The Art of the Title features a great interview with director Angus Wall that explores the genesis & execution of the show’s iconic titles (contextualizing the plot via maps & structures).
Elsewhere, visual effects shops show off some of their best shots from the last season:
Want more Zen of the Pen? Practice your skills in this beautifully designed online app. Creator Mark MacKay has built a whole range of these design-themed games dealing with color, type, and shape.
High-energy stylings from Michael Julings:
[Vimeo]
New vintage-inspired madness from Cyriak—he (?) of the Escheresque hand-fingers, Kitty City, and more.
I’ve no idea what this video is. It crawled out from some dark corner of my computer after evolving from the virtual maggots that feast on rotting film footage.
[YouTube]
I’m loving Kevin Weir’s Flux Machine project, created from public-domain images hosted by the Library of Congress. Make sure to check out the whole thing.
[YouTube] [Via Aravind Krishnaswamy]
Photoshop previz + paint + volunteers = visual meditations on identity:
Chinese artist Liu Bolin camouflages himself into urban backdrops using acrylic paint, becoming “The Invisible Man.” We went behind the scenes of his blending process at London’s SCREAM gallery to document his process as he created two new, unreleased works, using director Jack Newman as his chameleon-like subject.
Vice writes,
With his surrealistic photographic performances, Bolin addresses issues at once as personal as they are intrinsically human; Buddhist notions of illusion, Taoist practices of stillness, contemporary ruminations on transparency and the nature of surveillance.
[YouTube]
Fast Company has posted a fun feature on how The Onion creates bizarre imagery for their stories. I have a special affection for this kind of thing, having written & illustrated a sort of poor man’s Onion back at Notre Dame in the mid/late 90’s. The artwork was super primitive, but it was a great way to teach myself Photoshop, Director, and Illustrator.
Master digital painter Bert Monroy is famous for the level of detail in his hyperrealistic works. He based his new Amsterdam Mist on a photo he took in person, but it lacked sufficient resolution for him to really replicate various structures & elements. In this video (part of a series illustrated by the new painting) he talks about how he used Street View in Google Maps to cruise around the neighborhood, zooming in on key details.
[Via James Fritz]
Nifty monsters & more from chaps across the pond:
[Vimeo]
I’m an endless sucker for this kind of visual storytelling. Besides the reel below, check out a ton of high-res screenshots on Territory Studio’s site. See also some good links to similar content from Khoi Vinh.
[Vimeo]
Man, I want to have, like, 10,000 of Project Twins‘ posters’ babies. Make sure to see the whole set, but here are a few of my faves:
Recumbentibus: A knockout punch, either verbal or physical.
Ostentiferous: Bringing omens or unnatural or supernatural manifestations.
Yonderly: Mentally or emotionally distant; absent-minded.
[Via Bruce Bullis]
I was so enthusiastic about Nelson Chu’s original MoXi research 10 years (!) ago that I posted it as a video at jnack.com/BlowingYourMindClearOutYourAss*. We had Nelson come to the US from Hong Kong & intern on the Photoshop team, but we could never quite shoehorn his advanced, GPU-heavy algorithms into the old girl’s hide. Anyway, following some years at Microsoft developing what became Fresh Paint, Nelson is back on his own & has revealed Expresii:
*Back when men were men, YouTube didn’t exist, and to share a video you had to hollow out a log, stretch your own custom FLV skin over it, and fire-harden it for hours.
I’ve long enjoyed Franz Ferdinand’s Rodchenko-inspired album art, so I was delighted to discover (a decade late!) their animated Constructivist/Busby Berkeley/Dadaist video for Take Me Out:
[YouTube]
This $32 plug-in offers clever ways to refine, trim, and join shapes by sketching:
[YouTube]
Looks like a good resource:
When we released our previous file in 2009, the main question we received was why we would go to the trouble to create an Illustrator version of the iPhone UI elements. We addressed this at the time in a post titled “Why build iPhone app mockups in vector format?” There is even a nice note about the then rumored imminent introduction of higher resolution screens and how we hoped our use of vector files would help us once they were announced. (It helped A LOT.) […]
[W]e’ve purposely turned “Align New Objects to Pixel Grid” off in the Transform palette because it wreaks havoc on corner radii and icons. We recommend that you do the same.
This site is rather brilliant.
How lovely is this shadow-casting popup book? As Colossal explains, “As a light source is directed toward either side, a different moving image is projected on the page to help tell the story.” Check it out:
[Vimeo]
Anonymously draw versions of others’ selfies, and have them return the ostensible favor; what a bizarre but oddly compelling idea. It’s loaded with fun, cheeky little UI details, and the developers claim that it’s been downloaded more than a million times.
