In-tune is all we need. About ›
My wife Aysen surprised me with this tuning slide pillow she made for my birthday. As usual, she’s a couple of days early (patience is not her forte), but in this case it worked out perfectly as I desperately needed something fun tonight.
Some photos I took while visiting my wife Aysen’s studio the other day for lunch.
Creativity lies between boundaries, limits, and constraints. These are your basic rules when you start a project. Timeline, budget, expectations (both your client’s, and yours), technical feasibility, personal/team skills, etc. Add to those environmental responsibility, moral concerns, integrity, reputation, and you have a basic set of rules to work with.
At any given project, most, if not all of these will be your “box”. But only some of those rules will be pre-set for you before you start the project. The rest, you need to define yourself. This is important because the sooner you can define them, the sooner you can start thinking outside the box by “flexing” those rules. They will anchor you to your project’s goals, while you are exploring adventurous waters above the surface. So spend some time up front to better define your full set of rules. Trust me, it’s well worth the extra time and effort.
Notes:
I always strive for balance in graphic design; between color, texture, typography, form, and negative space. I start laying out by throwing some design elements into my canvas, and when things begin to get cluttered, I start removing some, or counterbalance by introducing new graphic elements. A table with lots of data needs extra padding between columns, long measure requires extra leading, red logo breathes better with more space around it. You get the idea. Just like playing with an equalizer, you’re looking for the perfect mix. Too much bass, and it thumps.
Can’t go overboard with your taste buds either. Yogurt goes well with spicy food. Whipped cream provides a nice complement to a really sweet dessert. Sweet and sour is a globally accepted combination. You enjoy these because your palate is cooperating with your body, which is always in need for the perfect acid/base balance.
And let’s not forget the balance between the three main aspects of music; melody, harmony, and rhythm. If you’re composing something harmonically advanced, then you need to keep your melody fairly straightforward, otherwise the tune starts to get too clinical, or experimental. Similarly, if you are utilizing a complex rhythm, you need to keep your harmonic structure simple, like in the case of latin jazz where you often hear relatively simple chord progressions accompanied by complex percussion. Or think of Coltrane’s vamps where a single-chord harmony provides a strong base, upon which a very sophisticated melodic structure can be built.
Stress/release, pump/decompress, black/white, cream/sugar, salt/pepper…
Simon Høgsberg has recently launched his new project “We’re all gonna die. 100 meters of existence”, which is potentially the world’s longest photo. Aside from it’s incredible size, it’s a beautiful collage of human expressions, unlike anything you have seen before. The low point of view enhances the perspective, and provides dramatic depth for this human parade in front of us, the candid viewer. All on one seamless canvas, against the muted blue color of the sky.
At 78cmx100m it is indeed a monster image, composed of multiple shots of 178 people, all taken in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge. What you see in the image above is just a cropped section of the photo that covers only 2% of the actual composition. The thin stripe below the image represents the actual photo, and the magenta box over it highlights the area I cropped.
It’s a brilliant idea, and wonderful execution. Check it out at Simon’s website.
That’s right. As part of an effort to simplify my life (further), I hereby present you the new layout for tuning slide. And it’s a single-column one. Why? Because there is no such thing as a zero-column blog. Seriously, it can’t get any simpler than a single column. One of the things that bother me about blogs in general is the junk you see around the content. So I decided to get rid of everything that I (or you) don’t need.
That said, you might see some weird things here and there. Especially with the older posts. So please let me know if you see something that looks broken to you as I iron out the kinks. In the meantime, enjoy the new upcoming posts.
