me studio

i was approached by dutch photography website/blog ‘photoq’ this week to contribute a piece to the ‘recommendations’ feature on their recently launched portfolio section, the idea is to choose a person or just one image from the available selection and explain your choice, mine was this image by ‘krista van der niet’, it was published this morning and can be found here

for the non-dutch speakers there’s a rough translation below:

her face isn’t visible but i would guess she’s roughly 22? in my fantasy she is pretty and good-natured? her thighs must have been painful afterwards, the majority of her weight is resting on the front legs of the chair but even so? it all had to stay upright?

so squeeze the knees together tightly and push the feet upwards to preserve the balance; a sterile, white backdrop behind and her head facing down, her breasts primly covered, then suddenly, click… it’s over

a magician’s trick, a charming observation, tongue-in-cheek, artful, elegant, clever, amusing and somehow ‘unfinished’, i noticed it straight away and it made me grin? an inner smile of recognition, that moment when you come up with an idea like this, go looking for the appropriate chair and then make it all happen? to take the idea out of your head and freeze it in an image?

the longer you look, the more you think about what you are observing… the lack of facial features, her pose, the attempts at establishing the right balance that must have been played out in that empty studio space, the relationship between form and function, beauty and so on… and i suddenly remember that anecdote about the obsessive chastity of Victorian England when even chair legs like these were covered with a tablecloth due to a fear of their inducing indecent thoughts… funny what an image can do to you sometimes… then yet another thought pops up: is it perhaps for sale?

you can see more of krista’s work here

update: it turns out it is for sale, but not in my price range… and i checked with the photographer afterwards: the model was 23, so not a bad guess from me…

CitID is an ambitious community project where designers world wide are invited to design a logo for their city. We are aiming to collect a unique set of inspiring logos/artworks, displaying the various styles and trends in contemporary logo design all over the world. We hope to include as many cities in the world as possible.

the invitation (above) for a crowdsource project (you know the ones: lots of fun, no money) arrived in my mailbox a few weeks back and stayed there until last week when i decided to give it a (quick) shot, this is basically the (first) idea i came up with…

the ‘stars’ that have somehow contributed to the city and made it what it is today…

it’s a nice, simple idea this project but, to be honest, a little disappointing to see now the site has gone live, that there aren’t many entries which could really seriously be called logos or identities in my opinion…

still i would be curious to hear from anyone who has an opinion about my own entry… just to be clear this is a presentation of the central idea (using the stars i.e. local people to represent the city’s identity and the star symbol to replace the letters ‘ster’) and not really a finished logo design… doing that seriously would take a lot of time (and money), which this ‘for fun’ project doesn’t really justify in my mind…

the complete set of variations i made can be seen below or on the project site (just look for the one with the big red star, or click here)…

by the way, i have already found one mistake i made before someone else spots it: anne frank actually died at ‘bergen belsen’ not ‘auschwitz’… and the hotel chet baker fell to his death from wasn’t 3 star, it just sounded better in the text (okay that’s two things)