The original Büro Destruct book came out while I was attending Emily Carr. It made an impression on our class, capturing some of the design trends occurring at that moment in time. Post-graduation, I’d kept up with their work only loosely. Turns out they’ve been very busy.
The video above is a teaser for their third book, coming out tomorrow. They’ve also just released an iPhone app, desktop app & accompanying desktop screensaver called “Büro Destruct Designer.”
Shake your iPhone to create a virtually infinite number of beautiful designs. (See examples on BD Flickr).
Using circles, squares and a set of rules, Büro Destruct Designer lets you find inspiration for color combinations and graphic shapes. Choose either full random colors or apply harmony rules to your color palettes. You can modify your compositions with gestures and the various tools from the menu. The results can be saved and shared by e-mail including the color palette.
Lots more great stuff to be found on their site and blog. Enjoy!
Douglas Coupland handed me my degree at the convocation for the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design (as it was called back then) Class of 2000. He, along with Lynn Johnston and Japanese-Canadian artist Takao Tanabe, were honorary graduates (pretty great, no?). Whenever I feel homesick for my five years spent in Vancouver, I dust off one of his books and flip to my favourite parts. No doubt it’s all the beautiful images of Olympic revelry spilling out of there that finds me with Vancouver on the brain…
From “Polaroids From The Dead”:
The man with the horn was Frank Baker, a restaurant owner of that long-vanished era when “fine dining” meant a T-bone steak, three double scotches and a pack of Chesterfields.
Mr. Baker, who died in 1991, had onced owned a “swinging” kind of restaurant in West Vancouver where your parents would take out-of-town guests, but only after first getting themselves all revved up with Herb Alpert records.
Mr. Baker was always, to younger eyes, the embodiment of a certain type of cool, so cool that he had even bought the original Aston Martin DB-5 used in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. He was certainly a character, and his restaurant was an occupational puppy mill for a good number of friends during high school who bussed there and diced the vegetables and did food prep on weekends. pg 72
and…
In late 1986 I arrived back in Vancouver after living abroad for a year. On that first evening back I looked down at the bridge and saw that it had been garlanded with brilliant pearls of light along its thin parabolic lines. I was shocked – it was so beautiful it made me lose my breath.
I asked my father about these lights and he told me they were called “Gracie’s Necklace,” after a local politician. In the almost five decades since the bridge had been built, the city had been dreaming of the day when it would cloak its bridge in light, and now the dream had become real life.
Now, whenever I fly back to Vancouver, it is Gracie’s Necklace I look for from my seat, the sight I need to see in order to make myself feel I am home again. We often forget, living here here in Vancouver, that we live in the youngest city on earth, a city almost entirely of and only of, the twentieth century — and that this is Vancouver’s greatest blessing. It is the delicacy of Gracie’s Necklace that reminds me we live, not so much in a city but in a dream of a city. pg. 73
I came upon this program by chance a few nights ago. It’s worth a viewing, especially the (scary) part about the US military’s “Army Experience Center” where young people can play military-based video games for free in a state-of-the-art gaming (recruitment) centre. Frontline always has excellent complementary information on their website too.
My wife has become a huge Etsy fan over the last few months, and has discovered many unique, smart artists & jewelers who combine intelligence with skill. One such example is I Am Star Stuff:
Of course the starstuff idea comes from the famous Carl Sagan statements: that we are composed of the stuff stars made, which it literally true. After the Big Bang, only hydrogen existed. Stars burned this fuel and started creating slightly heavier atoms. Then other stars made even heavier atoms. They spit these out as they burned or exploded them away as they died. It is this generative magic that allowed carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and potassium – and all the other atoms we need for life – to exist. Look around – everything you see used to be in a star.
The RADIO CANADA concept is a homage to the cultural significance of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This radio console design was inspired by the dedication of the many CBC listeners who keep their radio dials permanently set to our national broadcaster. After setting the radio to local CBC frequencies, listeners can toggle between CBC Radio One and CBC Radio Two without hearing the static in between.
