Hasta La Ideas

Since none of us are born into our careers, I’m always interested to hear how various creatives became what they are. You may be gifted with creative talent, but you make a series of choices that hone that talent into specific tools. On top of that there’s dumb luck and the curveballs life throws at you, and the way you choose to navigate those things. You’ll see me periodically doing origin stories on people across a variety of creative fields, with these articles geared towards students; because whether the person is an industrial designer, a multicreative like Becky Stern or a decorative painter like Benjamin Lai, there’s a commonality I would have liked to read about when I was choosing schools and making my own fateful choices. It’s about figuring out what your talent is, then deciding what the hell you’re going to do with it.

» Part 1: Introduction to the Finishes of Benjamin Lai
» Part 2: The Art and Science Behind Decorative Painting

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Ben Lai was raised by a single mom in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, with nothing in his surroundings to suggest he’d ever pick up a paintbrush or set foot in a Park Avenue residence. Growing up, role models were scarce; his father was not in the picture, and his mother put in long hours doing piecework in a garment factory to support him and his two siblings.

College seemed unlikely. The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan was not far away, but it’s safe to assume few people in that blue-collar neighborhood had ever heard of it or were keeping their fingers crossed for their child to apply there.

Where he lived, in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn, was an old-school neighborhood where kids could run around in streets absent the predatory criminals or speeding yellowcabs of 1970s Manhattan. Just on the other side of Jamaica Bay was JFK airport, but that may as well have been on the other side of the country. If you were a kid from Sheepshead Bay and you wanted to travel someplace far, you took the D-train.

If Ben never suspected he’d enroll at an art school in Manhattan, he surely never envisioned he’d subsequently hump it over to JFK to get on a plane bound for Belgium, and that what he found on the other side would change his life.

But yeah, that’s what happened. Here’s how.

(more…)

A few words with one of the secretive figures behind the client horror story blog

Web designers, those anonymous talents who help make sense of the sheer volume of white noise out there, are the unsung heroes of the digital age. The transition for many businesses is rarely seamless though—irrational behavior coupled with an unhealthy dose of old-fashioned racism is expressed by many of these Clients from Hell.

Consider this one:

Client: I want more ethnic people, I feel as if there are too many “white” people.
Me: I see only one picture with Caucasian people in it—you want them gone?
Client: Maybe you could just give them a tan? Or make them more “thuggish?”

Or another:

“I got this email once from some lawyer in Nigeria and when I opened it and clicked the link, the same email was sent to everyone in my contact list. I thought, hey, this is a pretty smart and simple marketing technique. When I send out this email to the 4,000 people, I want it to automatically forward to everyone in their contact list. Can you have this done for me by tomorrow?”

The Clients from Hell blog has been cataloguing these types of exchanges since 2009 and came out with a book late last year, offering a humorous form of therapy for the tech community and a rare inside look at the petty and downright insane requests to which they are often subjected.

Cool Hunting tracked down “Vincent,” a web designer in the 18-25 demographic, who is part of the shadowy team of disgruntled designers that have been running the site and recently published a 150-page book.

Cool Hunting: Which anecdotes do you find the most disturbing? Most amusing?

Vincent: The only anecdotes I find truly perturbing, actually, are the ones where the person who’s sent it (the “me” speaker) is jeering and maligning someone for not knowing something they couldn’t have possibly known. That’s not the spirit of jest, y’know. When it comes to poking fun at someone for being technologically ignorant, the tone ought to be spoofy, if not just a bit frustrated. When it comes to the real slimy characters, the ones we hear about who casually employ misogyny and racism as business models, those are the guys that you can really sink your teeth into—they deserve it.

CH: How did the Clients from Hell communities develop?

V: The way most communities develop. We settled around a body of water, or some other lush, food-bearing area and proceeded to erect houses and practice agriculture, until the crop-yield became sufficient enough that we could support guilds and artists, forms of governments, kleptocracies at first and then monarchies and then democracies. Then we abused that democracy and sold our interests to foreign investors and got mixed up in a few wars. 😉

Do you see different patterns in different countries and regions?

It’s mostly American, Canadian and English submissions, I think, with some Aussies peppered in. I always love getting submissions from people whose first language is clearly NOT English. Their delivery and word choice is incredibly awkward, but you can tell that they find what they’re saying really funny!

