Entries Tagged 'Design' ↓

The Santa Ana Wind Massacre.

“Clear Cut” Forest Fire Robot at work

Jordan D. Guelde is designer of the hypothetical Forest Fire Prevention Robot, above, and a man after my own heart. The 24-year-old graduate of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI says he’s “looking for a full-time employment opportunity where I can showcase my passion for design.”

But if you ask me, Jordan, your future is in the movies.

Here’s the scenario:

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The 1970s Never Ended.

Close Encounters still

Breakout video game

Apple logo

In “The Aesthetics of 1977,” an interesting post from his blog, Dave Troy: Fueled By Randomness, the author discusses how visual designers from that era, particularly ones working around a core set of entertainment products, appeared to imbibe, then spit out, influences.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that Close Encounters, Atari, Space Invaders, and Star Wars were all linked together with a common visual sense.  I think it’s pretty obvious that Atari ripped off Close Encounters for the Space Invaders packaging.

Likewise, the colorful “light organ” used to communicate with the aliens in Close Encounters is a close cousin, visually, to the famous Atari game Breakout. Steve Jobs was one of the designers of the arcade version of Breakout. Note the similarity to the original “rainbow” Apple logo.

He also looks at and compares icons as diverse as Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower, the rendezvous point for the mothership in Close Encounters; the Motorola logo; and Disney’s Space Mountain.

Admittedly, this is the way good designers typically work: Cribbing ideas from other sources, then refining and redefining them until they’re their own. Because of this, cross-pollenization is always hard to prove in visual design, short of an actual admission of it.

But whatever provides seed for an idea, ultimately, nothing may be so enobling as exploring the origins of inspiration, like Troy briefly does here. It would be great if someone were to develop this theme at book-length, in a volume smash-packed with pictures. The visual richness of the 1970s, as a decade, hasn’t even been touched yet.

I Am the Walrus.

Nagi Noda’s walrus hair hat

Nagi Noda’s Afghan Hound hair hatNeed a hot look you definitely won’t see on anyone else at tonight’s New Year’s Eve party? Before she died in September, Japanese artist / filmmaker Nagi Noda left behind designs for these startling Hair Hats, which sculpt actual human locks into likenesses of majestic animals. For example, check out the walrus, above, or this proud Afghan Hound, right. Next time someone says you have poodle hair, thank them! And no animals were harmed in the making of these hats: Just your dignity.

[via Yanko Design]

Benjamin Button’s Butt.

Benjamin Button fantasy poster

SlashFilm.com reader  and graphic designer Bruno V came up with this allusive, “poster that never was” one-sheet mock-up, above, for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, opening tomorrow.

Directed by maestro David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and starring Brad Pitt with Cate Blanchett, the film, based on a story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the tale of a boy who is born old—with wrinkled, liver-spotted skin and white hair—only to become younger as he ages.

Benjamin Button teaser poster with Brad PittThough skilled, Bruno’s riff on Benjamin Button violates the cardinal rule of any movie with Brad Pitt in it: Show His Face As Often As Possible. See right, for an example, from an early teaser poster. Or as one of the commenters on /Film.com puts it, less delicately, “Who the f#@% wants to look at a wrinkled ass baby?”

Actually, if you ask me, actor Taraji P. Henson, who cradles the infant, is the bigger obstacle. Since she’s Black and not Will Smith, Halle Berry, Samuel L. Jackson, or Queen Latifah, putting her on a movie poster runs the risk of confusing the prospective audience. It could make them think that they’re going to see a Black movie—maybe one starring James Earl Jones as the wizened family patriarch—and not a flick starring half of the world’s sexiest couple.

At least, so goes conventional wisdom, and if there’s one thing we can all agree on, Hollywood definitely knows their stuff.

Bad By Design.

Pooh Man, Funky As I Wanna Be cover

Its laughable gynecological ambitions aside, what may be most fascinating about this long-derided cover for rapper Pooh Man’s 1992 Jive/Zomba album, Funky As I Wanna Be, above, is that it’s one of the most expertly executed ones on the Museum of Bad Album Covers web site.

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Ramping Up For the Kill.

The Internationalist one sheet poster

Total hotness from Ignition Print, on the Feb 2009 Clive Owens / Naomi Watts thriller, The International, using the sloped interior of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum as an eye-ripping design element.

How To Kill Hitler.

“I’m gonna get you, sucka….”

Despite a lot of post-jumping on sofa, post-Scientology video blowback, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie, in which he plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, above, an operative sent on an impossible mission to assassinate der Fuehrer, is looking kinda hot, if the trailers are to be believed.

Valkyrie one sheet posterPlus, I’m kinda feelin’ the one-sheet poster, right, designed by BLT & Associates, whose classic pieces for Star Trek, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Transformers, Sin City, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the X-Men series, the Mission: Impossible series, the Spider Man series, Brokeback Mountain, The Silence of the Lambs, Saving Private Ryan, 12 Monkeys, Kill Bill, Titanic—whew!—have made them H’wood royalty. (Take a look at their web site, or their IMPA page, for a trip through contemporary movie poster art history.) It’s $20 from MoviePoster.com. Come December 26, maybe Hitler will be feelin’ deez…pieces of shrapnel. He definitely won’t be celebrating Kwanzaa.

Stop Showing Off Yer Stuff, Honey.

“Tee hee hee hee hee!!!”

Do you love your dog to death, but feel that the way the bitch proudly parades her business through the streets, tail held high, is, from a homo sapiens perspective, just a tad…indecorous?

So did Virginia Commonwealth University art student Meg Roberts. However, instead of just averting her eyes—like you do—she fashioned an anus-cloaking, tastefully enameled triangular copper piece, with delicate white and pink accents, and “a hinged door that falls open with gravity.”

Apparently, the object, appropriately titled A Lady Never Reveals Too Much, is a one-off, and Roberts has no plans to market it.

To which I say, Meg: Do you want to be a starving artist all your life? Do you know how many blue-haired, Upper East Side, New York City matrons would happily strap a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted one over Fifi’s sourpuss?

[via ExtremeCraft]

No Translation Needed.

Israel and Obama.

In case you missed one of the over 700 newspaper front pages, in 66 countries, commemorating the Obama victory—for example, Tel Aviv, Israel’s Maariv, above—now you can go to the Newseum’s web site and collect the whole set.

Take a look at some of the best American ones, below, after the jump. It’s interesting: When you check out a whole bunch, and see the designs, you can kind of detect which papers were inspired (e.g., the Hartford Courant, of all places), and which were just phoning it in. Also, actually, I think Will Smith was right, on Oprah, today: The Chicago Sun-Times did a cool cover, but, man, the Philly Daily News kinda came wit’ it.

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What Next?

Gates, wistful….

On July 1, 2008, Bill Gates, above, stepped down from full-time work at Microsoft Corporation, the company he founded with friend Paul Allen in April 1975. How does his departure affect the now-and-future direction of this corporate behemoth, a company whose software runs over 90% of the world’s computers, with assets of over $70 billion, and whose market capitalization approaches a quarter of a trillion dollars?

This is the fundamental question Mary Jo Foley provocatively addresses in her new book, Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. Foley is a guest, today, on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, November 7, 2 pm ET.

Then, Alisa Lagamma, curator of a show running at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” will talk about the exhibition and the wide universe of visual materiel the continent’s cloths present.

You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.