Working on a totally unrelated project, I made this image which ended up not being used, but turned out to be a great desktop background. Full-res download of Space Rainbow.
At the end of Level 3 at the California College of the Arts, it’s not uncommon for graphic design students to spend twenty hours a day on campus, fueled by gallons of Red Bull and dreadful coffee (and for many, handfuls of Aderall).
Why, you ask? Because we to finish our projects for the semester, polish off all the work we’ve done over the past two years, and present it to an intimidating panel of faculty and design professionals. After presenting and talking about our work for 45 minutes, the panel goes away to deliberate and writes up a grade and a feedback sheet which sets the tone for the rest of our path through design school, and our design careers thereafter.
The day after the presentation, after the celebratory hangover has passed, we are assigned a 6’ by 6’ exhibition space, in which we curate and present our strongest work done at CCA. My exhibition is pictured above.
Mike Lee:
With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to the next level. Those that don’t….
There is a threshold and we are very close to not making it. There’s a non-zero chance the carbon dioxide we pumped into the air has set off a methane cycle that accelerates global warming, that we’re already too late, and that we might not have 100 years. We need to starting thinking on a global scale about our place in the galaxy. Who cares what kind of sneakers you’re wearing? Why are we still killing each other?
Rick Fillion:
Details take time. Details are exhausting, and require a ton of trial and error. I spent at least 5 minutes last night just tapping Path’s button again and again looking at the animation to try to figure it out exactly, to figure out why it felt so right. Recreating it would take me much longer than those 5 minutes. This exhausting trial and error is how you can manage to create things that not only look good, but feel fantastic.
So I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting up pretty much everything else so I could get these done in time. But now that’s over, I’ll finally be able to show off my hard work. This is my final project for my Type 3 class, a class on information graphics.
Dangerous binge drinking in America’s youth is the result of a prohibitionist culture and excessively restrictive drinking age laws. This video is part of a fictional campaign aimed at parents to promote the idea of lowering the legal drinking age, while culturally fostering a more liberal attitude towards alcohol.
Willy Staley on how McDonald’s essentially transformed being in the restaurant market into being in the commodities’ futures trading market:
At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.
[…]
And unlike a Low Country barbecue shack, McDonalds has the means to circumvent—or disregard—supply and demand problems. Indeed, they behave much more like a risk-averse day trader, waiting to see a spread between an Exchange Traded Fund and its underlying assets—waiting for the ticker to offer up a quick risk-free dollar.
For a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.
A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew my rusty mixing skills.
Tracklist:
Otherside (Tim Mason Remix) — Red Hot Chili Peppers
California Dreamin’ (Savoy Remix) — The Mams & The Papas
One More Time (Mike Candys & Jack Holiday Remix) — Daft Punk
The Nth º — OVERWERK
Jack Daniel’s limited edition birthday bottle. Not only is it a gorgeous design, but as a Jack Daniel’s fanatic, I’ll be sure to get myself one of those.
Last weekend, I did the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Pretty crazy night, but got a very cool game built in under 24h with cool folks from Miso Media.
TechCrunch chose us as Staff Favorite and wrote this:
Music Combat: A real-time, player-vs-player music battle. Each player site reads music, playing the notes on the nearest instrument. Their mobile device detects which notes they’re playing. The better you do, the more damage you do to your opponent.
(Source: shawnblanc.net)
My name is Kenneth and I develop cool Mac and iPhone software. This is my personal weblog where I muse about the world of design, software and life.
