Category Archives: Design

The explosive titles of “Your Friends & Neighbors”

Design

As Motionographer aptly puts it,

Director John Likens and FX Supervisor Tomas Slancik dissect existential collapse in Your Friends & Neighbors’ haunting opener, blending Jon Hamm’s live-action gravitas with a symphony of digital decay. […]

Shot across two days and polished by world-class VFX artists, the title sequence mirrors Hamm’s crumbling protagonist, juxtaposing his stoic performance against hyper-detailed destruction.

Rive introduces Vector feathering

Design, Illustration

I really hope that the makers of traditional vector-editing apps are paying attention to rich, modern, GPU-friendly techniques like this one. (If not—and I somewhat cynically expect that it’s not—it won’t be for my lack of trying to put it onto their radar. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Lego Interstellar is stunning

Design

Wow—I marvel at the insane, loving attention to detail in this shot-for-shot re-creation of a scene from Interstellar:

The creator writes,

I started working on this project in mid-2023, and it has been an incredible challenge, from modeling and animation to rendering and post-production. Every detail, from the explosive detachment of the Ranger to the rotation of the Endurance, the space suits of the minifigures, the insides of the Lander, and even the planet in the background, was carefully recreated in 3D.

Interstellar is one of the films that has moved me the most. Its story, visuals, and soundtrack left a lasting impact on me, and this video is my personal love letter to the movie—and to cinema in general. I wanted to capture the intensity and emotion of this scene in LEGO form, as a tribute to the power of storytelling through film.

Side by side:

Sigma BF: Clean AF

Design, Photography

Refreshingly simple design!

Is it for me? Dunno: lately the only thing that justifies shooting with something other than my phone is a big, fast zoom lens, and I don’t know whether pairing such a thing with this slim beauty would kinda defeat the purpose. Still, I must know more…

Here’s a nice early look at the cam plus a couple of newly announced lenses:

Titles: Severance Season 2

Design

Building on the strong work from the previous season,

Berlin’s Extraweg have created… a full-blown motion design masterpiece that takes you on a wild ride through Mark’s fractured psyche. Think trippy CGI, hypnotic 3D animations, and a surreal vibe that’ll leave you questioning reality. It’s like Inception met a kaleidoscope, and they decided to throw a rave in your brain. [more]

Microsoft opens 13 new AI + Design roles

Design

If you or folks you know might be a good fit for one or more of these roles, please check ’em out & pass along info. Here’s some context from design director Mike Davidson.

————

These positions are United States only, Redmond-preferred, but we’ll also consider the Bay Area and other locations:

These positions are specifically in our lovely Mountain View office:

Reinterpreting classic instrument clusters in the age of CarPlay

Design, User Interface

“Tell me about a product you hate that you use regularly.” I asked this question of hundreds of Google PM candidates I interviewed, and it was always a great bozo detector. Most people don’t have much of an answer—no real passion or perspective. I want to know not just what sucks, but why it sucks.

If I were asked the same question, I’d immediately say “Every car infotainment system ever made.” As Tolstoy might say, “Each one is unhappy in its own way.” The most interesting thing, I think, isn’t just to talk about the crappy mismatched & competing experiences, but rather about why every system I’ve ever used sucks. The answer can’t be “Every person at every company is a moron”—so what is it?

So much comes down to the structure of the industry, with hardware & software being made by a mishmash of corporate frenemies, all contending with a soup of regulations, risk aversion (one recall can destroy the profitability of a whole product line), and surprisingly bargain-bin electronics.

Despite all that, talented folks continue to fight the good fight, and I enjoyed John LePore’s speculative designs that reinterpret the instrument clusters of classic cars (from Corvettes to DeLoreans) through Apple’s latest CarPlay framework:

Uizard & the future of AI-assisted design

AI/ML, Design

Uizard (“Wizard”), which was recently acquired by Miro, has rolled out Autodesigner 2.0:

We take the intuitive conversational flow of ChatGPT and merge it with Uizard generative UI capabilities and drag-and-drop editor, to provide you with an intuitive UI design generator. You can turn a couple of ideas into a digital product design concept in a flash!

