Over on Shapeways, community member and rubik’s puzzle fanatic Oskar van Deventer has been turning a few heads with his, apparently world-record breaking, 17x17x17 Rubik’s cube. This marvel took 15 hours for Oskar to produce; first 3D printing the parts and then dying and assembling the 1539 pieces by hand.
NYC!! Feeling sad about mother nature’s unending gift of snow (19 inches and counting)? Escape the winter blues, if only for the weekend, at Park Here, an indoor pop-up park. The OpenHouse Gallery and UrbanDaddy have come together to put together an ode to summer replete with artificial lawn, custom forest murals, SAD lightboxes by Northern Light Technologies, trees and park benches. Programming like daytime yoga and pilates will be open to the public and nights will be reserved for private events. This is the last weekend so soak up some summer before it all comes down on February 1st.
Après l’excellente vidéo Burn – Ride, voici cette nouvelle initiative intitulée “Alive” avec les riders Gigi Rüf, Ståle Sandbech et Arthur Longo. Des impressionnantes prises de vues nocturnes filmées à Vorarlberg, en Autriche. Une expérience produite par Action Hors Films et Burn.
South is the way forward! A pretty bold statement from our friend and contributor Arturo Pelayo. We recently became aware of his design education project that, with your help, will take place in Antarctica March 3-18.
Ring ring. Your iPhone is calling! Or if you screen calls, then there’s a message waiting. Here’s what it says – your iPhone wants to stay warm this winter, along with his friends iPod Classic and iPod Touch.
And there’s only two ways to do that. Either use your beloved gadgets endlessly so they overheat or hook them up with this adorable little accessory – a hoodie!
Yes, it’s basically a mini sweater to wrap your phone/mp3 player/camera/miracle-working gizmo in. And we think it’s a great idea! Especially because we love our iPhones so much, it’s the only acceptable way to treat them. Don’t you agree?
Magnifica serie di spot per EF Language Schools diretta da Gustav Johansson. In questa serie di video dedicati alla città di Parigi, Londra, Beijing, si gioca sul parallelismo tra immagine e tipografia. Tutti gli altri video li trovate qui su Fubiz.
In 1982, amidst a politicised and combative period of bombs and impending apocalypse, Disney offered audiences an escape into a new internalised world in the form of the emotionally autistic film Tron (original trailer below). In so doing, Tron captured the cold hearts and predominately introspective male minds of embryonic designers everywhere, thereby predefining the visual language of technology and modernity for a generation.
Tron’s impact on the visual code for all things ‘digital’ cannot be underestimated. Here was a global blockbusting film about technology that existed because technology had facilitated it. For perhaps the first time technology had blatantly made a film about itself, invoking an aesthetic in retrospect successfully determined as much by its own technological limitations as by the expert styling of the incredible hired talents in Moebius and Syd Mead. Tron light-cycled its way into design and the creative imaginations of millions, and in so doing forever co-opted the vector, the pixel and the grid, indelibly stamping its presence upon almost every visual manifestation of technology since.
THE LEGACY LIVES ON Importantly, in a pre-internet age Tron originally captured for the first time the dream of living virtually and in so doing spawned motion graphics’ own totemic aesthetic and sense of modernity (the term as naive and dated as the film itself). The film’s legacy can be identified throughout the slew of dated ‘modern’ visions outputted during the 1990s and 2000s by a generation of early adopters, who had formatively been exposed to the film as children and who – in the creation of digital worlds – could now themselves wield pro-sumer variants of Tron’s own custom designed animation software.
Given access to this previously inconceivably powerful software, what did Tron’s pre-pubescent audience now seek to create as adult designers? Unsurprisingly they sought to recreate Tron. Within the creative output of the last 20 years, adulatory Tron references abound. The legacy, it seems, lives on.
So, when Disney returns to this film nearly 30 years later with its sequel, Tron: Legacy, one wonders just what impact the sequel will have on designers of the future? Technology and the world has changed enormously, so what has happened within Tron’s parallel universe? How now does the future look?
