Favcol
What’s the web’s favorite color? Help Matt Webb find it. Take a photo of your favorite color. And send it in. The background of the website is the average of all the photos sent in. Cooooool.
At the time of this post this is the web’s fav color.
Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes came out with this record at a time when overproduction in music was at its maximum. This album goes to the other extreme; think punk, but acoustic. Disjointed songs and lyrics, crooked basslines, and a drummer without a kick drum! I remember hearing it for the first time. I was at a friends party and Blister in the Sun started playing. I didn’t know what to think. After that I was hooked. I got to see them many years later in Woodstock 94 and they just transported me back to the time I heard them the first time. If you don’t have this record, get it. A classic.
Probably Right
space/time/sculpture
Today while walking aimlessly across the city I went into a small museum under the Castello Sforzesco. There I found a sculpture I’d seen before. I spent several minutes completely focused on the beautiful curves. It is called Single Forms of Continuity in Space . Sculpted by Umberto Boccioni one of the fathers of futurism. He wanted to capture a body in movement, where you could see the it in different points in space and time.
Click for other views.
Take The Rorschach Test
While flying to Amsterdam the other day I wanted to write down an idea I had…I took out my trusty notebook opened it to the first un-scribbled page and uncapped my pen. Big black bubbles started forming at the tip. “I am going to stain myself”, I thought and let the ink fall into the paper. I had several flashbacks of psychology lessons in high-school…..Rorschach!!! I hurriedly closed the notebook, and let it dry. After opening it I discovered a perfect Ink Blot. The Original Inkblots!
So, what do you see here? (comment below)
For Hi-Res click on picture.
Point…..and click
The award for the best use of the index finger goes to: Harrison Ford
Recomendo
Kevin Kelly was a founder and executive editor of Wired mag for many years. He is also the writer of several books that I wanna read. Recomendo is objects and things that he..hmm well..recommends! Cool stuff continually added, he even accepts suggestions…
..Tok co tok…Tok co tok…Tok co tok…
The man that can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
Andr? Breton
Penny Stacking
Continuing with our talk about scales we couldn’t miss The MegaPenny Project. It is usually very hard to visualize big numbers….The Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: “What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?”
Just a Blue Planet
The Blue Marble has the best pictures of the earth ever taken. Assembled from many images these high quality photos are just niiiice. If you have the bandwidth, go for the TIFF files. I can’t get tired of looking at these pictures, they give a sense of proportion to everything; even world conflicts look small.
As I was Saying…
No1
Kevin Cornell has posted a whole sketchbook of his online. Sketchbook #1 is stream of consciousness drawing. Funny, articulated, and just plain satisfying to look at. This website has been featured everywhere, but I think one more mention is worthwhile. Hell, he even inspired me to have my own skecthbook!
Rock, Paper, and Scissors
Whenever a dispute arouse with my sister we would solve everything with a quick game of rock, paper and scissors. We each had our own strategy to try to beat each other…If only I had this page my whole childhood could have been easier. At the world RPS society you can learn all the tricks and strategy to be the reigning champion of any brother and sister fight!
Size does Matter
Every time I see a Sci-fi movie I am left wondering exactly how big the spaceships really are. Having no earthly or other known scale it is hard to tell how big is a Star Wars spacecraft or a Star-trek ship. Using Jeff Russell’s Starship Dimensions you can quickly drag and drop the ships to compare them, or measure them against known objects. Excellent!
Wooden Reflection
In 1999 Daniel Rozin created an art installation called the Wooden Mirror. A camera embedded in the mirror captures what is in front of it and relays the information to pieces of wood that tilt to provide different shades of the same color, giving back a pixelated image. Be sure to see the video (28.1MB), because it is truly beautiful.
foto-grafika
My cousin Dushan, a man of many talents just setup foto-grafika, a website dedicated to his photographs. All the images work the light as a compositional element. Speed shapes the photons, and blurs become the main focus of these colorful prints. By the way, he is getting married with Alexia in october….Woooo hoooo!!!
Gutenberg Bible
The Gutenberg Bible, the first book made with movable type was printed in Mainz Germany around the year 1454-5. Of the about 180 printed only 48 are still in existence. Each one slightly different from the other, because the drawings and rubrication were done by hand. The Ransom Center has scanned their copy and posted it. Be sure to take a look around their website, it explains the many details that make up this wonderful book.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Here is something you never expected to see! British Troops on LSD. This video shows british troops trying to conduct military exercises while on acid. Hilarious. An article from The Guardian about it.
We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. They invented LSD to control people, but what they gave us was freedom.
John Lennon
Instant Classics
There is one company I’d love to design for: Evasolo. They have a very smart line of products for the home. Each piece is painstakingly designed and manufactured. If they stopped production tomorrow a lot of their objects would attain instant cult status. Go ahead and take a look at their website, beautiful as their objects…but, be sure to turn off the sound, the music sucks big time….I know they’ll never call me to design….they work exclusively with: Tools
Better Start Moving…
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
The Big Picture
In essence GPS Drawing is about recording lines using ones journey as a mark making medium. The GPS receiver automatically records your journey like a geodesic pencil. Get it? Go see the gallery.
Once in a Lifetime
In the Botanic Garden of the Universidad Central de Venezuela a palm known as the Great Palm of Ceil?n has flowered recently. It is a spectacle that only happens once in the life-cycle of the plant which is in this case more than 40 years old. It is expected to show 12 million flowers and bear 500 kgs of seeds before it dies out next year. So, if you are in Caracas be sure to go check it out.
Thanx to Federico Galavis for this one. Un abrazo primo!
Exact Attitude
Rotterdam photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek take pictures of people in similar clothes and with similar attitudes and put them together. Known as exactitudes these photos convey a contradiction between being an individual and the uniformity of belonging to a group…I am trying to find out where I fit…
Solid as a Rock
Lifegems takes your ashes after cremation and turns them into a flawless diamond. I still haven’t figured out if I like it or not. At least the idea is novel, and you become an indestructible stone!
Just Enough is More
Taken from a lecture given by Milton Glaser on March 2002.
Less is not necessarily more.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realized that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realize that every part of that rug, every change of color, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
Death by Bad Design
The United States threw myriad leaflets on it’s war in Iraq to discourage the enemy. At the CENTCOM Leaflet Gallery you can find all of them cataloged and with their english translation. By the way, I had not seen such ugly graphics since I stopped using Corel Draw 3. Hmmm, maybe they wanted to compete in a b3ta photoshop contest! Stop spending so much on planes and technology and get better graphic artists!
The Secret Lives of Numbers
A graphical representation of the popularity of the numbers from 0 to 1,000,000. The Secret Lives of Numbers started in 1997 and is done by performing a massive automated internet search on each of the integers, and counting the number of pages which contained each. From the information one can visualize the predilection of certain numbers and the patterns that emerge from this.
Checker Shadow
I’ve loved optical illusions since I can remember (everyone does), but this one burned my brain like no other. I even had to open the image in photoshop and test if it was true. See to believe.
Easy
There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Start Dancing
Posting comments is like dancing at a 13 year old’s party. Paranoid. Everyone steals glances from others, nobody wants to be the first.
Will I look stupid, will the others laugh at me…. Then the first few adventurous couples start to dance, all of a sudden the dancefloor is alive. Say something, I feel stupid and think others are laughing…!
