Posts by Scott

 

Fubiz has a post up entitled "70 Amazing Business Cards" and while I wouldn’t go as far as to call all of them "amazing", there are some nice examples in the list making it a good resource if you’re looking to make some for yourself. My personal favorites are the embossed style, I love that texture, it makes the card feel so much more substantial.

I have always been sort of torn on the subject of business cards. On one hand, I love the type-based examples, they’re so clean and to the point. But on the other hand, that doesn’t always say much about the work the holder of the card might expect to find on your site. For mine, I ended up settling on mini posters on each side with the pertinent info worked into the original poster designs, sort of a quick glimpse of my portfolio.

· Obligatory Space Needle Shot

Running through the set at the hotel

· This guy is serious business

· Sound Check

I just got home from Seattle after playing Decibel Fest on Saturday night.  The show was a lot of fun and the crowd had some amazing energy. Thanks to everyone for coming out, I appreciate you having me up and hope to see you all again real soon. The Sight Below, Deru, and Lusine were incredible, was great to be able to catch their sets on such a huge sound system. I don’t have any pics from the set so if anyone has some posted on Flickr or something, let us know.

I wish I could have taken a lot more pics around town, but time was short and I never got a day to make it out with the camera. I did manage to get one shot (above) of the Space Needle from the hotel window. I love that thing, all we have in San Francisco is a stretched out pyramid. I’ve been to Seattle in the past but it was a nice refresher course this time around. There’s really a great vibe there that reminds me a lot of SF, but with way better coffee shops. They also have some amazing food; we had breakfast at a crepe place called "611" this morning. Off the charts.

I’ll post tomorrow on the VJ who did visuals for Lusine, it was incredible.

Flying out to Seattle today for tomorrow night’s show. The show has sold out so I’ll see you all out there, and if you didn’t make it in this time I’ll be back up soon enough I’m sure. The doors open at 8pm and I’ve been informed I’ll be on around 11:15pm. I’ve worked out some new visuals and added some new effects and tweaks for this set so it should be fun trying it all out for the first time. I’ll also be playing a new unreleased song along with some of the old favorites.

I’ve got my D80 with me so hopefully I’ll get some good shots of the city while I’m up there. And for those of you who have been asking about video from the live sets: We taped the Toronto show at the Drake, it’s still in production but should be up in some form soon so stay tuned. See you tomorrow…

Seatac image (above) via Ramparts54

It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci lived by the principals of what is now called polyphasic sleep; basically meaning he followed a rigidly structured sleep schedule allowing for only 3-4 hours of sleep per day. Sounds pretty crazy, but it does net the faithful around 21 waking hours per day. Apparently you take several naps during the day as opposed to one big sleep at night and somehow your body adjusts to this and thrives. I must admit the concept is appealing, all that extra time each day. But judging from how I perform off even 6 hours of sleep I am pretty sure I’m out of the running as a candidate anything like Da Vinci’s system.

That doesn’t change the fact that I want this alarm clock. Designed by Marc Owens, the clock operates on a very simple system that makes adhering to the polyphasic cycle easier, and better looking. More info can be found at Yanko Design.

A contributor to this very blog swears by polyphasic sleep and seems to thrive on it. Anyone else getting by with this system? Do you get more work done? Let us know in the comments

As if you didn’t already know, Adobe today announced the latest iteration of it’s Creative Suite, CS4. There aren’t any real surprises and most of the updates fall squarely in incremental territory. I am excited about the intelligent image scaling and GPU acceleration in Photoshop. I was a beta tester for Photoshop so I’ve had a chance to see these features in action. I didn’t notice any huge performance gains with the GPU acceleration, but then again my workflow doesn’t really include a lot of the tasks the new feature is supposed to speed up. I also got a chance to get a 64-bit version of PS running on my Windows XP 64 install to test out the performance now that Photoshop can actually "see" all 8GB of memory in my system. Again, the performance gains weren’t really noticeable which was somewhat disappointing. I think the cause of this was file size though. I think once you’re dealing with files that occupy more space in memory than you have physically installed in your system, the scratch disks are the key. In other words, I don’t think Photoshop seeing and extra 6GB of memory is really all that important when the file you’re working with is taking up far more and still writing to scratch disks.

