Archive for February, 2011

Flickr Pools can be a great resource for delving deeper into a visual theme or style and the Indic & Indian Scripts Pool is no exception. At least here in the US, the Latin Alphabet is pretty the only game in town when it comes to design so it’s easy to forget that their are whole other character sets out there. And while I’ve never encountered a project that called for any of these, it’s definitely inspiring to see such fluid characters and layouts.

From the Pool description:

“Indic scripts are Brahmi-derived scripts, This includes scripts used outside India, like Tibetan, Sinhala, Thai, Khmer, Burmese. Is this group for Indic scripts, or is it just for scripts used in India? If it’s the latter, then Arabic would count but Sinhala wouldn’t.”

Indic & Indian Scripts Pool

This Dunian track makes me picture a smiling person stumbling in slowmotion with their eyes hold in a dreamy state, not a care in the world, completely content, now i’m wondering what kind of person you’re imagining and if they look like the one in my head.

Don’t let the wonky intro for this Solar Bears track scare you off, its a very rewarding listen, epic echos and a sugary drive to it all.

Just a lazy day off sitting on the porch, really dry air keeping me awake, might take a nap still. Shlohmo switches it up on us with a hint of soul and its tweaked perfectly enough so you never think about how loopy it is.

Stephan Mathieu plays with tone as if you can grab a very thin strand of it out of the air and pull to no end, meanwhile as you pull the strand switches from different palette gradient colors, dangerously hypnotic.

Some really cool illustrative branding over at Matt Payson’s site. It kills me to post images that aren’t at least 450px wide and screw up the layout, but this is deserving work. Such a refreshing and well executed take on branding, I’d wear shirts of most of these.

Via Draplin

Sometimes really simple vintage is the best way to go, feels right to start off the week with this. A beautiful getaway from it all song by Bela Tar from on Bandcamp, enjoy.

These beautifully executed commercials for EF International Language Centers were created by designer Albin Holmqvist (who did the type) and director Gustav Johansson. The typography is simply incredible; many of these frames would be suitable as posters. There are four commercials in all, the rest can be found at Albin Holmqvist’s Vimeo.

Via Wanken

This Star Slinger track might as well be a Top 40 chart monster, it hits harder than a punch to the neck and has more soul than most of the pop songs out there right now.

I hear that Darkstar might be heading over to Warp Records, I can really appreciate a song like Dear Heartbeat, its raising the bar for bedroom producers, reminds me of a more simplified JDSY song or something tolerable from Her Space Holiday.

Moths seems to be starting off on the right foot by following the footsteps of Four Tet, Gold Panda, Seams, etc. Thanks NAVIS for the tip. Maybe he’ll sign to Moodgadget if he sees this post?

The label BPitch Control has offered some of the best 4/4 records in the past 10 years that blur the line of Club ready / Headphone music with artists like Ellen Allien, Telefon Tel Aviv, Paul Kalkbrenner and many more. With Chaim on their roster they add more of that beautiful techno to their sound kind of like one of favorites Modeselektor’s I Love You:

Anyone know who did the image above? would love to give some credit.

I had the great fortune to study under Jennifer Sterling at the Academy of Art, a couple of years ago now. She taught two of my typography classes (one of which I completed the Pantone Poster for). I’ve always been a big fan of her work, and as Fabien points out, her long disconnected site, has recently popped back up. No new work that I can see, but it was exciting to see the archive back online.

Jennifer was definitely one of my favorite instructors at school. She was intensely critical, which I loved, and I feel like her exacting evaluations drove me to do some of my best work at the time. I can’t stand it when people hold back during critiques or are luke-warm on giving feedback. If something I’ve done is bad I want to know. Maybe I’ll disagree and we can argue about it, but it is in no way helpful for students/teachers to hedge around giving honest feedback. I always appreciated Jennifer’s classes for her honest and precise critique.

Had to share this, here is 5 seconds of every #1 song in chart history until 1992. I had to start with Part 2 because it started with Down Under but Part 1 is here.

via Buzzfeed

I came across these great photos from Québec-based recording facility Studio Frisson while gear-lusting tonight and was stricken by their quality. Most studios don’t do a very good job of tastefully photographing the facilities so it was refreshing to see these very well executed portraits of some of the most rare and prized recording equipment in the world. Some of the post on the photos is a little synthetic for my tastes, but still nice. Unfortunately the images are watermarked so you’ll have to imagine what they’d look like clean.

Speaking of watermarked photos, I’ve really been getting annoyed by the practice, particularly by good photographers. I get why they’re doing it, but honestly, is the damage it does to your image and composition worth whatever infringement someone could pull off using a 650px, 72dpi JPEG? Just asking for the sake of argument, I can certainly understand the motivation.

Anyways, you may not share my hopeless obsession with analog audio hardware, but you can’t deny the sexiness of these machines and their interfaces. I’ve always found equipment like this a good source of inspiration when designing realistic software interfaces.

Sorry, no mention of the photographer that I could find. If anyone knows please speak up!

Studio Frisson

Here are a couple of great high res scans from Sarcoptiform’s excellent Flickr stream. Emilienne and Emmanuelle are apparently French books from 1968. I can’t find any more information on them.

The title face looks like Clarendon to me; one of the better uses I’ve seen, particularly on the Emmanuelle cover. And that black background would make a great texture for all sorts of applications. Sharpen > Desaturate, Levels > Select Color Range, or just use in blending mode.

Update: According to Blo in the comments: “Emmanuelle and Emilienne were erotic best sellers, and Emmanuelle was also a film. 10x18cm is the size of the pocket book. It was and still is a collection of novel paperback.”

Via Sarcoptiform