Remember the good old times when you where making music compilations on a cassette tape? I always was one of the girls that gave her (potential) boyfriends mixtapes and not the other way around! :-) I really miss that a bit nowadays. If you share your music you tend to give away the whole mp3 backcatalog of a band or even a label sometimes (i am evil, i know.. shame on me!) and not a personal selection of your favourite songs anymore. I try to do that with my last.fm playlist every once in a while but there is no possibility to make a special sequence yet and that is kind of lame. If you miss making mix tapes this product will inspire you again! SUCK UK produced a Compilation tape USB drive - for home taping. How great is that? Available at the end of september here.
Login pages are tricky. Whilst we as designers appreciate the clear focus and the beauty of space, very often clients think it looks “empty”, “too boring” or “not entertaining enough”.
Have you ever not entered a restaurant or bar because you disliked their typography or logo too much? Have you ever not liked a wine because the label looked too ugly?
If not, please do not continue reading.
Our favorite shampoo just got a new packaging design and therefore –what a mess– we cannot use it anymore:
By the way, we’re not at all talking about the graphic design, that’s beyond repair anyway. It’s the shapes of the package that ache and trouble us.
The article spread, an Ableton ad, my monome 40h and my feet.
I just wrote another article for de:bug magazine (#115) about DIY musical instruments. It presents a workshop called Musical Interfaces at FH Potsdam and features an interview with the people behind monome.
The magazine is now for sale at the newsstands, a free PDF version will be available on the de:bug website in a couple of weeks. I’m planning to publish full-length versions of both interviews here sometime soon. The monome interview will be in English then as well.
www.number27.org - the work of jonathan harris.
i really like his work, probably you know it too, but this showcase shows all his projects and gives great texts and explanations about them. some directs links to the projects themselves (but make sure you read the texts on his site too): universe.daylife.com www.wefeelfine.org timecapsule.yahoo.com
Was very impressive to me. This year illustration and art more than the communication design and typography classes. Class Klar was a real disapointment. Hickmanns Class had some nice Stuff. But the illustration and art works was so nice! UDK has open until tomorow, Sunday. Worth for a Visit! I left the exhibition with some kind of euphoric smile :)
The sequence shown takes only about a minute (image borrowed from Wikipedia).
I’m currently residing at my parents house and we’re sitting in the garden a lot. A highlight every evening is the opening of Evening Primrose blossoms, a gorgeous progress you can observe with the naked eye.
I’m not only impressed by the speed of this procedure, but also by the apparently highly sophisticated sensory perception* of this plant. Several blossoms open up every evening (and only in the evening) and are already withered the next morning.
* As far as I read on german Wikipedia, the moment of opening blossoms depends on altitude of the sun, daytime temperature and air humidity.
Ich hatte gerade einen Spätzle-Workshop bei meiner Mutter, da fiel mir das geniale Otl Aicher-Zitat wieder ein:
Die Relation von Form und Material lässt sich nirgendwo so gut nachweisen wie bei Nahrungsmitteln, also etwa Teigwaren. Maccaroni schmecken anders als Spaghetti – nur aufgrund der Form. Es gibt Maccaroni die sind glatt und es gibt welche, die sind geriffelt. Es gibt gedrehte, es gibt Gnocci, es gibt gewirbelte, verzwirbelte und immer, immer schmecken sie anders. Doch die wirkliche Urform der Teigwaren – das sind die Spätzle.
The HBO Voyeur Project is a collection of multi-media stories that HBO has built around the theme of voyeurism.
See what people do when they think no one is Watching
is the tagline that they have used to describe the experience that starts in the streets of New York City, behind the countless windows that we pass everyday. It comes together in a silent film that will be projected on the side of a building, and extends to the HBO channel, HBO on Demand, and online at HBOVoyeur.com. There are also “artifacts” of the characters everywhere, pieces of story which have been sprinkled around the web and in the real world to heighten the experience for those who like to get involved. However it is experienced in whichever medium, the point of the HBO Voyeur Project is to get the viewer to confront the uncomfortable question: “Do You Like To Watch?”
Since being on vacation is the US and A, I have had continued access to my favorite HBO series Entourage and even discovered some new ones like Flight of the Conchords. Between programming breaks they show a teaser for a new media project called HBOVoyeur.
The music and images to the trailer alone are enough to get me hooked, but it goes deeper. Apparently the premier was projected onto a wall in SoHo to kick off the experience. There are twelve interconnected story lines, which take place in four apartment buildings throughout NYC. A visit to the HBO link showcases some very nice flash design which invites the user to explore and watch all of these apartments and their inhabitants further. This is a hypermedia (?) experience with soundtrack downloads from talented composers, character profiles, fake websites, and even phone numbers to call. One writers job is just to document the whole internal process through his blog, leaking some information, thus giving us insight into some things.
