Influencers

Great thoughts and comments on trends, influencers, and the current design culture.

I particularly like minutes 7-10 talking about the tipping point of new/trendy/cool to mainstream and the relevance of brands as influencers with the distance from a large brand to actual trending culture.

I Heart NYC

Gorgeous - I will never get tired of NYC time lapse



Also - love the song - "Rivers and Roads" by The Head and the Heart

12 Drawings a Day

Illustrator Denis Chapon's 12 Drawings A Day: An Animated Story

This is stunning. Chapon drew 12 drawings a day, the equivalent of one second of video frames, each day for three years and ended up with this beautiful video.

Object Architecture

Amazing video creating various architecture landmarks out of objects such as books, bowls, knives and even a wig. For any architecture lover, this is pretty great. Created by Luis Urculo.

Via Arch Daily & Veronica

Support the FSU Film School Master Thesis films for 2012 on Kickstarter. There are 23 filmmakers and and 18 films being produced. Beyond their small student budget, these students are looking get just $1000 extra each to make even better films. Watch their video below and support them on Kickstarter today!



Also - this whole video was shot in one continuous shot! Crazy!

Field of Light

Field of Light, an installation by British light artist Bruce Munro, opened this weekend at The Holbourne Museum. Field of Light consists of a stunning 5,000 lightbulbs "planted" around the museum grounds creating something akin to Avatar's glowing Pandora landscape.

Breathtaking - if you're in the UK - check it out! Its open through January 2012.

Via Laughing Squid

Build your own font

FontStruct lets you build, share and download fonts. Haven't tried it, but it seems pretty cool.

Using the fonts made on the site, this limited edition poster was created and is for sale on Etsy.

Also, if modules and pixels aren't sure style - you can upload your handwriting to create a custom font using one of these sites - Fontifier or YourFonts for only $9.

It doesn't get much cute than this! Little Printer brought to us by BERG



Full article on FastCo

CNN Ecosphere

Hello lovely

This live twitter visualization is one of the most gorgeous, smooth and data filled visualizations I've ever seen. CNN's Ecosphere is a visualization of the live conversation for the COP17 Conference on Climate Change.

Breathtaking...and nerve-wacking to watch...but beautiful.

"Tancrède, Julien, Seb and Antoine are pioneers in ‘highlining’ - a vertiginous combination of climbing, slackline and tightrope walking."

See more videos here.

Eames love

Such brilliant people so far ahead of their time. I wish I could have been designing during this time. Charles and Ray Eames documentary "Eames: the architect and the painter" playing now at the IFC Center.

"We don't make art; we solve problems"

Via Veronica & FastCo Design

Oldies but Goodies

Mmmhh vintage data visualization

Rank of Most Populous Cities at Each Census

Via Pinterest

Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga

So much love for Lady Gaga

Prouve RAW

I really want these chairs
I may just have to settle with seeing them at the NYC Vitra store...

via FastCo Design

London Squared

Today is full of awesome.

For anyone who knows me...this video is like an amazing motion version of my "Faces" project that I've been doing for years now. These faces found around New York City are not static, however, but talking and singing!!

Combine anthropomorphized newspaper bins and insane stop motion - are you kidding me - this is best thing ever!! LondonSquared - hats off to you. This is spectacular.

And to top it all off - it is yet another amazing part of the MoMA Talk to Me exhibit I have yet to see!

Thanks to @veroacosta for knowing me so well and sharing this!!!

Also...both videos autoplay - sorry. The first one is a music video and the second is hilarious personalities talking about life.

Color Codification Dot Drawings

Came across these today and fell in love - such a great combination of information design and fine art. I WANT ONE! :) Artist Lauren DiCiocco created this series and her explanation of the project is below -

"I call this body of work my "color codification dot drawings." To make each painting, I lay a sheet of frosted mylar over a magazine page. I assign a color to every letter (numbers are shades of grayscale) and apply tiny dots of paint over every character on the page according to my color-code. Making the paintings is a lot like solving a cryptogram and the result is a legible blur of dots in the form of the article’s layout, a kind of Braille for the color-inclined."

A few are for sale via 20x20.

Freaker!

This is quite possibly the most brilliant Kickstarter video ever!! And he sells these in Union Square - how fun! Look for Zach Crain.



He's already reached his funding, so just enjoy this ridiculous video :)

Grampa's gonna look like a baby

This is my FAVORITE commercial!! I've acted it out for like 10 people - now you can just see it for yourself :) love it!!

New York Time Lapse

I love this city :) and this spectacular time lapse series by Josh Owens

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Kickstarter

This post has been a long time coming and I'm so happy to be able to share some truly awesome projects. For those of you not familiar, Kickstarter is a GREAT site that serves as a funding platform for creative projects. Its been featured on just about every major site you can think of and every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. On the site, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands.








Some awesome projects that have been funded through Kickstarter include:
The Noun Project which started on Kickstarter here
TikTok+LunaTik started on Kickstarter, going on to raise nearly one million dollars and soon to be sold through Apple (via FastCo Design article)
Designer Frank Chimero's new book The Shape of Design was fully funded almost immediately on Kickstarter













So here's the best part - there are some really great causes on Kickstarter as well as some great projects from friends of mine. Check these below that friends of mine have been involved in -



Parsons Splash House - a graduate architecture project providing lockers and changing rooms for a Washington Heights pool so that the areas rec center can remain open throughout the summer. The project must reach its funding goal by June 1 2011. See the project website here.




