Archive for August, 2009

In my fourth post for Adobe Inspire I cover the master of retro-lofi photography, Neil Krug. Read the full article here.

This is part of a guest blogging series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

My latest post at Adobe’s Inspire Blog (where I’m guest blogging this week) is up. I focused on Photographer/Director Timothy Saccenti, who’s work you might recognize from some past posts.

Read the full article at Adobe Inspire

Underworld’s Jumbo will always go down as one of those songs that no music snob should feel right making fun of because its just an overall beautiful classic song with one of the best samples in the intro with the old guys talking about vests OR they’re just kidding themselves and their bitter and on one of these levels:
A. They listened to Underworld Beaucoup Fish way longer than all of us and now hate it because they showed up late to the other music genre parties.
B. They had a great experience at Love Parade hearing it as a raver but some sweaty muscle dude walked by and just smeared body sweat across their face and every time they hear “Nice lil vest, light!” they can still smell that sweat on their face.
C. they have a bad collection of music with not much depth and are very critical and own a lot of R.E.M. CD’s that their hiding for no reason and are too embarrassed to even share high school photos of themselves on facebook.

I remember someone was so kind enough to turn me onto Paul White on the blog and I just tried to search the comments but no luck to give them any credit. Paul White is pretty similar to Bullion(by the way, Bullion and Pilooski killed it last night, super nice guy, had dinner with him and told him about the blog and he dropped this amazing track that Busta Rhymes sampled to make Dangerous that blew my mind) but with a more silly side to him, really love the tracks and just soo much fun to listen to but a little short but hey it makes me press rewind.

Been waiting for a new Hudson Mohawke song forever, this bad boy has been floating around all day yesterday on twitter and blogs, the good people at Warp are nailing it this year. Rising 5 has this Onra feel to it but the highs and instruments really make your eyebrows raise in a good way.

To be honest I never listened to Calvin Harris, you know how you just see a musician’s name around certain brands and promotion that you just never get around to hearing what they do because they’re tied in with just odd pop culture that you’d never feel like you would enjoy whatever the person is offering creatively? well thats how I feel about Calvin Harris BUT when this song picks up after the intro I really had to throw all that other crap out the window that’s tied to Calvin Harris in my head, all in all pretty great remix work here Mr. Harris, is the album good?

Underworld – Jumbo

[audio:jumbo.mp3]

Paul White – Cheese Special & A Draw

[audio:cheese.mp3]

Hudson Mohawke – Rising 5

[audio:rising5.mp3]

The Hours – See the Light (Calvin Harris Remix)

[audio:cthe.mp3]

If you’re like me, you have piles and piles of notebooks filled with half-baked name ideas for firms, bands, and the like. When I was in college, I think I went through about 30 pages of (truly) terrible names before settling on something for my former band*. Basically I’ve never really perfected this technique. Whether it’s for a new band, new client, or my own (eventual) design studio, it is always a long and arduous process to think of the perfect name. (Herein lies the problem — looking for the “perfect” name is often the creativity killer for me.)

My process generally starts with a pencil, thesaurus, dictionary, and my iTunes playlist (pieces of song titles have served me well). It’s worked in the past, but for a recent project, I decided to try something new. I based my exploration off of Josh Levine’s useful chart that divides naming styles into six categories. You can see the chart above for examples and read the full descriptions here. I tried to go through the list three times, thinking of a potential name for each category on every rotation. What ended up happening was I thought of about 30 names in the metaphorical category, avoided the descriptive, and thought of one or two for each of the others. After about two hours I had my name, at the bottom of my metaphorical category list.

Of course, my normal process is not unlike this most recent one — but the added structure and formulaic approach really seemed to help me in this case. I just hope to be able to replicate it in the future. I would recommend giving this chart a try if you are looking for new brainstorming techniques. Just switching things up is really all you need to spark something cool. I’m sure everyone has their own strategies and I’d love to hear some if you’ve got them!

*Crazy story actually — the name I eventually decided on (Running Lights) was the same name my Mom had sent me in response to my plea for suggestions. We had thought of the exact same name, on the same day, without any direction or communication. I told this story to my band mates and that was that — how could we go with anything else!

