Late Night Crafts, vol. 2

Partially inspired by Able Parris, partially in continuum of my recent midnight art projects, and partially in tribute to the hours I used to spend cutting things out of magazines and pasting them wherever I pleased… I have decided to start a new moleskine dedicated solely to collaging, drawing, & type. Basically a sketchbook. Sort of.

This one in particular (to be expanded upon soon) is my attempts at drawing type freehand, based off of Hoefler Text (Black Swash!). Time to bust out of these winter blues and start making stuff!

Animals: crackers vs wild

I guess you could say I’ve seen some pretty sweet animals this year. (and not just at the circus)

Late night crafts

Sometimes it’s hard to break out of a creative slump. Instead of going out to the bars it’s generally more satisfying to be productive with this time. Therefore, I cut up newspapers and see what happens. It’s probably not a finished piece, but it’s 3:30am and I generally like it, although it doesn’t look as much like an airplane as I might have hoped. Also, please excuse the shitty quality phone pictures.

Horoscopes are really creepy sometimes.

“Which metropolitan areas in America have the most brainpower? Not the best sports teams or the richest businessmen or the most powerful politicians, but the smartest people? “The Daily Beast” did a study and declared that the top two were the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina and the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it so happens that those are the two places where the brilliant people congregate. And I’m quite sure that they have been a very good influence on me. My recommendation to you in 2010, Cancerian, is to cultivate this knack. Gravitate towards genius. Surround yourself with deep thinkers and innovative dreamers. Hang out in the vicinity of brainstorms.”

Alright, February. Where are you with my one-way ticket?

The New Minimum

Ladies and gentlemen, your mind is about to be blown. The New Minimum, released today, is an online magazine-style blog started and curated by Jacob Heftmann.

TNM‘s manifesto: The New Minimum is a magazine about unique perspectives. We realized that the web has lots of good ideas but has a hard time with presenting them in a compelling manner. Our priority is to match good content with great art direction.

In the midst of job searching, Jacob’s first feature touches on some of the more interesting and overlooked jobs for designers. In this case, war propaganda. This ties in nicely with some of his latest infographics, tracking his job search progress.

I’m excited to see what new features will be rolling out of this. As we start to roll into a new era of really understanding and grasping the power of designing & displaying content on the web, I think TNM will definitely be a key player in driving bloggers, designers, and idea-makers to push the quality of their online content to the next level.

My life is complete.

A note on modern movie-goers

I’m generally disappointed in the American movie-going culture.

There aren’t many IMAX movies that I’ve seen in my life, and definitely none in 3D. Despite a few frame rate or minor projector issues, and vibrations that I think were caused by the speakers booming against the back of the screen, it was an exhilarating experience. I drove 3 hours up to Chicago, paid $17 to see Avatar 3D IMAX, and drove 3 hours back home, breathless and with my mind racing.

To me, it’s important to get really into a movie if I’m going to watch it. I don’t want to pay to sit there and criticize every little piece of the story, I want to be taken from my seat and transplanted into another world. Somewhere along the line, I learned that it’s really important to stay until the very end of the rolling credits, if nothing else to show support and respect for all of the people who worked hard on the movie.

This is why it was disappointing to me when the entire IMAX theater was emptied before the screen even cut to the black rolling credits. As soon as the names started appearing, the people started leaving, despite the few extra seconds of flying through the scenery. This especially shocked me for an IMAX theater. For a movie like Avatar, this extra minute or two was just about the time I needed to digest the movie.

Avatar aside, another one of my pet peeves is when people judge movies too quickly and without much reasoning. “I didn’t like the story”, “the graphics looked cheesy”, “the dialogue sucked”, “the message was too literal”, “in 3 years this won’t be relevant anymore”. Thank you, for single-handedly murdering the magic of film. You don’t leave the Louvre saying, “Van Gogh’s colors blow”, “the paint is too dry”, “the statue didn’t look real enough”.

Movies are story-telling devices. What good is a story if you don’t learn something from it? We are internally connection-builders. If you can’t find a way to relate the message and the stories to your life, at least make an effort to figure out how this movie reflects our culture. Perhaps film appreciation classes should be just as mandatory in schools as art history.

This year, I’d like to challenge both the film industry and the audiences to make a shift in attitude towards film. Stay until the end of the credits, even if there isn’t an extra scene!