Cinemagraphs: the art of the animated gif
April 21, 2011 § 4 Comments
Remember the early days of the web, before Flash and JavaScript, when the animated gif was the only thing that could move in a webpage (and more often than not to a displeasing effect)? Those days are long gone, and the gif has been de-throned and for good reason: most of them were not only crude, but utterly ugly as well, by definition bordering on the kitsch side. But the gifs you are about to see are a completely different story.
Fashion (and not only) photographer Jamie Beck creates these amazing animated gifs with the help of web designer Kevin Burg. 
These gifs walk the fine line between photography and video, belonging to neither. They are studies on a scene. You might even miss the motion completely if you are not careful enough. But, even if minimal, this motion is heavy with emotion and fluent with meaning.
The artistic duo calls their animated gif cinemagraphs and explain: “There’s something magical* about a still photograph — a captured moment in time — that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.”
You can find all of Jamie’s animated gifs in her tumblr: from me to you. Not only that, but you can also find all of her fashion photography (New York Fashion Week, anyone?), her own styling and street fashion photography (I love her vintage style; it is actually her on the portrait above), her food blogging, her series on NYC and other cities and A LOT more.
*[Speaking of magic, this minimal flickering inside the photograph is exactly how I always imagined the Daily Prophet.]
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The history of graffiti and street art
April 21, 2011 § 1 Comment
Because graffiti and street art have a long history, too.
designed by Daniel Feral
via Laughing Squid
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Green typography
April 20, 2011 § 1 Comment
Anna Garfoth experiments with eco-graffiti and green typography. And I mean actually green: messages written with moss on walls.
She also uses leafs, garbage and tape on fences’ grids to spell her messages.
And my personal favorite, the edible poster made out of cookies.
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Read it elsewhere
April 20, 2011 § Leave a comment
Check them out:
- A dramatic reading of Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, complete with a beret and (e)spanish accent (video) – kottke
- Is the cupcake dead? – Johnson Banks
- John Lennon’s bitter letter to Linda McCartney – flavorwire]
- Do you know how much power your appliances use? (interactive infograph) – GE visualization
- The evolution of web design – mashable
- He’s an actor, he’s a writer, he’s a musician: download Hugh Laurie’s new blues track for free – pop culture brain
- What if Barbie was real-size – msnbc
- The latest tumblr to take the world by storm – hipster animals
- If logos were honest – buzzfeed
The human factory
April 20, 2011 § 1 Comment
We often consider our self as part of a mechanical work. That times has changed and we are nothing but a machine which work all the time to fulfill its ever emerging needs. But the idea of the human being as a machine was first conceived or at least illustrated by German physician, artist and writer Fritz Kahn in 1926. Fritz Kahn created Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), a poster of the human body, which depicts the body’s complex functions, such as respiration, circulation, digestion as parts of a wider mechanical process. He ‘compartmentalized’ the body, creating different rooms, where workers carefully carried out the different works of our body.
Henning Lenderer, a German visual communication and animation student, has created an amazing and high detailed animation of Kahn’s poster, managing to eloquently explain the separate functions of a body, in the following video and an interactive installation for the audience to explore the different cycles of this human machinery.
via Visual News
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Just symmetry
April 19, 2011 § 1 Comment
In their own words
April 19, 2011 § 3 Comments
If you were a writer and you were about to make your self-portrait, how would you draw yourself? Would you choose to depict an extract from your literary work perhaps? Artist and author John Sokol creates drawings of literary figures, whose outline of the face is crafted from the very words of their own works.
Jorge-Luis Borges and the Secret Miracle
See more portraits after the jump
From behind
April 19, 2011 § 1 Comment
Can you imagine how Twitter and Facebook would look like from behind? I am sure you can’t. Designers Jeff Lam and Josephine Yatar present in their blog Back of a Webpage a different and very creative ‘back view’ of most of our favourite websites. 