I took this crappy image of myself & minutes later it became part of a diptych. Thanks, RiotingKnucklehead!
Shine on, you crazy doodlers. [Via Brian Matiash]
No wonder Steve Jobs clicked with Adobe founder John Warnock. While introducing the iPad Jobs said,
“The reason that Apple is able to create products like iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both.”
The Warnock family embodied just that, pairing a pioneering software engineer/mathematician with a professional designer. Their collaboration shaped PostScript and then Adobe’s first app, Illustrator. This beautifully produced little documentary (warning—you’ll get sucked in) tells the tale. I love hearing from old friends & new talent:
Interviews include cofounder John Warnock, his wife Marva, artists and designers Ron Chan, Bert Monroy, Dylan Roscover and Jessica Hische.
Side bonus: Here’s a copy of the VHS demo tape that shipped inside the Illustrator 1.0 box that I uploaded a few years ago:
The Draco project from Autodesk lets you sketch repeating elements, then use other sketched elements to define their replication and flow. It looks really promising:
We propose a framework built around kinetic textures, which provide continuous animation effects while preserving the unique timeless nature of still illustrations. This enables many dynamic effects difficult or not possible with previous sketch-based tools, such as a school of fish swimming, tree leaves blowing in the wind, or water rippling in a pond.
Having pestered my Illustrator & NVIDIA friends about this for years (even playing matchmaker on intercontinental conference calls), I’m so pleased to see their collaborations starting to bear fruit. Now if you’re running a high-end NVIDIA GPU on Windows (Mac support hopefully coming soon, dependent on Apple & driver changes), you can speed up on-screen rendering by a factor of 10 or more:
The progress is encouraging, but I’m excited less about speeding up what’s possible today & more about enabling things one simply hasn’t been able to do—new kinds of brushing, live transforms, etc.—given previous performance constraints.
[YouTube]
For the World Cup Coca-Cola commissioned 3D street artist Joe Hill to create this mural/stage:
Elsewhere, trip out on the work of painter Brian Williams:
Colossal explains,
This particular optical illusion is what’s known as reverse perspective painting, where objects (usually rooms) are painted on a physically skewed surface resulting in images that appear in reverse when viewed head on.
Or, as my 4-year-old son put it upon glancing over, “It’s an M-room.” (Note the shape of the wooden floor.) Here’s its secret:
[YouTube]
My team has built a fun little feature: Add a hashtag to your photo (e.g. #PaintUSA), share it on Google+, and we’ll automatically apply the country flag of your choice. My colleague Alex Powell (who recently joined us from Dreamworks) did this work and writes,
- Take a photo of yourself and up to 5 friends who’d like their faces painted
- Share it on Google+ with the hashtag #PaintUSA or any other country in the knockout round (list of hashtags)
- After a few minutes check back in your stream. The faces will be painted with the country flag of your choice
Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
I’ve been fooled more than once before, but after 27 years AI has at last matched the shape-modifying chops of everything from Photoshop to PowerPoint. All good-natured ribbing aside, this should make interface designers seriously happy.
Rectangles now have quickly modifiable corners, including independent radius control. Corner attributes are retained if you scale and rotate your rectangle. Now Illustrator remembers your work — width, height, rotation, corner treatment — so you can return to your original shape.
Here’s a practice file & exercise.
I’m pleased to see that the pen & ruler once dubbed Mighty & Napoleon are now available from Adobe, together with Line (for precision drafting, including in perspective) and Sketch (drawing with built-in community). Check out Brian Yap’s Dia De Los Muertos illustration plus Terry White’s overview demo:
Having spent years trying to get rotatable guides & snap-to-path functionality into Photoshop (hope springs eternal!), I’m really eager to take Slide & Line for a literal spin.
The hardware ships together for $199. What do you think?
[YouTube]
Promising news from the folks behind Paper:
FiftyThree introduces Surface Pressure—an industry-first feature that uses Pencil’s uniquely-designed tip to vary the lines you create. Surface Pressure comes to Pencil with the release of iOS 8 this Fall.
When I took the original iPad to visit master digital artist Bert Monroy & artists at Pixar, I noticed how their eyes lit up (after an initially tepid response) when they used their fingers to smudge pixels. Something magical happens when tools feel true to themselves, when you’re using your fingers not as crappy fake pens but as fingers.