What kind of submissions are unpublishable and can you describe why?

Ha ha, well the aforementioned submissions where the English is horrid but the emphasis is still punchy (e.g. “And then he ask me make Sunday work for only same prices!!!”) are generally unpublishable. And we get a surprising amount of submissions where someone has clearly read one of our earlier posts and has a very similar story, so they send that. We can’t publish the same joke twice, though, I feel like telling them.

As a design professional, is the relationship getting better, worse, or does it remain the same?

I’d imagine that as the generation that grew up alongside computers begins to grow up and take over companies, that the client/designer dynamic will be less of a comedy of misunderstandings.

What effect—if any—do you think the CFH phenomenon has had on your profession?

Very little. The people that ought to be learning from it aren’t, unfortunately, the ones reading it.

How long do you reckon the CFH site will continue? Is their a clear goal aside from making a mint?

As long as there are fresh injustices or some fresh ignorance at which we can laugh or roll our eyes, there will be a CFH. If, one day, all the client relationships everywhere magically become harmonious and right, then we’ll retire it.

Questo roll contiene 12 sottopiatti/tovaglioli in 100% cotone con lato preforato e utilizzabile pronto all’uso. Possono essere lavati almeno 6 volte poi via, si ricicla.
{Via}

Dal 9 settembre al 29 ottobre c/o lo spazio Espai Tactel di Valencia esporrà il talentuoso artista/illustratore spagnolo Esteso con la mostra di alcuni suoi selected works, Uncertain Future.

Celebrating creativity in a digitally-powered exhibit

When scientist Edwin Land created the Polaroid camera in 1948, he hoped to simplify photography. As the Minnetonka, MN-based company continues to innovate in the 21st century, they’re keeping that value at the forefront with products like their GL10 Instant Mobile Printer. The wireless digital printer can pump out instant party pics or stand in as postcards of your latest vacation. Like the original invention, there’s tons of creative potential, which is shown to great effect in the one-week group exhibition and auction, “Made in Polaroid” that opens today, 7 September 2011, at New York City’s Phillips de Puery & Company’s gallery.

Described as “about the creative process and a new era of creative spirit” by photographer Chase Jarvis, who worked with Polaroid to put the show together, the project challenges 50 notables across various disciplines to each create one work of art using only the GL10. We got a sneak peek at the the lineup—including the likes of James Franco, Patrick Demarchelier, Rob Pruitt—and a chance to speak with avid Polaroid photographer and French stylist Maripol, artist and entrepreneur Vashtie Kola and the Philadelphia-based satire artist Joka, who explained their initial concepts and shared a few thoughts on using the printer.

Taking more than a week to print her final concept, Maripol’s “Maripolaroid Go Green” dress is the upshot of her longstanding passion for Polaroid pictures, undaunted by the printer’s initial technical difficulties. The legendary stylist, inspired by the vivid colors of the Zink printer, insists it’s “not a Polaroid, it’s a digital print.” She still uses the original camera and film too, most recently on a shoot for Vogue’s December 2011 issue, but her Polaroids have graced gallery walls around the world. In her piece for the exhibit, she seamlessly mixes old and new too, attaching the Zink paper images to a 1981 Millard dress with colored safety pins.

Looking to another legend of Maripol’s era as well as NYC itself, Vashtie snapped shots of city landmarks—both cultural and institutional—to make up her ransom letter-style Warhol quote. Her process included a few weeks of preparation, meticulously choosing her representative letters before scouring New York with her Canon G11 and iPhone, printing the final piece in three days. Vashtie told CH she habitually carries an Epson mobile printer with her and found the GL10 to be on par with weight and ease of usability once sorting out the initial setup.

Joka chose to combine traditional print photographs and painting in his “Do You See Me Like I See You?” Always working primarily in pinks and purples and applying paint with toothpicks, Joka’s time-consuming tactic beautifully balances the immediacy of his digital portrait. Though he shared that the project was more strategic than he was accustomed to, he enjoyed the pragmatism the printer lent to the challenge.

Raising awareness for Free Arts NYC, the auction will take place 14 September 2011 at Philips de Pury’s gallery at Milk Studios. Check out more details at the Made In Polaroid website.