Archive for December, 2005
This typeface and it's famous ligatures have seen a huge resurgence in popularity lately, and can be found all over the place (I see it use a lot in design coming from the UK).
Elsner+Flake had made the Avant Garde Gothic Pro and Alternates (Ligatures) available in digital form first, and
ITC has recently released an Opentype version.
Some examples of Avant Garde Gothic Alternates |
More
From graphic-design.com: Avant Garde -- the typeface -- was born as a logo for a new magazine of the same name in the mid-60s. Ralph Ginzburg collaborated with Herb Lubalin (pronounced "Loo-ba-lin") on four magazines, of which Avant Garde was their second. Ginzburg remembers, "Avant Garde (the magazine) began as the single most difficult collaboration we had -- his [Lubalin's] first logo was in Hebrew. He thought that was funny. Then he did it in Coca-Cola script. We went through a dozen logos, masterfully executed."
Graphic Design Publishing - Herb Lubalin's Avant Garde Lubalin and Ginzburg used a collection of Picasso erotica in the promotional materials for the new magazine and needed a complete alphabet for their titles. Lubalin used three assistants to hand draw the 26 characters (only capital letters were needed) very quickly and, with the vital involvement of Tom Carnase, another of Lubalin's partners, many additional fitted character pairs (called "ligatures") were created as their work progressed. It is these upper case character pairs that made Avant Garde one of the most original typefaces of the twentieth century. But Avant Garde, the all-cap typeface, was intended only for use in the magazine by its art director.
December 31st, 2005
Continuing the meaty theme, I happened across this iPod giveaway contest.
Mike Davidson's 'Make a Meatspace Shuffle' contest asks people to submit images of an iPod shuffle made from food - anything from dill pickles to spam. There are some really ingenius submissions, as well as some pretty lame ones. There is a funny comment about Spam being the state food of Hawaii.
December 31st, 2005
The last couple days I've had the opening song to '
Honey & Clover' stuck in my head. It's Dramatic [
mp3], by
Yuki, a super chibi J-Pop girl with Bjork-ish touches - I caught one of her vids on AZN TV (um, no i dont watch that! *grin*) and it was super weird. Kind of blue man group mixed with j-pop style and all smothered in a good dose of anime mentality.
More info here. The 1st 1/2 Season End song is good also Waltz, by Suneohair. OMG - save me, I'm admitting to liking J-Pop stuff....
Honey and Clover is a good anime, with a large focus on character development, the interactions of normal kids and the people around them. Nothing super-mecha-action-harem-fanservice about it. It centers around art students at a college, and as such has some interesting tidbits about life as a designer, the trials of a genius artist, and the difficulties of art students. It has very nice watercolory animation, and a decent amount of fun, crazy animated segs.
December 31st, 2005
Chriss Angel (aka the MindFreak) is a total idiot. If you don't know who this is, you're not missing anything. He likes to think he is a 'magician' - He's the first magician that I could actually figure out how he did his
on-TV tricks, and that blatantly edits his '
feats' in post production. It is so cheesy, he is so lame, it makes me want to laugh... Which, by the way is the only reason he is on A&E. Just like Dog the Bounty Hunter who is a comic facade of a bounty hunter, Chriss Angel is a parody of a magician, and him and his production crew are completely blind to their idiocy. Sure, he fools a lot of people, but people seem to be easily fooled these days. Maybe next time he gets struck by pseudo-lightening, he'll stop bugging me on TV.
December 31st, 2005
DRS Technologies uses some really good Ultra High-Speed Cameras. I love watching stuff in slow motion - especially destructive forces. They have one especially cool gadget that tracks the flight trajectory of a projectile and seems to even detect the shockwaves - check out the clip of this
tank shell. The Mythbusters need something this high tech! Of course I'd be happy to have their hi-speed camera any day!
electricstuff.co.uk has some crazy electrics tomfoolery going on that I recommend you check out, especially the
hi-speed footage stuff.
December 30th, 2005
Boing Boing addresses
why not to shoot a gun into the air for fun. The simple and obvious answer is that a faling bullet will f*** you up worse than a regular gunshot wound. This has a Mythbusters tie-in:
What is your favorite Busted Myth and your favorite Confirmed one? ADAM SAVAGE -- I've always been partial to the Penny Drop myth, i.e. will a penny dropped from the Empire State Building kill you when it hits the ground? To me, that was one of the most elegant and simple applications of science to a question that we've done. Until last week. We just worked on a myth called "bullets fired up" -- i.e., will a bullet fired directly vertically kill you when it comes back down. We did tons of research on it, and in the end, added significantly to the body of knowledge that's out there on the subject. I won't give away the ending, but we nailed this one.