Somewhat dispiritingly, Tron: Legacy looks and feels almost exactly like Tron, but channeled through a three year-old Audi commercial. The great crime here is that nearly 30 years later Disney has invoked almost exactly the same aesthetic. Whilst the sequel could never have ignored its predecessor’s visual legacy, one would have expected Tron: Legacy to have radically reinvented it. Not so.
If modern technology has shown anything, it has shown that it can be warm, human and relevant. Instead we are presented with a charmless bombastic anachronism. Plot was never Tron’s strength, but here we are treated to a suspect and clumsily fascist storyline that together with its visual styling, composition and soundtrack would surely solicit the approval of Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer. These fascist allusions are actively amplified by its score. Though marketed as one of Tron: Legacy’s strengths, not for us the original film’s inventive electronic Bach of Wendy Carlos. Instead imagine Triumph of the Will sound-tracked by an industrialised Wagnerian marching band.
STEALING FROM THE PAST Had this ‘visual prog rock’ been made over ten years ago at the birth of the then imminent 80s revival and conceived primarily as a vehicle for a Daft Punk then at the height of their powers, this would have been an infinitely more agreeable and significant experience. Instead Disney has missed the boat and through a blue-screened cinematic equivalent of ‘dad dancing’ cried out in ‘digital oompah’ to a generation too sniffy, too emotionally challenged and too busy wallowing amidst the emotional landfill of their own referential introspection to care about this film.
But it is particularly ironic, given this film’s subject matter, that the greatest missed opportunity within this cinematic experience lies in the film’s inability to harness modern technology. If there is one recent film that is best placed to harness 3D, then it is Tron: Legacy. A stylised virtual world within which anything can happen is simply screaming for deep, rich and immersive 3D. It should be a showcase, a pivotal moment for all that is genuinely fantastic about 3D. Indeed, here is a film begging to be interactive. Instead we are mostly fed shallow seemingly faux 3D and fail to transcend the digital baroque of surface and gimmickry.
Perhaps the fate of film in post-post-modern times is that it must steal back from its past (in this case not least The Matrix), but it strikes me that one of graphic design’s most exciting frontiers is its intersection with production design in film. On paper Tron: Legacy was a truly wonderful opportunity for incredible and original art direction to improve upon and sustain a never- before-seen technological aesthetic. On paper Tron: Legacy was an open goal built solidly upon a foundation of great originality. The problem, I suspect, is that in design terms it never was ‘on paper’, at least not in a contemporary Moebius or Syd Mead’s sketchbook. Where we craved the shock of the new we have instead found Tron’s legacy to be at best ‘conceptual mo-cap’, and at worst a generational vacuum.
Johnny Hardstaff is a director and designer, represented by RSA and Unit9 in the UK. See www.johnnyhardstaff.com
Custom-fitted to the unique shape of your ear in just four minutes, the Sculpted Eers earbuds from Montreal-based Sonomax deliver dynamic sound in an ultra-comfortable way. The DIY kit comes with easy instructions for achieving a perfect fit for either of their two models—a single speaker PCS-100 or superior dual driver PCS-200.
The recently-launched earbuds will be available beginning spring 2011, and will sell for $200-300. To keep tabs on their arrival, follow Sculpted Eers on Twitter.
Here’s a new selection of global advertising treats to help you while away the end of the working week. First up is a quirky little film for Norwegian bus service Nettbuss. Agency: Los Co. Creatives: Ragnar Rocksvåg, Jo Espen Johansen. Director: Jesper Ericstam. Prod co: Social Club (Nice Shirt Films, London).
Over to South Africa now, and a commercial for mobile phone network Telkom, starring a Frank Sidebottom-esque emo character who’s in need of some good ol’ fashioned love. Agency: McCann Erickson SA. Creatives: Vanessa Pearson, Sean Harrison, Tim Beckerling, Peet Engelbrecht, Yvonne Hall. Director: Keith Rose. Prod co: Velocity.
DDB Paris has created this simple film to advertise French TV channel Trace Urban. The film focuses on the skills of beat boxer Eklips, who performs a four minute history of hip hop in just one take. Conception: Alexandre Hervé, Tashi Bharucha, Clement Reynaud. Director: Tashi Bharucha. Prod co: Atelier Vertigo.
