me news

gripping stuff

last week i caught up with roel wouters, a.k.a. xelor on the phone to talk to him about his two fabulous projects ‘grip’ and ‘robot high school’

the reason for approaching him was that i had entered his work for the ‘dutch design awards’ in the notoriously difficult category ‘animation’

roel’s work isn’t strictly animation, rather a new kind of genre which i suppose you could call ‘live action animation’ roel explained to me that ‘grip was actually made as a live performance for a video festival and only later after the fact turned into a pop video, the whole thing was (deliberately) shot in one take to ensure that everybody tried their hardest, and it shows…

the two things that i like the most about this project are that it contains a lot of humour and it also (perhaps by chance) acts as a kind of statement against the digital culture & image manipulation in general, it pokes fun at video special effects and is a convincing demonstration of the fact that a good idea is always better than a big budget and snazzy technology

anyway, congratulations from ‘me’ for the nomination and i would be very surprised if ‘xelor’ doesn’t walk away with the first prize in october…

m / 17-09-2008 10:51 - tags: , ,  

day have hi bayuss, day have looo bayuss…

some ‘trinidad stylee’ bikes with a built-in sound system all the way from queens

m / 16-09-2008 10:42 - tags: ,  

our president is an idiot

this wonderful image dates back to 2004 and shows a label on a computer bag

the label reads as follows:
The English is exactly what you would expect and so is the French, for the first 6 lines. The last three lines of French are most interesting:
"We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him."
Given recent strained relations between our two countries, it’s good to see that not all Americans agree with the current administration.

i found the story years ago on this (now defunct) blog

m / 13-09-2008 14:47 - tags: ,  

world press photo stamps

whilst doing research for my stamp design project for TNT Post, i came across this series i had lying in a drawer: made to commemorate the ‘world press photo’ winners form 1955 to 2004, the print quality of the sheet is such that despite their diminutive size the pictures retain their evocative power… an amazing series well worth checking out… the design is intended to reflect the newspapers which the imsges were originally intended for… in my opinion they are absolutely beautiful

m / 20-01-2008 18:31 - tags: ,  

holland festival (part 2)

i got a really nice mail from ‘vincent van baar’ cd at studio dumbar yesterday, who likes my blog (thanks) unbelievably it seems that more than one person has bothered to read my ‘overly long’ blog entry (1300 words, see ‘me stuff’) about poster design

vincent, who is in a pretty good position to know corrected me on some of the facts i wrote about the two posters (shown here) that are amongst my all-time favourites…

the curly logo and the first series were designed by ‘ed macdonald’ (from cranbrook) in 1986, the cardboard model and the second series in ’87 were designed by the brilliant ‘rorbert nakata’ also from cranbrook. ‘gert dumbar’ made the coloured strips and together with robert they art directed the photography, which was done by ‘lex van pieterson’ the picture was used as a background and printed in a large run in offset. the typography was later added in screen print and the two shown here actually designed by ‘ton van bracht’. in 1988 the posters were again done using the same technique, but in ’89 the screenprint was dropped and the whole series was produced in offset. the offset/screenprint technique was largely based on studio dumbar’s earlier work for ‘theater zeebelt’, thanks for the info vincent…. unfortunately vincent was also able to tell me that these are indeed very scarce, and i was hoping hee was going to offer me a set for a sweet price… oh well

m / 14-11-2007 10:04 - tags: ,  
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