adidas australia: originals festival.

Adidas never lets me down. Just like The West Wing or Golden Grahms or Tori Amos, I can depend on Adidas to do what I need it to. If that includes creating a full-blown 8-bit pixellated website that invites you to create your perfect summer music festival, that I guess that’s what I need right now. I trust Adidas that much. If Adidas gave me Kool-Aid, I would drink it.

The Originals Festival website is candy. Besides giving you that old-skool Commodore 64 feel that makes me feel warm all over, it lets you pick your dream line-up for a healthy list of scenester bands, DJs, and folk heroes. Then it gives you a box full of design tools to create a poster worthy of your earth-shatteringly cool headliners. It’s easy enough that design-fans like myself can have some fun with it, but complex enough that an actual graphics expert could do some seriously good shit. Once you’re done, people vote on which fests they’d be into and which suck. The winner gets a trip to the Berlin Festival and a shopping spree and all that stuff. Of course, it wasn’t until after I’d done the whole thing that I realized you had to be an Australian resident to officially enter. Feat not, no matter where you live everyone can add their own festival for voting.

Here’s my poster. I went for a heavy electro vibe, a little hippie-folk, and topped it off with M.I.A.

Via Adverblog

miguel cabanzo: humanflows.

This article also appeared on Josh Spear.

HumanFlows is the first of a series of projects conceived during the Visualizar workshop organized by the Medialab Prado in Madrid. Led by graphic designer Miguel Cabanzo, the on-going project takes the growing trend of visualization into the study of globalization. HumanFlows maps trends of migration in the hopes of getting insight into their causes. Rather than focus exclusively on present trends, HumanFlows gathers data from the last 15 years to create a more comprehensive picture.

Given a clear visual idea of the directions people have moved their lives (realistically and figuratively), you can’t help but wonder why. What impetus encouraged huge groups of people from point A to point B, rather than point C? It’s simple to rattle off answers like “war” and “poverty” without thought, but to look at these maps and think of how actual humans have been impacted brings issues into a more powerful and personal focus.

Though still in its nascent stages, the project kicks off with map filters such as Gross Domestic Product and Unemployment. The goal is to build on this framework with more data and to shed light on the inter-connections between the different causes for people to migrate and the impact on the nations who receive them.

learning to love you more.

This article also appeared on Josh Spear

Just as it’s title so succinctly implies, Learning To Love You More is an on-going interactive web project created by artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July that teaches us to explore ourselves from every angle.

 

Managed by California-based artist and designer Yuri Ono, the site challenges potential participants to complete a series of 68 assignments. New tasks are always being added and they can be completed in any order you chose. The results – whether it’s a video or picture or drawing – are submitted to the site and added to the chronicle of each task. Ranging from the artistic (#27 – Take a picture of the sun) and the anarchic (#34 – Make a protest sign and protest) to the ephemeral (#68 – Feel the news) and the sublime (#36 – Grow a garden in an unexpected spot), each new idea moves you to take on a new talent, face a new fear, or potentially dig up the past to get it done.

Since it’s creation in 2002, more than 5000 people around the world have put pieces of themselves into Learning To Love Your More. Those works have been gathered into a constantly shape-shifting exhibition and screening of the project, including a presentation at NYC’s Whitney Museum, and the project has also been documented in a new book. 

The simple power of each task and the collaboration between strangers all around the world points to one eternally poignant message. By accessing the most personal facets of your self and then having the courage to share them, you can’t help but see a beautiful truth: nobody is alone.

design police: “bringing bad design to justice”.

An edited version of this article also appeared on Josh Spear

The visually conscious (or sometimes visually obsessive) among us see it everywhere: bad colour combos, heinous spacing, over-sized logos, and – gasp – excessive use of Helvetica!

Now the design-minded have the means to take control… if taking control means slapping a sticker on a poster and running back to the Mac like a little girl. Design Police’s downloadable Visual Enforcement Kit gives you a series of offense-marking stickers to gleefully place on bad kerning and other layout tragedies whenever you see fit. These five comprehensive pages of design-geek glory cover the gamut of offenses from “Do not use clip art!“ to “turn off the CAPS LOCK”. My personal fave is “Hire a copywriter”. Amen to that.