So good. 🙂 [Via]
(I have no idea of its origin, though I like that Google suggested this image as being visually similar on the same day that we introduced our boys to David Macaulay’s classic Cathedral.)
My years-long design crush on these guys continues unabated. Check out the Chop Shop Store for beautiful letterpressed cards, t-shirts, posters, and more (like this Strangelovian gem):
Even as a fairly minor work in the director’s incredible canon, this video for Metronomy is fun. The Fox Is Black writes,
Shot in a single-take, the video sees the band stuck inside a painted set while a camera rotates around the outside. In typical Gondry fashion the video is fun, playful and filled with the director’s distinctive sense of whimsy.
[YouTube]
I cannot express just how much Young JNack would have been All. Over. This.
The Doodles team writes,
For our 7th annual Doodle 4 Google competition, we asked kids, grades K-12, to draw an invention that would make the world a better place. Out of more than 100,000 submissions, 250 state finalists, 50 state winners, and 5 national age group winners, we are excited to present the 2014 Doodle 4 Google winner: 11-year old Audrey Zhang of New York!
Animated (!) in Photoshop, no less.
The Washington Post writes,
Audrey won a $30,000 college scholarship from Google, which also gave a $50,000 tech grant to her school, Island Trees Middle School in Levittown, New York. Google also donated $20,000 in Audrey’s name to provide clean water and bathrooms at 10 schools in Bangladesh.
[YouTube]
Fantastic. Dose writes,
Photographer Alexander Khokhlov and Makeup Artist Veronica Ershova worked on a project that transforms regular women into magical works of art… Despite some of the photos looking like drawings, they are all actual women with their makeup perfectly done to capture the vision of the artists.
Click through to see the full set.
[Via Maria Brenny]
Super cool. The Fox Is Black writes,
Sue Murphy, an art director at Ogilvy & Mather, started Good Design is Good Business, a single-serving site which offers high-res versions of new and classic IBM posters. You’ll find works of design by legends like Paul Rand as well as contemporary classics like HORT. Perfect for the starving student or the design lover who needs some new art for their cube.
I have a particular soft spot for this genre, especially Paul Rand’s work. After I proposed to my wife, I made her a little illustration combining Rand’s Westinghouse W logo plus two bees from his Eye-Bee-M logo, then emailed it with the heading of simply “You.” Didn’t take her long to parse the meaning: W2B, as in “Wife To Be.”
Solid life perspective:
An audience appreciation is only going to be periodic, in the best of times. You fall in and out of favor continually. I don’t think it should be something one should be looking for. I think you should turn around at the end of the day and say, “I really liked that piece of work,” or “That piece of work sucked!” – not, “Was that popular or wasn’t it popular?”
“There may be something sacrilegious,” says artist & editor Lauren Wade, “but the same could be said for our contemporary ideas of beauty.” Check out some examples of her experiment:
[Via]
A quick, neat tour courtesy of Cento Lodigiani:
The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the ‘old men’ of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Of course they weren’t old men at the time, but young men who were at the forefront of exciting discoveries that were contributing to the development of a new art form. These principles came as a result of reflection about their practice and through Disney’s desire to use animation to express character and personality. This movie is my personal take on those principles, applied to simple shapes. Like a cube. Check also the animated GIF gallery.
[Vimeo]
Erroll Morris & team did a terrific job with The Fog Of War (wherein a spreadsheet of numbers started to fall like bombs on Vietnam), and their latest work—this time focusing on Donald Rumsfeld—is even better. I loved the juxtaposition & treatment of historical photos & text to the point that I created a gallery of screenshots that you might enjoy.
Classic illustration gets a dark twist as German director Werner Herzog* reads & interprets Madeline:
*(NOTE: Not really Werner Herzog)” [Via David Nishimura]
And if that’s up your shady alley, try Time Is A Flat Circus on for size:
[Via Adam Symons]
Having gotten my publishing start as a kid via Cricket Magazine’s art contests, I’m pleased to see that Google has opened up voting across age ranges for kids’ art to appear on Google.com. Check it out!
Andrea Minini has created Animals in Moiré, using Illustrator to vary line weights. (I must know more about this technique!)
[Via]
The whole set from Nathan W. Pyle is pitch perfect. A couple faves:
My immediate thoughts every time these guys come out with something:
Check out the very promising looking Stylism:
Fifty bucks; good stuff.
[YouTube]
Reshape line segments by holding down Opt/Alt:
Create your own custom Tools panel(s) (yay, Configurator in Illustrator!—kinda):