The elegant design of RADIO CANADA celebrates the immediacy of the medium and reflects the quality of the broadcasts it receives. Additional features include MP3 player compatibility.
What is good design? If you ask an American, she might cite the Museum of Modern Art’s historic 1950s exhibitions of the same name, which championed simple, Modernist forms over ornamentation and historical styles. Ask a European, and you’ll hear mention of Dieter Rams’s ten commandments on the subject, which emphasize functionality, durability, and environmental responsibility. But ask a Japanese designer, and you’ll see good design through a different lens. For him, it means that a product has a high kansei value, or emotional and physical appeal to the user.
Kansei is manifested in three ways. The first is the expres-sion (hyojo) of an object, or its appearance. This includes color, texture, material, and surface treatments: all the qualities visible to the eye. The second is the creator’s gesture or intent (dosa), or the body’s physical responses to the object. These become apparent upon using or touching the object—how it feels in the hand and how its fragility or strength dictates one’s movements. Finally, there is the heart (kokoro)—the emotions an object stirs. This psychological dimension is the most abstract, but it’s also the most prized by Japanese designers, who speak of the feelings of recognition, attachment, or playfulness that an object elicits in its user, perhaps because it functions so well or is pleasant to look at.
Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
Too often in the past we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy or effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often among deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline. As for the lover of arts, it is he who, by subjecting himself to the sometimes disturbing experience of art, sustains the artist — and seeks only the reward that his life will, in consequence, be the more fully lived.
Always a great place to find high-quality video of recent ads and other motion graphics, Boardsmag recently posted their It List for 2009:
You know what’s awesome? No? We do. And it doesn’t start with ‘r’ and end with ‘ecession’. It’s a hamper full of companies, people, gadgets and trends that entertained, enlightened and impressed us over the last 12 months, all wrapped up in a pretty ribbon and with our sincerest love. You’re welcome.
Also, the lead graphic above was created by (one of my all-time faves, and designers for electronic group Underworld) Tomato, and their process is described here.
Came across this super fun line up of body products at Winners of all places. Their line goes: “Whatever you look like, whatever shape you’re in, we only want you for your body.” Nice one. Lots of great product names, delivered in simple, inviting packaging using Helvetica Rounded.
One of my most treasured albums, and a sure sign I’m older than I care to admit, I see that The Stone Roses are getting ready to re-issue a 20th anniversary edition of their classic, monumental self-titled album from 1989, “The Stone Roses.”
To celebrate, I offer one of their best songs, on my Top 10 all-time list, “I Am The Ressurrection.”
* colour, black & white
* archival photos & sound
* 8 & 16mm film
* Hi-8 digital video, DigiBeta, Beta SP NTSC
* 4:3 letterboxed
* stereo
Created through the Winnipeg Arts Council’s Public Art Program during an artist residency at the City of Winnipeg Archives. Collection of the City of Winnipeg.
Fun, fun, fun Japanese goods shop… sections include Art, Fashion, Interior & Toys.
“Tokyocube was founded in 2005, initially with the launch of the Tokyocube Magazine, which was designed to provide people throughout the world with a place to find features, articles and reviews on all the latest to come out of Japan, as well as learn more about the unique Japanese lifestyle.
As an extension to the Tokyocube Magazine, which receives thousands of visits every week from people all over the globe, we wanted to provide a further link for people interested in the Japanese culture – this time, a place where people could buy some of the cool products we’d featured on the magazine site, which would otherwise be very difficult to get hold of outside of Japan – from this, the Tokyocube Shop was born!
Our aim for the Tokyocube Shop is to introduce people to the quality and unique style of Japanese products which have been carefully selected from some of the most up and coming designers and suppliers in Japan, as well as bridge the communication gap for English-speaking users by offering a secure and efficient online store for purchasing these products directly from Japan.”