I’ll admit though, I just haven’t had the time to really put it through it’s paces and get any real figures, these were just my initial impressions from the limited experience I’ve had with the software. I guess I just always looked forward to the day Photoshop became 64-bit with GPU acceleration as the day I could effortlessly tear through an 18×26" poster @ 300dpi without so much as a screen refresh delay; sadly, I don’t think we’re there quite yet. All that aside, I’m always excited to have an update to my favorite software. All of the previous updates have added great features / functionality and this version is no different. Link

I’ll be playing a live Tycho show this weekend in Seattle (Sat. Sep. 27) as part of Decibel Festival. I’ll be doing full live ISO50 visuals along with the music. Here are the details, hope to see you all out.

GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL LABEL SHOWCASE

Tycho (San Francisco) : Seattle Debut Live A/V Set – Ghostly International, Merck
Deru (Los Angeles) : Live – Ghostly International, Merck
Lusine (Seattle) : Live – Ghostly International, Hymen
The Sight Below (Seattle) : Debut Live A/V Set, Ghostly International

Venue: The Baltic Room – $12 presale / $15 at the door – Doors open Venue: 8pm / 21+

BUY TICKETS

After seeing his work in the new Canon promo video I decided to check out Vincent Laforet’s portfolio. He has some pretty amazing stuff up there, including some incredible high altitude shots that really put his subjects in a unique perspective. I also found his work with tilt-shift (last three shots above) to be quite refreshing for that genre. Judging from these shots this guy seems to just float around in some sort of blimp all day taking pictures. You can find more of his work at vincentlaforet.com.

James White has posted a follow up to his excellent feature on Saul Bass’s branding work, this time focusing on logos by mid-century corporate logo extraordinaire Paul Rand. Very nice stuff, thanks for posting James! Link

"Mindblowing Full HD" was how Gizmodo yesterday described the newly announced Canon 5D Mark II’s video capabilities. Vincent Laforet, who calls the 5D "the best camera ever", was one of the first to take the new camera for a spin and the results are undeniably striking. The stills you see above are from video he shot using the $2700 body and $25,000 in lenses (a list of the lenses he used are at the Gizmodo post). The video, while still not official available, has leaked onto YouTube giving us at least a glimpse of the quality we can expect from the final (view video below).

Gizmodo had this to say about Laforet’s experience creating the video:

"That and a $2700 DSLR body. A testament to its ease of use is that Laforet is a photographer; he has no professional film experience and had never used the 5D Mark II before, yet was able to storyboard, cast, shoot and edit the clip in just two days, with less than 12 hours notice. In particular he noted that dumping the MPEG-4 video takes way less time than it would with an actual HD camera. The only issue that would stop a person from shooting a TV pilot solely with this camera is sound matching, he says. If that’s covered, you’re gold."

I think that’s the most compelling aspect of the 5D: it’s accessibility. Such a powerful tool which yields such amazing results will empower scores of artists looking to break into motion work. I realize that at $2700 the 5D  sits at a price threshold a little beyond the grasp of a lot of us, but high-end video of this caliber has never come this cheap and when you take into account the fact that the 5D also more than covers your DSLR needs the whole package starts to look like a sound investment for photographer and videographer alike.

I don’t know about you guys, but the argument for 5D supremacy is becoming more and more convincing as Canon slowly reveals what it’s capable of. I am still holding out for a head-to-head versus the D700 which, although lacking in video capability, is apparently a low light performer. Whatever the case may be, such a versatile tool as the 5D would make a welcome addition to any graphic designer’s kit. 

How about you guys, have you started saving up?

Found this gem by Halftone Def Studios on Gigposters. I’m pretty much over the whole "skulls craze of ’06/07", I think there was a law in L.A. for a while that stated all shirts produced within city limits had to include a skull on it. Jakub and I went to the Pool clothing show in Vegas and my actual skull exploded due to the amount of skulls on everything. Skulls.

Doesn’t matter, this poster is still badass. I guess that’s the paradox of ubiquitous design trends: Do it right and you’re a genius; do it wrong and you’re a lowly imitator. Or just use ITC Avant Garde; you can’t go wrong with that one.

Now that the skull-rush of ought seven is over, can anyone guess what the next big trend in design is going to be? I vote for rainbows and deer antlers. Oh woops, that already happened.