cheapest here or else’ marts can upload prices in real time to a social website for comparison.
But, if you have the power to dynamically change price, would you? Would the feeling of certainty and constancy be more important than the perceptively fluctuating or shifting price, which tends to lead to insecurities? Would the customers think they’re getting gouged when they have to pay a higher price responding to a certain context (even though they could’ve chose to think the other way – they got the discounts on other days)?
Food for thought…
With the idea of ‘Mine is better than yours’ as a central theme, Superest is a funny, continually running strip of comic in which two main comic artist draws a super hero that is better than the previous. Like scissors-paper-stone, except in this case, the subject are superheroes, and the loop isn’t closed at all.
This led to some wildly imaginative and funny characters, possessing a bizarre range of powers. Shown above are just a small slice of all the heroes. You’d probably want to head over and start at the very first hero, just to see how this whole thing unfolds.
