When I stumbled across this great blog All My Eyes today and spotted a post about gorgeous Argentinean bus tickets, naturally I had to keep reading. I wasn’t disappointed.
I have a personal interest in tickets; my great-grandfather Ruben Harry Helsel invented more than 45 different ticket dispensing machines between 1917 and 1958.
Photo by Angela Riechers
His Takacheck (above) is still a familiar sight anywhere people need a civilized way to take a number and wait their turn. (I wrote about my great-grandfather for a design research class taught by Steve Heller as part of SVA’s DCrit MFA program; you can see the finished book here.)
Here’s a post I just wrote for AIGA Voice about the virtues and vices of actual travel vs. Google Earth. Mostly, I adore Google Earth. Except I hate clicking on an icon thinking it will pull up a photo and instead getting one of these weird 3-D renderings people insist on attaching to a location where I know a lovely castle stands, in real life.
Clockwise from top left: Panoramic Camera, View Finder Camera, 35 mm Single Cut Camera, Micro Camera. Photos courtesy of Hyun-seok Sim
Sculptor/metalsmith Hyun-seok Sim crafts these incredible pinhole cameras from sterling silver and brass. Their name, CamerAg, is a portmanteau of camera plus Ag, the scientific abbreviation for silver. Each one is built entirely by hand, right down to the screws and dials. They all take pictures, but that’s almost beside the point. Many of the cameras lack viewfinders, meaning that composing an image relies on luck and chance more than anything else. But who cares? These work just fine as eye candy. To see the entire collection of 23 cameras, click here.
This “digital” clock was created by artist Mark Formanek at Rotterdam Central Station (NL). For 24 hours from November 27th to the 28th, each wooden number was carefully adjusted by a total of 36 workers, making this a real clock that keeps accurate time. The performance was recorded on film and will be shown in Rotterdam throughout the city.
It’s kind of a great cosmic meditation: an analog version of the digital, recorded it so it will function into the future as part of the digital world. I wonder if the wooden components will simply become kindling?
Standard Time is an artwork by Mark Formanek commissioned by Bureau Binnenstad (City of Rotterdam). With thanks to Rotterdam Festivals and Rotterdam Centraal (NS, Prorail and Randstadrail)
I know, I know. No posts since October. Bad blogger! (what do you mean no one noticed? I’m going to overlook that snarky comment.) So I want to come back with something nice: take a look at this writing program. I just downloaded the beta and may seriously try it next time I have to work on something. It clears away all the visual clutter on your computer desktop, no toolbars except a few rollover options, and just lets you type over a snowy scene, with soothing electronic music. It’s its own little peaceful environment. http://www.ommwriter.com/en/
This offers all sorts of creative possibilities: an online promo piece for British band the Editors places custom panoramic photographs of band members into various London locations via Google Street view, hacked for the occasion. I really wish I knew how to do that. via Gavin Lucas, Creative Review
On view at the NY Art Books Fair. Left: J and L Books. Right: DAP.
It was heartening to see that as the publishing landscape makes room for Kindles and vooks and online magazines complete with flippable “pages,” there is still interest in beautiful, impractical artist’s books. Printed Matter, the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to publications made by artists, presented the fourth annual NY Art Book Fair, October 2-4 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. Read the rest of this entry »
The doors of American supermarkets swing open to usher us into retail fever dreams, the fabulous fairy-tale world of who corporate brands would like us to be and who we wish we were. Meanwhile, who we really are gets lost in the vast landscape. Product package design meant to appear masculine says far more about hopelessly outdated cultural assumptions than it does about real shoppers, male or female. And reduced-calorie or lowfat products pitched towards women feel very out of touch now that it’s common for members of both sexes to be concerned with weight loss.
Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘peelable’ design for the Wallpaper* cover featuring model Baptiste Giabiconi. Photograph: IPC Media
Readers of the October issue of Wallpaper are in for some old-fashioned interactive fun. Peeling off the top layer of the cover designed by Karl Lagerfeld reveals the sultry Baptiste Giabiconi, naked, on a second cover underneath. Magazines have been trying hard recently to come up with covers that break traditional formats; remember Esquire’s light-up version in September 2008? Using e-ink technology and a battery, it wasn’t interactive or even attractive, and was a logistical nightmare—the issue needed to ship in refrigerated trucks to keep it in working order.
Wallpaper’s new cover reminds me of Andy Warhol’s iconic design for the 1971 Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, which had its own production and practical issues (the real zipper broke through the plastic overwrap on the albums and sometimes scratched the vinyl when they were piled together in stacks). One key difference, though: your curious eyes couldn’t penetrate through the layers of image any farther than the briefs. —Angela Riechers