I’m really curious to see how the application of LLMs & conversational AI reshapes the design process, from ideation & collaboration to execution, deployment, and learning—and I’d love to hear your thoughts! Meanwhile here’s a very concise look at how Autodesigner works:

And if that piques your interest, here’s a more in-depth look:

“Top Billing,” huge egos, and the art of title design

Design

99% Invisible is back at it, uncovering hidden but fascinating bits of design in action. This time around it’s concerned with the art of movie title & poster design—specifically with how to deal with actors who insist on being top billed. In the case of the otherwise forgotten movie Outrageous Fortune:

Two different prints of the movie were made, one listing Shelley Long’s name first and the other listing Bette Midler’s name first. Not only that, two different covers to take-home products (LaserDisc and VHS) were also made, with different names first. The art was mirrored, so that the names aligned with the actors images.

One interesting pattern that’s emerged is to place one actor’s name in the lower left & another in the upper right—thus deliberately conflicting with normal reading order in English:

Anyway, as always with this show, just trust me—the subject is way more interesting than you might think.

“A brief & beautiful bubble in design history”

Design

I always love a good dive into learning not just the what and the how of how things—in this case materials from the US federal government—was designed, but why things were done that way.

This video’s all about the briefly groovy period in which Federal designers let it all hang out. From the NASA Worm, to the EPA’s funkadelic graphics, to, heck, the Department of Labor acting like it just took mushrooms, this was an unquestionably adventurous period. And then it stopped. What went wrong?

The Federal Graphics Improvement Program was an NEA initiative started under Richard Nixon, and its brief reign inspired design conventions, logo revamps, and graphics standards manuals. But it was also just a cash infusion rather than a bureaucratic overhaul. And as a result, we only remember toasty Federal Graphic Design, rather than enjoy its enduring legacy.

“What is Mise en Scène?”

Design, Photography

One of the great pleasures of parenting is, of course, getting to see your kids’ interests and knowledge grow, and yesterday my 13yo budding photographer Henry and I were discussing the concept of mise en scène. In looking up a proper explanation for him, I found this great article & video, which Kubrick/Shining lovers in particular will enjoy:

“For All Mankind”

Design

Hey friends—Happy New Year! I hope you’ve been able to get a little restful downtime, as I’ve done. I thought it’d be nice to ease back into things with these lovely titles from For All Mankind, which I’ve belatedly started watching & which I’m quite enjoying. The work is by Imaginary Forces, whom I’ve admired ever since seeing founder Kyle Cooper speak in the 90’s:

From the creators:

Lines deviate and converge in a graphic, tactile world that pays homage to the past while hinting at the “what if?” future explored throughout the series. Like the show logo itself, these lines weave and merge to create stylised representations of human exploration—badges, almost— ultimately reminding us of the common thread we share.

Heinz AI Ketchup

AI/ML, Design

Life’s like a mayonnaise soda…
What good is seeing eye chocolate…

— Lou Reed

The marketers at Heinz had a little fun noticing that an AI image-making app (DALL•E, I’m guessing) tended to interpret requests for “ketchup” in the style of Heinz’s iconic bottle. Check it out:

Adobe 3D Design is looking for 2023 interns

3D, Design

These sound like great gigs!

The 3D and Immersive Design Team at Adobe is looking for a design intern who will help envision and build the future of Adobe’s 3D and MR creative tools.

With the Adobe Substance 3D Collection and Adobe Aero, we’re making big moves in 3D, but it is still early days! This is a huge opportunity space to shape the future of 3D and AR at Adobe. We believe that tools shape our world, and by building the tools that power 3D creativity we can have an outsized impact on our world.

Ketchup goes AI…? Heinz puts DALL•E to work

AI/ML, DALL•E, Design

Interesting, and of course inevitable:

“This emerging tech isn’t perfect yet, so we got some weird results along with ones that looked like Heinz—but that was part of the fun. We then started plugging in ketchup combination phrases like ‘impressionist painting of a ketchup bottle’ or ‘ketchup tarot card’ and the results still largely resembled Heinz. We ultimately found that no matter how we were asking, we were still seeing results that looked like Heinz.”

Pass the Kemp!

[Via Aaron Hertzmann]