See more after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics
April 18, 2011 § 5 Comments
Really good songs have usually really good lyrics. And good lyrics stay with you. When we were at school we doodled them on our books and carved them into the desks. What do the digital natives do? Here are the best ideas (and, incidentally, really good songs for the most part) we found around the web:
1. Pick a photo, apply a vintage effect and write the lyrics in helvetica
Paris by the Friendly Fires (the Aeroplane version featuring Au Revoir Simone kicks major ass, too)
(visual first seen at letlooselove, our title inspired by this)
2. Make a flowchart*
Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash
(visual first seen at Urlesque)
*but be careful not to be trapped on an infinite loop
See 9 more ways after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
Do you know about A Google A Day?
April 18, 2011 § 1 Comment
Well, if you love puzzles, riddles and trivia (or plain Google procrastination) this is your game. And if Google searching is your specialty, then you will like its challenge: A Google A Day asks a question, gives you some hints and allows you to use Google Search to find the answer. The catch? The search is protected by Deja Google, a search engine that only returns results from before A Google A Day was created. This way, you can’t get walkthroughs or answers from social media.
Are you up to the challenge?
P.S. I dedicate this post to F. who’s 10 years my junior and recently asked me, when I was complaining about not finding something on Google, “but did you search cleverly enough?”. Duh!
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Things deteriorate
April 16, 2011 § 3 Comments
Beautiful stop-motion animation of things falling apart with the passage of time by artist Ryan Kothe.
Or, as someone once said, screws fall out all the time; the world’s an imperfect place.
via core77
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Musical attack
April 15, 2011 § 1 Comment
See what happens when a house in the suburbs is attacked by six drummers.
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Read it elsewhere
April 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
Slim pickings:
- It’s true what they say, there is a tumblr for everything – fugly android interfaces
- What kind of twitter user are you? (infograph) – daily infographic
- I assure you that a post with the title “Unspeakable Bodily Fluids and Genitalia: A Short, Revolting Intro to the Finest Metaphors in British Food Criticism” is a good read – GOOD.is
- Bringing the bling to Anakin: Darth Vader’s helmet gets the artist treatment – total film
- These post stamps for the 50 years of the Royal Shakespeare Company are amazing – creative review
Creative truths
April 13, 2011 § 1 Comment
The most valuable truths that rule both life and art, are often the simplest ones. Shirley-Ann Dick reveals some of them in what appears to me at least as Rothko-like posters.
See more after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
What do the oos in google mean?
April 13, 2011 § 2 Comments
Architects play with LEGO
April 12, 2011 § 1 Comment
I’ve always imagined architects playing with LEGOs as little kids. It turns out, they still do it as grown-ups (or at least Architecture students).
PLAYTIME WORKSHOP by KRADS (a Icelandic/Danish architectural ensemble) asks of Architecture students to create LEGO structures based on themes like Volume Studies or Utopias (how architectural of them).
They have also been part of a museum exhibition in the reykjavík art museum during designmarch 2011, where the architectural structures where used as a starting point for visitors to interact and built upon.
The concept behind the choice of LEGO is the freedom in form and shape that results from not having too many choices: using one material (the LEGO brick) in one color. Liberated from variety in the medium, the shapes become innovative and dynamic.
I have to admit that I usually find conceptual projects by architects to be pretentious, but this inspired me. Perhaps due to the fact that LEGO was my favorite childhood game. But it has given me motive to go back to it with a new perspective. Now I just need the 65 kg of LEGO bricks that were used in the exhibition. Any donations?
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Is a picture worth a thousand words?
April 12, 2011 § 2 Comments
One of the most beautiful scenes in the motion picture history restructured. In words. Juan Osborne used the lyrics of the’ Singing in the Rain’ song to outline Gene Kelly’s figure of in his memorable dance. Juan Osborne creates mostly portraits of directors, writers, actors, politicians by choosing very carefully the words to incorporate in each of his subjects. He has even used over 200,000 words for just one piece.
If it is too blurry to view it, just get some distance and it will appear clear. Check out some of his amazing portraits in his personal blog.
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it's a small web 