Death Pop

Shake off that holiday slump, we’re back. Mark Hall-Patch did some fancy lettering for some death metal logos, only they’re for pop artists. Oddly enough, I could see Lady GaGa using this one at some point…

(via Buzzfeed)

“Lego artist Sachiko Akinaga spent 11 days assembling the cover for the New York Times Style Magazine’s winter travel edition.”

(via Buzzfeed)

Take AIM

Good bye, little AIM guy. You served us well, in buddy icons throughout my school career.

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. I mean, It looks fine. And all the collateral surrounding it looks equally as good. But it feels a bit too Tumblr, Vimeo, Aviary-y. It seems to entrenched in trying to look like something and feels like a copy of a copy of a copy. Huh.

But what is good is a desperately needed change from the near 15 years of AOL stagnation.

We prove our worth with our portfolios, not with a membership badge.

— 

– Grace N., in a comment on the Creative Review

There’s a new show on Bravo, that home of “reality TV” which is more competition shows than it is “reality” (they’re cheap, easy to produce, and honestly more entertaining than you’d think). But this new show is called “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” and it is an abomination on TV.

It’s just another competition show, but my main problem with it is that it is qualifying expressive art. From what I understand (I haven’t seen more than one episode, because it frustrates me so much), contestants are given a theme or topic or objective with which to create a piece, with restrictions to add that special twist. But each piece is subjective, created by one artist, and viewed by one person. How can you say one piece is better than another and be objective about it? 

But I’m concerned about what’s happening over in the UK. It’s almost a “Work of Art” kind of thing, but done in an actual profession, across the board. To make an exceptionally long story short: in February, the Chartered Society of Designers made an application to the government to award certification to designers. This application was just granted. Without getting too dramatic, the CSD will soon be allowed to dictate who is and who isn’t a designer.

Architects, yes. Doctors, absolutely. These are the professions that warrant a certification. These are professions that require a board to make sure the people who build buildings and operate on humans do them correctly so that these buildings don’t fall down and doctors don’t open people up and say, “Huh, what’s this do?”

But like art, design is inherently subjective. I’m not arguing that there are not standard and practices designers follow. And I’m not arguing that some things look better than others. My concern is how it could stifle creativity.

A board is going to certify what it likes. And say a board doesn’t like your work that is a bit out-of-the-box. So you don’t get certified. Now it’s harder to find work, because you or your studio isn’t certified.

I may be getting melodramatic, but that’s where it might lead with a certification. And maybe I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the CSD or what it’s process will be (and I hope I am woefully ignorant), but like I said, I’m going to keep an eye on it.

(That said, I would be pretty damn cool to have a professional suffix. “Why yes, madam, I am Sam Bolles, C.D.”)

(via Creative Review)

“This installation by Erik Kessels is on show as part of an exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam that looks at the future of photography. It features print-outs of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period…”

(via Creative Review)

Oh yeah! I forgot about the music video that I went crazy over a while back, and I was just reminded of it.

Machine Molle did this video for Justice’s “DVNO,” off of their 2007 album † (which is where the rather conspicuous cross toward the end of the video comes from; it became somewhat of a de facto logo for the band, incidentally). Outside of being a really great song, the animation is well done and reminds me of old HBO tapes my aunt would placate me with as a child. 

The famous Starbucks logo seems to just keep getting enhanced over time. Enhance… enhance… enhance…

More clever copy, this time from Zynga’s “Hanging with Friends” mobile game.

Title Scream →

My childhood is a blur of wasted summer afternoons spent playing videogames in the basement. My mother says that we spent so much time down there that the smell would stick to us and permeate throughout the rest of the house. My friends were the same way; when I would go to their houses, it was nearly exactly the same routine. Videogames in the basement.

Suffice it to say, I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to videogames of the era. These games are often referred to by the processor each system had, 8- and 16-bit. Those jagged little edges of pixels, so large that if you wanted to waste the time you might be able to count each one on screen. I was always amazed at how real life things were represented with such technical limitations, especially in games based on movies or television shows.

Design inspired by videogames is hardly anything new, but I recently stumbled upon a blog that celebrated the parts of games that often had the highest graphical fidelity: the title screen.

Using these title screens as a graphical inspiration never occurred to me until I looked at Title Scream’s description. And then, well… I won’t be getting that last hour or so back.

(via Creative Review)