If this is making any sense to you so far you’re probably a design geek – maybe even that particular sub-species… the font geek. If you’re curious as to your own design/font geek status then here’s an easy litmus test – if you find the “Comic Sans is illegal” sticker amusing, then congratulations. Don’t worry – I’m a font geek too. Despite the general mutterings I sometimes I hear from those around me about my incessant use of Arial Rounded MT Bold, I don’t care. It’s my fave:

I often flirt with the idea of cheating on it with Helvetica, but in the end I always come back to my baby. Long live Arial Rounded MT Bold!

the art monastery.

This article originally appeared on Josh Spear

In the immortal words of Sophia Petrillo…Picture it: Italy, 2008. In the green hillside of Calvi dell’Umbria sits a cherished 17th century Baroque convent. A group of artists, dedicated to their passion for finding new ways to communicate and collaborate, have come together to create, imagine, inspire and tend the walled garden that grows their food. At the end of the day, they meet together to sing a Gregorian chant before bedtime. Sounds a little too good to be true, doesn’t it?

This idyllic “life as art vision” is about to be realized by The Art Monastery Project. Soon Californian artist couple Peter Fülling and Betsy McCall will lead 30 artists to Italy and bring this dream to reality. Over the next few years they hope to build a community of artists and musicians, allowed to live in the monastery in exchange for renovating and caring for the property. Those retreating there, both visitors and long-term residents, will share a regular schedule (not unlike the convent’s former residents) designed to focus their minds and add fuel to their creative fires.

After searching 25 locations in Italy, there were formally invited by the Mayor of Calvi dell’Umbria to use the convent following a June 2007 visit of 30 artists that included a concert in the town’s oldest church, dancing in the piazza, and a great deal of wine.

McCall says their goal is to foster “an intentional community where the depth of collaboration and vitality of discussion produces genuinely transformative art.” Wow.

If it wasn’t for my lease (and job… and goldfish…), I’d be heading for the Alitalia terminal right now.

random website friday: word count.

The Western culture ranks things constantly. The top 10 this and the ugliest 5 those and the 100 greatest these of all time and the 7 wonders of the world. Quantifying gives us an equal measure to scale things no matter how ephemeral they may be. #1 is the most whatever and everything subsequent is less… whatever it is. So why not rank language itself?

Word Count tracks the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language and ranks them in order of commonness. Created by the almost frighteningly brilliant Jonathan Harris, it’s source is the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million published writing samples from a variety of sources. Word Count includes any word that shows up in the BNC at least twice.

The 5 most popular words (when I wrote this post) were “the”, “of”, “and”, “to”, and “a”. Nothing shocking there. I’m pleased to report that “fuck” comes in at a healthy #5598. If you’re interested in the rankings of the first 5 words that came to my head (please don’t judge) then we’ve got: “adore” at #22,013, “expunge” at #58,890, “ejaculation” at #54,644, “phosphorus” at #20,611 (who knew that many people were talking about phosphorus?) and “barnacle” at #50,129.

Disappointingly, this means people are talking more about barnacles than ejaculation. WTF?

Word Count even has it’s own site where people can submit suspiciously logical groupings of words. Among the interesting social tidbits I found on Word Count Conspiracy (part of Harris’ website Number27) were #992-995 “america ensure oil opportunity” and #7964-7967 “homosexual loses papal schooling”.

brandt botes: obscene interiors.

UPDATE #2 – 01.26.08: I recently got an email from Brandt Botes asking me to post this apology to Justin Jorgenson. It’s easy to not be accountable for your actions in the blogosphere, and I think apologizing takes some guts. Here’s Brandt’s statement:

“Thanks for featuring my set on your blog. Since doing this in 2001, i got told about the original Obscene Interiors by Justin a few years later. I loved what he did to personal ads and the commentary he wrote – more than that i couldn’t think of a more apt description than Obscene Interiors. I carelessly hi-jacked the name in 2007 when i published my set on Flickr, without asking permission or giving credit.

