Come on Down to South Park

So instead of catching up on freelance work today, I decided to make South Park characters of some of my best friends from my hometown.

Here they are in this order:

Val Complete with yellow bikini, yellow designer sunglasses, drinks, a and a cig. Why the hat? I don't know it just seemed appropriate.
Caitlin Booze, beach, and of course- a black eye!
Jenna Hip hat and a tennis racquet
Doreen Red hair, pirate gear, and a light saber. Doreen, I believe you can die now.
Heather Doublefisting. The viking hat was a bonus.
Amanda I thought the outfit looked like something a preppy Bostonian student would wear, and the weather too.
Kristen Do I need to describe this?
John Little black T, a high tech camera, FOOD, and a halo of course

Make your own at http://www.sp-studio.de/

Chris Jordan: Intolerable Beauty

detail of Cans Seurat, 2007, 60x92"
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Chris Jordan is a photographer based in Seattle who's work has been influenced by photographers like Andreas Gursky. Jordan has definitely influenced my own work, as I was looking at him when I did my Darfur installation. All three of the series featured on his website are amazing, but he regrets that they are not nearly as impactful on the web as in person.

His earlier work is all photographed from existing found scenes- as is- pictured in his Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption. His newest work Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait (2006-2007) features digitally compiled photographs based on statistics of American (and world-wide) litter and consumption. He describes how he had one litter research organization send him 5,000 cigarettes which he dumped out on the floor, photographed, and digitally manipulated to create a massive image of the number of cigarettes discarded in one second all around the world.

I listened to a podcast interview with him and was intrigued to find out that his original interest was not consumerism, but color. He would find scenes like old paint cans in the dumpster in the back of an auto body shop and photograph them for the amazing color they produced. One particular image of a mass amount of trash he took and blew up spurred his interest in photographing things related to mass consumption. I think it's amazing how he could come from almost a strictly formal photographic curiosity, and end up doing something so heavily conscience driven.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Retro Junk

http://retrojunk.com/

I've recently revisited this site and I can still spend hours on it. As an 80's/90's kid it's so much fun to search for videos of old commercials and the themes from shows and movies I forgot existed!

My favorites? The Goonies trailer, Ray Charles Pepsi commercial, Salute Your Shorts, The Elephant Show, and how could I leave out my personal childhood fav, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Paula, what are you doing?!

Famed graphic design icon and Pentagram partner Paula Scher has designed a series of free business templates for HP. Suits have a choice between 5 styles- "Bold", "Friendly", "Elegant", "Edgy", and "Modern."

The templates are, as all templates are, boring and generic. There is not a stint of creativity in these stale, one-size-fits all molds. These fonts are nice I guess, but lend nothing to the individuality of a brand. I mean, what is the difference between these "designy" templates and any old Word template? Also, if anyone has seen the documentary Helvetica, Scher comments that she actually hates the font and never really uses it in her own work, even though she chooses none other than Helvetica for two of the styles here. In that light the templates almost seem sarcastic on Sher's part.

In Scher's defense she says “No template is a substitute for hiring a professional designer,” and also gives a link to the AIGA website. “But at the very least, I hope we can stop a few innocent people out there from using Comic Sans.”

Uh, I'm not buying it. That's nice on the surface, but think about it- these templates do more harm than good. This makes the design process (choosing a font or an image) seem as easy as picking out a pair of socks in the morning. No: easier. Is this really what small businesses need? What does this really do to make people understand what designers actually do and how important building an original brand is to the success of their company? This seems to go against everything we stand for as designers and diminishes our value.

Paula, I'm disappointed.

We Feel Fine

Check out this amazing database of feelings (We Feel Fine) by Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar:

It's such an amazing and diverse way to gather and map out information. I would love to do a project like this someday.


Excerpt from the site:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

"The feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on."

Labor Day Kayaking

On Labor Day I went out to Southampton with John to go kayaking. His uncle lives out there so we used his kayak. It was reeeeally choppy so it took us a while to get to our destination (called Sand Hill by the locals because, well, it's a big hill of sand) but it was a decent workout and we stayed close to the shore. Then we got back and ate some dinner that John's aunt made, drank some wine, and made a fire outside. It was relaxing.

I'd have to say I'm pretty much a kayaking pro by now. Like one more outing and I'll be ready to compete definitely.

VC + Yankees = :)

So Adam Tatz invited me to Saturday's Yankee game, and it was perfect. Seats in section 1 right behind home plate! And we were in the shade. Before the game we went to Monument Park which was my first time there. I saw Clemens up close throwing in the bullpen.

I took my die-hard Mets fan friend who always talks shit about Yankee stadium and he was impressed. He said, "Why are they knocking this place down?" Sadly, the answer is: To make more money. It will be a tragic day.

Anyway, the best part of the story is that they were giving away beanie baby bears to everyone 14 and under and of the 4 of us who went to the game, I was the only one who got a bear! I guess sometimes it pays to look like you're 12.

Final score:
TB 6
NYY 9

Me and Tatz

Monument Park







View from our seats

THE INTERVIEW (dun dun DUN!)

To quote Sarah Erin's comment on my "Portfolio? What's that? By Myself?" post:

"Hope it went well!"

ummm. If by "well" you mean that I flawlessly finished my book (and actually liked the way something I did came out for once), set aside everything I needed the night before- outfit, directions, and all (which is something I obviously never do if you know me at all), set my alarm, was totally psyched...

...and STILL almost slept through the interview, woke up at 8:30 when I was supposed to catch an 8:51 train, called the creative director's cell phone, lied and told him I had forgotten about a doc appointment at 9:15 and could we please reschedule?

Then yes; it went well.

haha but seriously it did go well. Even though that really did happen. But the CD was really cool about it, told me to come in at 3, and he really liked my work! I'm not sure if I'll get it because I think he's looking for someone with a little more experience, but we seemed to "get" each other. It would be cool if I did get the job because it would basically be just me and the CD which means I'd have my hands in everything, and probably even be "in charge" of certain projects, go to client meetings, and get tons of experience.

I also have an interview at MRM Worldwide next week, which is really cool because Tatz works there now and really likes it. Which reminds me that I better get to sleep because I'm meeting up with him for the Yankee game tomorrow!

Night! :)