Switch Hooks - a great project by Andy, a friend of a friend, converting light switch panels into multi-functional objects for holding things like keys or phones. See the project website here.




Trade in Hope: Fighting Child Sex Slavery in America - a powerful project to create a feature length documentary about American children being sold for sex. See the project website here.

BP Oil Spill

This is an interesting animation of the BP oil spill data called Oil'd by Chris Harmon. I'm a huge fan of infographic videos anyways, but I think this was does a really good job adding helpful context to these numbers.

Its one of Fast Co's Daily Infographics - an excellent source of high quality and content data visualizations.

Oil'd from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.

Aurora Borealis

For everyone who has the Aurora Borealis on their bucket list...if you never make it to see the in person...this seems to be the next best thing to real. This super high quality video captures the incredible beauty and intrigue of the aurora borealis. Per suggestion of Steven, watch it full screen with the music as loud as possible.

See more work by the Norwegian filmmaker Terje Sorgjerd here.

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Photo from here.

Everynone

Absolutely stunning!! These videos are by Everynone, an amazing filmmaking team based in NYC with Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercandante and Julius Metoyer III.

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Thesis sneak-peekery

Visualizing food a bajillion different ways (official explanation)

The Johnny Cash Project

See the full project at The Johnny Cash Project



This is a project by Aaron Koblin, with director Chris Milk, that is, of course, completely amazing. He's the brillant mind behind The Sheep Market, Flight Patterns, Radiohead's House of Cards video, and Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown video, among others.

This latest project again uses the crowdsourcing method of The Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents where participants are asked to create small bits of the project, that when put together create something spectacular. The Johnny Cash Project is a collective effort to create the final Johnny Cash music video for his final studio recording - Ain't No Grave. Participants draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash from a still within the video creating an always evolving video and images are always able to be added. Over 250,000 images have been drawn by people from 172 countries - and this number is always growing.

Babies

A beautiful story of the first year of life of 4 babies born around the world, you watch them grow and learn, in radically different environments, essentially all the same things. Located in Japan, Namibia, Mongolia, and the United States, the babies have nothing in common except for the fact that they all must learn the same basic essentials - crawl, walk, talk, play, explore, etc.

Centered strictly around the 4 babies, the filming is spectacular. It creates a more personal feel for the viewer and leaves the sterile qualities of some documentaries far behind. The shots are close and really focus on the baby. There are no scenes of parents talking, no subtitles, no parenting advice. You are introduced to life at its purest.



Babies is available for instant play on Netflix. See the official movie site here.

OFFF 2009 Main Titles

Main titles from Prologue for OFFF 2009
by Kyle Cooper, Ilya Abulhanov and Elizabeth Newman

Spectacular imagery paired with crazy sound and great vector animation

Similar aesthetics to the intro for Stranger Than Fiction with typography and vector imagery laid over video, just with the added elements of weirdness and suspense - love it

OFFF 2009 Main Titles from Prologue! from OFFF, let's feed the future on Vimeo.

Fage - Plain Extraordinary

A rare gem in the jumbled mess that is commercial advertising today, this is both stunningly beautiful and marvelously simple. Fage engages the viewer with a lovely and intriguing voice-over paired with imagery that looks nothing like any yogurt commercial you've seen before.

Enjoy.




And on a side note...greek yogurt is amazing...if you haven't tried it...you need to.

The Whale Hunt

Prepare to be blown away.















Reminding me of the flickr thread showing all the people who sat across from Marina Abramovic at her recent MoMA exhibit, this is a piece that, once you start looking, its incredibly difficult to step away.

The Whale Hunt is a beautiful project by Jonathan Harris - storyteller, visual artist, computer scientist, anthropologist, data voyeur, photographer, digital anthropologist, interviewer, and designer - that really pushes storytelling to a new level. Harris is the designer behind We Feel Fine and many other unique online story-telling experiments of sorts.


















Here's Jonathan's description of the project -
"In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. I documented their traditional whale hunt with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, taken at five-minute intervals for seven days, and at even higher frequencies in moments of high adrenaline. This established a constant “photographic heartbeat” that more or less matched the changing pace of my own heartbeat, and which recorded every moment of the hunt. I then developed a framework for experiencing this story, allowing the viewer to rearrange the photographic elements of the story to extract multiple sub-stories focused around different people, places, topics, and other variables."

Here's the ways you can see the photos, and then once you begin to click through, you can change the constraints of what you're viewing - only pictures in Barrow Alaska, about so and so, doing just this, etc etc.

Explore it...and give yourself a little time to do so.

Red Eye

Christoph Niemann...your work is brilliant. This is the THIRD time I've really enjoyed something he designed before realizing it was indeed him who had created it :)

A previous cookie dough post and the wonderful I Lego NY book (sitting happily on my coffee table at the moment, as all recent Amazon deliveries tend to do) can also be attributed to him.

Red Eye, a "visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London)" is hysterical, especially for anyone who has dealt with lots of air travel.

I left a few images out, so see the whole thing on the original NY Times post.