When created, it was done so without knowing anything about Justin’s work. For me it revolved around a love of wallpaper and pattern – something found in excess in 70’s porn. Once the figures were removed, it became a “guess the position” scenario to boot.

Justin – apologies for using your name. I have changed it, for what it is worth. Other than that similarities between the work is purely coincidental.”

UPDATE #1 – 01.11.08: Since this post went up I’ve been contacted by artist Justin Jorgenson. Here’s what he said:

“FYI – this concept of removing the figures from porn began with a feature called “Obscene Interiors” on my website http://JustinSpace.com in 1999 and was covered shortly after by The New York Times and other publications. My collection of online male personal ads with the figures grayed out became a book, “Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Decor” published in 2004 by Baby Tatoo. This Brandt Botes person (aka Von Brandis) you’ve mentioned was clearly “inspired” by my work.”

I looked through his site and his claims are totally legit. Whether Brandt Botes had seen Jorgenson’s work before beginning his own is impossible to know. Either way, plagiarism is serious shit. Check out Justinspace to decide for yourself…

ORIGINAL POST:

And you thought the best part of vintage porn was the music (or possibly the glaring lack of pubic grooming). Well, think again…

Thanks to South African artist Brandt Botes‘ (aka Von Brandis) latest Flickr set, Obscene Interiors, we can now clearly see how vintage porn really excelled in “set design”. By removing the actual pornstars from old skool shots he found on the internet, we can now check out, unhindered, the no-holds-barred shag carpeted key party glory of it all. Plus the white silhouettes, positions discernible from the outlines but the details and money shots blurred away, are tantalizing little brain teasers. Of course our imaginations are pervier than reality… or at least mine is.

If you’re into it, he’s also got a (ultimately not-printed but still worthwhile) tee design on Threadless.

Via Juxtapoz

random website friday: weburbanist.

Sometimes you’re in the mood to wander the ‘net aimlessly but you’re not feeling Perez and all the usual suspects. Say you’re in the mood for something intellectual and architectural, yet completely random, with some culture and a good dollop of modern art thrown in. When you’re in that mood (and who isn’t, really?) that’s when you need to head to WebUrbanist.

This site is the shit. There hasn’t been a single visit where I haven’t come across something unexpected. For instance, right now the latest posts are on shopdropping (the subversive art of reverse shoplifting), the 3 most bizarre micronations in the world, the 7 smallest hotel rooms in the world, and urban camouflage.

If you’re saying “shopdrop who?” and “micronation what?” and “urban camowhazzit?” then that’s precisely why you need to go there. Now. Go now.

vessel: the perfect drink.

This is the kind of futuristic brainstorming I love. This idea is so cool I’m thoroughly disappointed that it’s just that – an idea.

TheGreenerGrass.org is a site that fully conceptualizes ground-breaking (though still fictional) products that are openly collaborated on by it’s members. From that springboard comes Vessel – the world’s first personalized custom beverage.

Vessel would let you create your ideal drink by blending Base (a nutrient combo you’d select based on your gender and age), Flavour (this one’s pretty self-explanatory), and Agent (add different kinds of vitamins, proteins, energy boosters, etc). Depending on how many different Flavours and Agents you mix, there would be a limitless number of drinks you could invent for yourself. Personally, I would add vodka. Or maybe mojito mix.

Via TheGreenerGrass.org

random website friday: desktopography.

As someone who spends a large part of they day starting into a Powerbook, Desktopography is one of my fave sites.

Each yearly exhibition features desktops from digital designers around the world. The work is nature-themed, the whole idea being to bring a fantastic view of the natural world to your computer screen. The designs are so hot you’ll have a hard time picking just one, but since they’re free to download you can switch up your desktop whenever you like. Even better, link back to each designer’s home site from their Desktopography submission and explore their full portfolios whenever you need a little time out from your daily routine.