I wonder when this episode will air - it will be an interesting experiment to pull off since it would be pretty difficult to shoot a bullet in the air and have it fall to a specific location to embed itself in
ballistics gel to measure results. I think they will probably drop a bullet at sufficient height in order to acheive terminal velocity. Multiple drops with multiple slugs should take care of random tumbling or lack thereof.
Check out Mythbusters shirts here
December 30th, 2005
Some poor bastard in Hawaii opened up his iPod cube packaging on Christmas morning only to find a ...
slab o' meat! Turns out a former WalMart employee had tampered with several iPod shipments and replaced the mp3 player with a tasty surprise. So with "Meat" becoming today's theme, I created this
beefy iPod image. [update 12/31 - took screen capture of the meat from CNN video]
December 30th, 2005
King Kong - He's What's For Dinner! Soon as Peter Jackson's giant gorilla eats it, you can eat him, thanks to this handy guide to King Kong meat cuts! Just print it out and hand it to your local butcher and you'll have some Filet Mignon ala Kong in no time! Boy o boy that'd be a fat slab o meat... I highly recommend it with a glass of red wine and some mash potaters.
If you want to use this as desktop wallpaper, just set it up as centered to fit with a solid color background.
December 30th, 2005
I wish I had my very own
Solar Death Rayâ„¢. Then I would make it burn through a barbie doll torso from whose Barbie locks is suspended the Gravity Death Logâ„¢, which would then fall and destroy any object I desired. While not quite as powerful as the
MIT solar death ray, it still has the power to turn an Orea cookie into a smoldering piece of char. Shame on you Mythbusters for not taking your own contraption and burning a crater in the a nearby planet!
December 30th, 2005
In a classic poster from 1979, Jack Summerford promoted the 'new' typeface ITC Garamond through use of the word Helvetica typeset in ITC Garamond. This was a reaction to the overuse of Helvetica at the time, and a humorous stab at the ubiquitous typeface. Ironically, ITC Garamond subsequently gained notoriety and saturated the design world, most notably as the font for Apple Computers (albiet at 80% horiz scale) I have put this 1979 classic onto a t-shirt and can be
bought here (Available as a tshirt & messenger bag).
December 30th, 2005
Another Mythbusters T-Shirt design is complete. The tshirt is available on cafepress, and features the words "I reject your reality and substitute my own" and a likeness of the Mythbusters crash test dummy 'Buster.' I believe that quote is from Adam Savage talking about Jamie Hyneman. Yikes, I'm such a Mythbusters geek!
Also available: I DO MY ALL MY OWN STUNTS, plain I REJECT YOUR REALITY text-only tee, and more!
Look here!
December 24th, 2005
On the recommendation of a friend, I have started putting designs up on CafePress. Being a few years behind the rest of the world, I must say what a cool service this is. (You all knew that already) Well, I posted my RSS / XML T-Shirt humor design "feed me", as well as my Pontiac Fiero 80's car design TShirt. The
"Feed Me" shirt is a play on the feed buttons that you find everywhere these days for xml/rss/feedburner/atom etc feeds. The
Fiero shirt, is well, pretty much just an illustration of a Pontiac Fiero! I miss my cute fastback 2 seater mid-engine plastic body firetrap!
December 24th, 2005
I've posted my 'Alphabet Killer' design as a desktop wallpaper, created using ASCII characters and simple human figures. The desktop wallpaper is available in
widescreen and
standard monitor sizes.
December 15th, 2005
"Na na na na na na na na, where the hooooood at? where's the hoooood... aaatttt" This ad from Sprint / Nextel is insanely irritating. The worst part of it is that it gets stuck in your head and at some random point on your day you'll start singing DMX to the tune of Karma Chameleon. Whoever thought this up is either a genius or an idiot. This ad is almost as irritating as the noise those Nextel phones make right before their owner's talk way too loudly into them.
By the way, that's eight 'na's in case you were wondering.
December 15th, 2005
Is it me, or does the king from
Le Roi et L’Oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) look a helluva lot like the dude from Katamari that vomits a rainbow (he's got some serious eating disorder issues). Actually, it's probabl y the other way round. Anyhoo, this animation looks like a great piece of animation history, and supposedly is supposed to have influenced great Japanese animators such as Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli fame. Put together by renowned animator Paul Grimault and based on a story by Hans Christian Anderson, it sounds amazing. I haven't seen it yet, and unfortunately isn't on Netflix.
IMDB has got in it the DB, and further research suggests the French DVD doesn't seem to have English subtitles.
December 15th, 2005
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