Yes, I do have a new year resolution, but it’s hard to put into words. I think the transcript below from Heroes Season 1 will do a good job though. Taken from a dialogue that takes place between Peter Petrelli and Claude Rains—my favorite character in the series, played by Christopher Eccleston:
| C. Rains | You worry a lot about your people, don’t you? Your friends, your mother, your brother. No wonder your head’s all clogged. You’re still sunk under. |
| P. Petrelli | Under what? |
| C. Rains | Your attachments. All these people who feed you biscuits, pat your head, and tell you you’re not fit for the outdoors. You still see yourself through their eyes, is that it? |
| P. Petrelli | No, I don’t. |
| C. Rains | Right, well, I’ll bet you 20 bucks your dad didn’t make much of you either. God, you’re easy. We’ve gotta get these people out of your head. Do you understand? |
| P. Petrelli | These people are my family. I can’t just cut ‘em out. |
| C. Rains | Of course– Peter can’t use his powers without someone holding his hands. How can you not punch that face every time you see it? (Pointing to Peter’s brother’s posters on the wall) |
| P. Petrelli | He’s not like that. |
| C. Rains | He is, trust me. |
| P. Petrelli | You don’t know him. |
| C. Rains | I don’t need to. I spend a lot of time moving around people’s homes, their bedrooms. You get to know people if you see them when they think they’re alone. You see them for what they truly are: Selfish, deceitful, and gassy. So what is that, your big truth about the world? Sooner you learn it, sooner we get that collar off your neck. People suck, friend. Every last one of them. Never forget that. |
Quite insightful, considering it’s kind of a cheesy show. Anyway, Happy 2009!
Even though I have a lot of applications currently installed on my iPhone, I realized that I only use a few of them on a regular basis. So here’s a list of some of the applications I wouldn’t want to be without—in fact, I’m considering uninstalling everything that did not make it to this list.
My wife and I just recently bought this wonderful pen & ink original art by Stuart Harris. It’s the most whimsical, curious thing I have ever seen. By looking at the frame and the color of paper I can only guess that it’s at least 40 years old. I wish I had some information about the artist. Detail here.
Another great creation by the extraordinarily talented Michal Socha. Everything is so imaginatively designed and consistently integrated, like the way the very first title comes up. His pieces have such great music too. Very inspiring.
Just read an article in this month’s Computer Graphics World by Barbara Robertson about new creative possibilities in 3d moviemaking. Read the online version here.
There are interviews with industry leading visionaries such as Robert Neuman and Phil McNally, both of whom have the great title of stereoscopic supervisor at Walt Disney Animation Studio and DreamWorks Animation respectively. I was especially intrigued by Neuman’s explanation of how they use multiple sets of “cameras”, and dial in the depth to create the internal volume and roundness for each character, which then they composite together. Also interesting was what he calls the “floating window”, a black mask they put on the edges of the images, and then vary the thickness of that mask between the two eyes to change the perceived location of the theater screen.
We create a virtual screen (a window) that we can float into the theater, push back into the screen space, or change the orientation of the image.
The article is filled with these interesting new concepts, so definitely check it out to gain some insight on what to expect from 3d movies in the near feature. As for me, I’m still waiting for one of those studios to produce the equivalent of an impressionistic painting in 3d movie making terms. I think we’ve been through the Renaissance of digital movies; now it’s time to move on to the next step.
PixelMEDIA recently launched cirrusvillage.com—an online community for Cirrus plane owners/pilots, and their families. While working on the design of the website, I was also tasked with creating the Cirrus Village identity. In this post, I would like to share the logo design process we went through.
Here are a few interesting tools/services that recently grabbed my attention:
I don’t think I fully realized how big the $700 billion bailout really is until I saw this article in the ID magazine about this newly opened museum in D.C. The Newseum, a 250,000-square-foot, six-level, high-tech and interactive museum dedicated to five centuries of news history, opened its doors back in April. It’s an impressive facility that cost $450 million to plan, design, and build. Quite a cultural landmark.
What’s more impressive to me is that you could build roughly 1,500 of these with the newly signed $700 billion bailout. That’s 30 Newseums for each state! Or better yet, one for each major town across the US. That’s how much $700 billion is.
I was organizing the attic a few days ago when I noticed the pile of sketch pads that have accumulated over the last 7-8 years. Flipping through pages I thought I should make a post, and include a medley of some of the stuff I was able to quickly scan and combine in a single image.