This new spot for the Hyundai Sonata Hybrid imagines a world where technologies never advance beyond their first incarnation – people ride penny farthings, use brick mobile phones and travel via airship. Agency: Innocean, Huntington Beach. Creatives: Jeff Spiegel, Doug James, Robert Prins, Steve O’Brien, Tim Gibson. Director: Jim Jenkins. Prod co: O Positive.
Director Carolina Melis has created this charming video for new track What A Big Wide World by Essie Jain.
We finish up with two new spots from Fallon that form part of the French Connection Spring/Summer 2011 campaign. The spots follow on from the brand’s unusual campaign The Man/The Woman, this time turning to the audience and asking ‘You Are Man?’ and ‘You Are Woman?’. Enjoyably baffling stuff. Creatives: Richard Flintham, Augusto Sola, Toby Moore, Selena McKenzie. Photographers/directors: Blinkk (Webber Represents).
Architecture firm Scott Brownrigg have completed the London office of internet search engine Google, with a giant logo in the lobby forming doorways through the two Os.
Designed with a Brighton beach theme, the interior is filled with dodgem cars used as work spaces, red telephone booths, beach huts and giant dice.
Wallpaper in the meeting rooms and video conference booths is printed with seaside imagery.
The space also includes a gym, spa centre and restaurant offering free meals for the 300 strong staff.
SCOTT BROWNRIGG INTERIOR DESIGN COMPLETES PHASE ONE OF GOOGLE’S NEW LONDON OFFICE
Scott Brownrigg Interior Design has created a new 40,000 sq ft office for Google at 123 Buckingham Palace Road, London to accommodate over 300 staff.
The new office is designed to create a dynamic and collaborative work environment that supports the growing number of Google staff in London. As with many other Google offices worldwide, the office has a strong local theme. Joe Borrett and Jane Preston from Google, working with the Scott Brownrigg Interior Design team chose a theme of London-Brighton and as a result many iconic elements of both are incorporated into the office design.
For example, brightly coloured timber beach huts are meeting rooms and giant colourful dice accommodate individual video conference booths, original dodgem cars and traditional red telephone booths are all work spaces available to staff and visitors. Open plan workstations for all staff are mixed with a few offices, meeting rooms and open break out seating areas and support spaces for printing and IT technical support. Google look after the health and welfare of their staff in an exceptional way and Scott Brownrigg Interior Design has designed a fully fitted out gym/shower facility, massage and spa treatment centre, and an Asian Fusion/Sushi restaurant that is free for all staff.
Ken Giannini, Interior Design Director of Scott Brownrigg stated: “It is little wonder that Google is one of the most desirable places to work in the UK. We have enjoyed every minute of this exciting project. All the Google staff are up for innovation, brilliant ideas and they like to be challenged. We also recognise that Google is a serious business and demands efficiency, value and solutions that can support their business practices. This project has it all – a fun working environment that also incorporates lots of practical solutions.”
Joe Borrett, Head of Real Estate and Construction for Google commented that: “The office was designed and delivered in a very fast timescale (4 months) and the team of consultants and the contractor pulled out all the stops to get it done. It was an impressive effort.”
Jane Preston, UK Facilities Manager at Google said: “The first impressions by visitors and our staff has been very positive. The project fits well with our real estate and HR strategy and will definitely help support our growth plans. We see the work environment as a major recruitment factor for us to compete for the best talent and this new office certainly does that.”
Client: Google Interior Designers/Planning: Scott Brownrigg Interior Design Programme Managers: CBRE Project Managers and Cost Consultants: MottMacDonald M&E Consultants: TBA Main Contractor: Cameron Black Size/floor space: 40,000 sq ft Timetable: 16 weeks Furniture: Desking System: Bene, Task chairs: Herman Miller, Knoll, Vitra, Hitch Mylius, Wiesner Hager, Arper, James Burleigh Flooring: Interface Floor, Object Carpet, Dalsouple
Completion of phase one was November 2010 and phase two (10,000 ft2) completes March 2011.
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