Hasta La Ideas

The visual savants over at the Society of Publication Designers won’t announce the winners of their annual awards bonanza—now in its 47th year—until May 11, at a fancy bash at Cipriani in New York. However, the judging wrapped up last weekend, with co-chairs Luke Hayman, Richard Turley, and Jeremy Leslie overseeing the print judging, Scher Foord and Joe Zeff supervising the digital judging, and Robert Newman chairing the Magazine of the Year competiton. Foord, Zeff, and their trusty five-member jury were particularly busy, having been deluged with a record number of digital submissions. Not only did they get through all of the entries, but they lived to tell about it. In this video by Joe Zeff Design, judges Mike Burgess (Beattie McGuinness Bungay), Neil Jamieson (Money), Steve Motzenbecker (NYmag.com), Josh Clark (author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps), and Marisa Gallagher (CNN Digital) reveal what they liked most in the entries they reviewed and what it all means for the publishing business.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Finally—a music video starring pencils! Motion graphics wizard Dropbear (also known as Jonathan Chong, whose pseudonym is that of a vicious yet imaginary marsupial) has outdone himself with a colorful feat of stop-motion animation for Hudson. This video for the Melbourne-based indie-folk band’s “Against the Grain” will delight viewers of all ages, falling somewhere between Surrealist film festival fare (we’d put it right after Hans Richter‘s Dreams That Money Can Buy) and Sesame Street interstitia:

Wondering how he did that? Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes look at the 920 pencils and 5,125 images required:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

(Photos: Benoit Pailley)

For his first New York survey exhibition, German artist Carsten Höller has transformed the New Museum into a fun house-cum-laboratory that invites visitors to take a ride on the mirrored carousel, commune with nature (giant mushroom sculptures in the lobby, canary mobiles, a zoo’s worth of napping polyurethane mammals), assault their visual cortices with a wall of flashing lights, and take a disorienting dip in the “Psycho Tank,” a sensory deprivation pool. Getting to all of these attractions—uh, works—is half the fun, thanks to the 102-foot-long stainless steel slide that now perforates the ceilings and floors of the SANAA-designed building. The pneumatic mailing system for humans runs from the fourth floor to the second floor, but those that prefer to take the elevator will find Höller’s videos—of elevators and twins—playing, appropriately, on a loop.

On view through January 15, the exhibition features work from the past two decades, but don’t expect clear chronology at this carnival. “The show is conceived as an immersive environment,” writes curator Massimiliano Gioni in the exhibition catalogue, which borrows its mini-encyclopedia format from a publication for Marcel Duchamp’s 1977 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. “Nearly all of the works in the show are meant to be used and tested. And viewers themselves will also be tested and tried by an exhibition that alternates between excitement and boredom, overstimulation and radical dullness.” That’s also an apt description of the labor-intensive process of installing Höller’s slide, and the New Museum has created the below series of three videos to answer the inevitable question: How’d they do that?

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The big news from the US Department of Agriculture, of course, is their move away from the familiar and iconic food pyramid and into their new plate-based system of showing us how much of each type of food thing we should be consuming (full disclosure: this writer’s wife works somewhat directly with the group that creates these pyramid and plate guidelines for the USDA and certainly wouldn’t appreciate his use of “food thing” to describe types of food). And with the transition from pointy to round, eventually the media was going to have to turn to a design expert. We were both surprised and pleased as punch that CBS Evening News went directly to Pentagram‘s Michael Bierut for his commentary. It’s the nightly news, so of course he only gets a few words in, but nice to hear from someone outside of the food world or government sharing their insight. Here’s the clip:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Part curated short documentary series, part nice branding effort (because who else would you buy furniture from for your ultra-modern house?), Herman Miller this week has launched POV, a series of films highlighting the work of five California architects from Jim Jennings to James Meyer, all directed by the agency Hello, with additional visual consultation and photography by Julius Shulman‘s former business partner, Juergen Nogai. If you like interesting modern architecture, very attractive pictures, and above all (particularly for those of us here in Chicago, where it is still 40 degrees), sunny skies, we’ve just found a good source to help kill your whole morning. Here’s the trailer:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.