What colour is your birth date

Pantone astrology, where everyone has there own assigned colour for their birthday.

Urban Outfitters Blog

Why scroll up and down when you can go across...

On the box

Excerpt from the "Media Show" a monthly magazine series on media, publishing, advertising and design in Ireland.

This edition of the Media Show" briefly explains the development of a piece of large corporate branding from design conception to completion for Ireland's leading national radio station Newstalk 106. Close partnership in strategy and design were important proponents in this successful application document.

Webby Awards

The nominations for the Webby Awards are in

My vote went for Design Observer

Helvetica the movie poster

Robot Walrus

Robot Walrus


A Blog about Posters and Art Prints

My Present Heroes

PEOPLE

SAGMEISTER book "made you look"

Paula Scher, "make it bigger"

Catherine Zask (graphic designer)

Julia Hasting (book designer)

Sebastian Kubica (a great poster designer)

SITES

Bibliooddysey
Claiming to be this is a collection of beautiful, weired, unusual old and new prints

Botanicus
A collection of books about botanics, they are all scanned page by page

Tpographika
Typography from around the world by Erik Brandt

Posted by Julia

Fold school

Foldschool is a collection of free cardboard furniture for kids. The downloadable patterns can be printed out with any printer. Follow the instructions and assemble a stable piece of furniture.

A nice eco friendly way of creating a kiddies stool, just make sure they don't spill their ribena on it.

Fine festival in barcelona

www.primaverasound.com
great line-up

Snowboarding 07

nice...

Willisau Jazz posters designed by Nicklaus Troler.

Cake Café

The Cake Café, based in the Daintree Building, Camden Street, Dublin, specialises in home-made quirky cookies and cakes. The cookies can be personalised to any shape with any logo – perfect for wedding favours, presents or corporate gifts. Owner, Michelle Darmody also recently took over Curved Street Café in Filmbase on Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin At both cafés and in her catering business, Michelle uses Irish food produce, supporting small Irish producers and sourcing much of the food from farmers markets. The café’s are run in an environmentally aware manner using bio degradable cleaning products and plastic bags, recycled napkins and recycling every thing they possibly can.

Jeep Waterfall

Jeep Waterfall used at the Jeep Roadshows in South Africa, Geneva and Detriot.

Syndicated video art projects

With the rise in popularity in uploading of DV onto the internet it was only a matter of time before people decided to us the internet to create a group project. Using Jumpcut "white mouse" is one such project. Production values are low, the theme a little quirky but still a nice idea to syndicate for visuals from different poeple.

wiki mouse

Olympic posters Munich '72 poster

Otl Aicher's landmark series for the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich. Designed in 1970, they still look astoundingly fresh today.

Stranger than Fiction

Official website.
Upon first inspection this story synopsis sounds fairly dull however, the film's scope is huge. It tackles fundamental questions about who controls the characters and steps outside the conventions of storytelling by blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. It's heavy material for a comedy but, to bring such ideas to a broader audience, humour seems the best way to go.

We are introduced to Crick by a narrator, a common device, but then Crick starts to hear the narrator's voice in his own head. He learns he's due to be killed-off and tries to transform his life's genre from the tragedy shelf to the Rom-Com section. Further complications emerge when he realises the book would be a masterpiece, immortalising his name in the process, but only if the author is allowed to kill him off.

These ideas come from the structuralism school. This line of thought examines and challenges the fundamental structure of things. It can be applied to maths, linguistics and psychology as well as art. When applied to fiction, written or filmed, it asks whether the characters are real even within their own fictional world and if they, or the author, have control over their fictional lives. Sometimes a novel or film becomes self-referential when the writer suddenly breaks with convention to address the reader or viewer directly.

This leads to a subversion of the traditional relationship between the writer, the character and you, the audience. Yes, you, sitting there reading the Studio Artois website. I hope we're getting these concepts across without sounding too pretentious (and nothing works better than an example!), but you're clearly not stupid or you wouldn't be here in the first place!

John Fowles, author of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' said fiction writers "wish to create worlds as real as, but other than, the world that is" and that's exactly what is happening in Stranger Than Fiction. Other films have tried to tackle this concept and the most commercially successful all used a humorous lightness of touch to soften the blow.

Perhaps the best known example is The Truman Show (1998) in which Jim Carrey's character discovers his world is just a TV show. It was also Carrey in the vastly popular Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), A film does not need to be 'arthouse' to tackle such ideas. Stranger Than Fiction should be given the label 'smarthouse' - films that entertain but also offer plenty of stimuli for the discerning viewer.

Pushing the borders of reality and storytelling. In The Number 23, due out next year, his character reads a book which he believes is all about his life.

It's no coincidence Carrey and Ferrell are cast for these roles as both are used to playing over-the-top, unconventional and totally unrealistic characters such as Ferrell's 'Buddy' in Elf (2003) and Carrey's eponymous role in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). There's nobody better to take us on an existential journey into the absurd.

Other films have taken a higher-brow approach to these ideas. Spike Jonze's films Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) - adapted by Harold Pinter from Fowles' novel - and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) all received critical acclaim for their innovation but this very cleverness will alienate some of the audience who want entertainment without the headache. A film does not need to be 'arthouse' to tackle such ideas. Stranger Than Fiction and Eternal Sunshine should be given the label 'smarthouse' - films that entertain but also offer plenty of stimuli for the discerning viewer.

It's perfectly possible to avoid brain-strain while still subverting the structures of the form. Just look at the simple visual gag at the start of gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously (1984). After the opening credits we see a street scene with date '1935' apparently superimposed over the road, then a car comes along and smashes the numbers to bits as it turns out they weren't a caption but polystyrene numbers placed on the road.

To work with such intellectual concepts without scaring off the mass market, wrapping these ideas up in a comedy dressing makes it more comfortable for the audience and leaves them feeling in control. We know comedies like Stranger Than Fiction are absurd and so don't truly suspend our disbelief to accept the film as real. In conventional drama, you are asking the audience to accept the film's reality and invest in it emotionally. If you then deconstruct the very artifice you've just presented, you risk unsettling the audience, resulting in the same betrayed outrage as if you made them sit through two hours of story only to say "it was all just a dream."

Ref: www.studioartois.com

Guardian Viral Top 20 Hit Parade

No need to go surfing about Youtube or video google anymore for the virals poeple are discussing as the Guardian is kindly going to release a poll every friday telling you what's hot and what's not.

Starting last friday from their mediablog, organgrinder.

Source www.viralvideochart.com

Flippies.com

Well this is what they say..."Use Flippies for your creative premiums, event handouts, sports promotions and tradeshow giveaways. They're also great for movie tie-ins and entertainment marketing premiums and creative promotion ideas. Flip books are perfect for turning your marketing ideas into creative pharmaceutical promotion materials, retro marketing items, kids promo items and other promotional products."

A little bit of fun in a dull world. I especially like the moving premise one.

Here is a site dedicated to some eccentric frenchman's collection - sport, erotic and cartoons are covered

Animated typography

Director Kris Moyes music video of animated typography.

Paul & Spongebob