I just learnd that one of my favourite architects and designers Jean Prouvé (1901 - 1984) was one of the first who experimented with prefab houses and actually constructed one called The Tropical House in 1949. Perfect for me to write another post about precious dwellings – in the truest sense of the word: one house of only three ever built was just sold for 5 million dollars to hotelier André Balazs who plans to install the little mansion at a new resort hotel he’s developing somewhere in the caribian.. damn.. i think this building belongs in a museum. At least it will return to the tropics! But anyway, this is what the UCLA Hammer Museum (see also for more pictures), who was exhibiting another one of the three houses, writes about the prefab house:
Prouvé designed the Tropical House in 1949 as a prototype for inexpensive, readily assembled housing that could be easily transported to France’s African colonies. Fabricated in Prouvé’s French workshops, the components for the house were completed in 1951 and were flown disassembled to Africa in the cargo hold of an airplane. The house was erected in the town of Brazzaville, Congo, where it remained for nearly 50 years. In 1999, the Tropical House was disassembled and shipped back to France for restoration.
Ich bewege mich in letzter Zeit sehr häufig mit dem ICE auf der Strecke Hamburg-Berlin und zurück. Neulich habe ich früh morgens zwischen 5:54 und 7:40 Uhr z.B. einen ganzen Song gebastelt und diesen dann nur eine Woche später uraufgeführt. Und heute habe ich zwischen 20:18 und 22:00 Uhr ein paar Gedanken aufgeschrieben. Zur Abwechslung mal in Deutsch – ich denke ja schließlich auch nicht in Englisch.
When it comes to German design, one of the contemporary key figures internationally known and famous is with no doubt Mr. Erik Spiekermann. He and his style, using humanistic grotesque and so called ‘analytic approach’ is hard to avoid and to see everywhere along Germany. He founded Meta Design and Fontshop, designed a list of almost same looking typefaces and did (and still does) almost every important (re-)design of corporates in this country—plus almost everyone seems to use fontshop font-designs which, at least to me, seem to be repetitive in style and impression (mostly humanistic grotesque) and therefore is Spiekermann referring, which designed successful Meta sometime around the mid 90th’s that became the raw model for most of the following fontshop released designs.
This domination seems to paralyse every different approach and practise around. I doubt Spiekermann is an idealistic person and wants graphic design to move on. It seems that he got cosy and therefore using always the same dress to success, which seems to be a typical attitude for Germans anyhow.
I recently saw a documentation on Otl Aicher, which would be the analogy comparison to Spiekermann a few decades before. Aicher carried the burden of the famous early modernist from a highly abstract, reduced style to an engineer like and attitude driven approach and became something like an intellectual sparing partner and consultant to the companies he was working with. An apparently widely appreciated attitude (to be seen in the documentary) which got companies queuing to get him to work on their Identity, in which Aichers’ way of thinking included not only design but also the company products and actions in total and became therefore something like the pathfinder for Spiekermann and Meta Design. He even designed the first ever existing humanistic grotesque which was named after his swabian residence Rotis.
It seemed that Spiekermann wasted that truly honest design, consulting driven and intellectual way of working Aichers’ to commercial sell out nowadays. One of his latest redesigns was the corporate design of the german railway company ‘Die Bahn’, which was a simple, honest and well working identity, designed by Kurt Weidemann, not so long ago—who is mainly famous for the Redesign of ‘Mercedes Benz’ Identity in the early 80th’s. Spiekermann turned it into a design which is exchangeable and again Spiekerman referring, instead of an independent, content driven and ‘Die Bahn’ referring Identity.
It does cause me physical pain when I walk around the city and see work by Spiekermann and his now idependent child Meta Design almost everywhere—he got mobbed out a few years ago by Uli Mayer-Johanssen and the rest of the managers. For his excuse it must be admitted that he seemed to be a young, truly driven designer himself almost 30 years ago (see picture) but now turned into something like Darth Vader, an Imperator, who lost his faith into the force.
Top: Remarkable Spiekermann font designs. Great variety in concept and style.
DotDotDot #7, page 77, winter 2003.
PS: Spiekermann also knows how to push the right buttons media wise. He was the only professional designer who actually claimed the British Olympia 2012 Logo to be “not so bad at all” which got him a lot of quotes in the press (even ‘Der Spiegel’ quoted his notes)… Easy, of course. If you are the only one who claims to be pro of something everyone’s contra, you’ll get a lot of attention…
Documentation ‘Otl Aicher, Der Denker am Objekt’ by Angelika and Peter Schubert, SDR – Süddeutscher Rudfunk Stuttgart. Sometime around early 90th’s.
The sequence shown takes only about a minute (image borrowed from Wikipedia).
