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“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck and a head full of questions, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s “bed-in” phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it.”
Intrigued? “I Met The Walrus” is a fantastic short film that uses motion graphics to translate the aforementioned audio interview with John Lennon. It showcases a great combination of illustration and photographic elements and even better philosophy. Check out some more screen grabs below.
You can currently go watch the short film in its entirety in The YouTube Screening Room and it is available for purchase on iTunes.
The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
Oil on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
I have been lucky enough to have seen some of Henri Rousseau’s work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and can say that most of the criticism of his work is fueled bigotry and jealousy. Rousseau was rarely taken seriously as a painter because of his working class background, his dream-like painting subjects, and his simple painting techniques until artists such as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky came to express their appreciation for his work. If Rousseau is unknown to you, below is some background information on the painter.
Henri Julien Rousseau (1844-1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter who helped to develop the ideas behind the surrealist movement. However, Rousseau was much different than avant-garde artists of the time as he was self-taught and from the working class. Because of his class and initial status as a hobbyist, many ridiculed and still do ridicule him. Rousseau retired from plumbing at the age of 49 to try his hand at painting. He was extremely naive, had had no academic art training and his painting technique was considered extremely simple, but he developed his own painting style that was different fromt the avant-garde art surrounding him at the time.
The Dream, 1910
Oil on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Despite starting out as a hobby painter, Rousseau deserves to be recognized as a true forerunner of Surrealism.
Over at Hardformat.org, you can check out a growing historical collection of music-related print and package design including vinyl, CDs, cassettes and more. With music formats evolving so quickly and modern physical packaging following vinyl into the category of fanatical collection, music-related design is becoming more obscure. Hardformat is aware of this and has created a place to find and admire both old and new music design work.
“It seems like everybody’s talking about the end of physical music media. Who knows whether they’re right or not, but Hard Format is a little place we’ve set up to celebrate our love of brilliant music-related design.”
While perusing their designs, I came across some great designs for a 2002 Sigur Rós compact disc and a 1981 Kraftwerk vinyl.
Wordle is a simple and fun tool to generate typographic word clouds. It may only seem like a time-waster at first, but if you take a look at the gallery you can find some very clever word combinations and descriptions that are great examples of typographic solutions to design problems. The above word cloud includes all the major words from my last few posts, but there are more in the gallery that go as far as to include entire novels.
There has been a lot of talk and complaints about the new Google favicon lately. I’ve found it to be both too indistinguishable and unfamiliar to be able to recognize it immediately as Google.
One of the main purposes of the favicon is to act as a shortcut icon that will help you find a saved bookmark in your browser or an application on your desktop. Such a change of this icon completely disrupts what users are comfortable with and familiar with, which is extremely important when it comes to any interface or application.
Luckily, Google listens to its users and has decided not to close the door on the issue. And now if you have an idea for updating the Google icon (or gcon! no?) then now you can submit your favicon design to google and have your celebrity forever cemented in 16 pixels of stone, or at least until the next update. Beyond that, don’t expect to be compensated for fixing Google’s branding problems. Seems a little like spec work to me…
This is an oldie but goodie by Alan Becker.
You can also now play a video game based on the animation here
Prolific poster artist Alton Kelley passed away on June 4, 2008 at the youthful age of 67 from complications of osteoporosis. Kelley’s distinct concert posters for artists such as Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture.
Kelley’s posters were heavily influenced by a wide range of historical art styles including Art Nouveau, Art Déco and Bauhaus, but also borrowed styles from Native American and Chinese artwork.
It has been a tough week for Rock ‘N Roll as Kelley’s death comes just two days after the death of legendary rock guitarist Elias McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley.
The New York Times is running a story in which you can read more about the work and life of Alton Kelley.
While I prefer not to use TrueType fonts, building your own over at FontStruct can be extremely fun. The tool lets you build fonts using geometrical shapes arranged in a grid pattern, save them as high-quality TrueType fonts, which in turn you can use in any Mac or Windows application.
If you’re feeling short on inspiration, you can browse the user gallery and download a wide variety of fonts. Digital fonts certainly have their limitations, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be creative and useful.