As I mentioned earlier, I’m guest blogging over at Adobe’s Inspire Blog this week. Today I talked about the work and process of one of my favorite photographers, Kalle Gustafsson. Read the entire article at Adobe Inspire

By the way, Kalle has a great new portfolio up with loads of new work to look at. You can check it out at www.kallegustafsson.com

As Scott mentioned, the ISO50 studio recently added the hulking Epson 9900 to its arsenal. We purchased the printer through Kirk Economos of Meridian Cyber Solutions, and he was on hand to help us set things up and make sure everything was working properly. I filmed the set up procedure and a trimmed down version is displayed above. Many thanks to Kirk for helping out! If you are in the market for a large format machine or other print supplies, we would highly recommend the guys over at Meridian.

In case it doesn’t come across on screen, this is one serious machine. I’m used to working with the much smaller R2400 and there is really no comparison. It’s been pretty exciting to have the ability to output such massive prints with the 9900. We had a few color profile and paper issues initially, but everything is working smoothly now. Look for a detailed post about color management and calibration next week.

Bullion is debuting tonight in the US in New York and tomorrow in Los Angeles at Low End Theory, definitely worth checking him out, here is some more info on the DJ/Producer at Turntable Lab.

US DATES
Aug 11 2009 – 11:00P Plan B – New York, US w/ Pilooski, In Flagranti
Aug 12 2009 – 11:00P Low End Theory – Los Angeles, US

TRACKLIST
Free Spirits Intro
Sweet And Innocent – Express Your Love
Iron Butterfly – It Must Be Love
The Moody Blues – I Don’t Mind
The Manhattans – Follow Your Heart
Birtha – Feeling Lonely
The Bee Gees – To Love Somebody
ELO – Telephone Line
Joni Mitchell – Solid Love
The Four Tops – Still Water (LOVE)
Let’s Kiss Blonde Coeds Interlude
Adrian Baker – Is This Love
Ned Doheny – A Love Of Your Own
Tony Grey – She’s My Love
The Koobas – Woe Is It Love My Dear?
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – More Love
Free Spirits Outro

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Bullion – Mixed Up In Love II

[audio:bullionmix.mp3]

Dave (of the fantastic Grain Edit) spoke to Katie and Joel for Part II of our Hatch interview series. They talk in detail about the JAQK design process and look at a lot of early visual directions for the brand. Further proof of the innovative work the crew over at Hatch is doing. Check out Parts I and II of the interview.

Most of the summer I have been going to shows almost 3 or 4 times a week and i’ve probably seen these 4 musicians (Shigeto, Mux Mool, Mingus Rude, and Mogi Grumbles) the most and all of them I noticed at some point would play a cover or edit of a song that they really liked and this is collection of those songs for the ISO50 blog for free folks.

Shigeto takes the classic by Astrud Gilberto and takes the Flying Lotus approach and gives it this great marriage of where gorgeous and head nodding meet.

Mingus Rude might be the newest to the bunch here, he is also Charles Trees for any of you that follow the Moodgadget label. To be honest I think this Fleetwood Mac edit might be the best i’ve ever heard of Fleetwood Mac, it never goes too noisy but just stays on this slower tip and just makes the original abit more for the dance floor.

We definitely needed this track for this EP from Mux Mool which was a crowd pleaser every time I heard it being played. Brian slows down the very popular song and makes it his own with his signature mixture of Mux Mool synths & hip-hop mashed together.

If you’ve been outside and to anything social this spring then you’ve heard this MGMT song plenty of times, Mogi Grumbles takes it to Justice cut up disco land and rides the track off into the sunset for peak hour play.

DOWNLOAD the EP here for FREE

Astrud Gilberto – Berimbau (Shigeto edit)

[audio:bgsremix.mp3]

Fleetwood Mac – Dreams (Mingus Rude edit)

[audio:fmmremix.mp3]

Stardust – Music Sounds Better With You (Mux Mool Remix)

[audio:mmsdremix.mp3]

MGMT – Electric Feel (Mogi Grumbles Remix)

[audio:mgmgremix.mp3]

I’ll be guest blogging over at Inspire — Adobe’s Experience Design blog — this week. The Experience Design Team (XD for short) is an internal group at Adobe who develop applications and interfaces, you’ve seen their work in the form of the Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom interfaces. This months Inspire is focused on photography so I’ll be pointing out the photographers that inspire me and also talking about the roles photography plays in my own work. I posted up a short introduction today with more to come throughout the week. Check it out here.