The Secret of Drawing is a four-part mini-series from 2005 by the BBC about the history of drawing and how it has been and still is an integral part of our lives. Whether it be the telling of stories, creating technical plans for architecture, or as a tool of exploration, drawing is an important part of the human experience. Parts 2, 3, and 4 are available on Google video, but unfortunately I cannot find part 1 right now. Video after the cut.

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I was glancing through the metro this morning and was surprised to see a giant photo of Bubbles (aka Andrew Royo) in the Metro Weekend section. For those that don’t know, The Wire is probably one of the best written and most honest dramas that has appeared on the small screen. The first season began as an average-to-good cop drama, focusing on thug life and the dope game on the streets of Baltimore. Over the following four seasons we saw the city of Baltimore come to life, each season introducing a new aspect of a struggling American city–the dockworkers being replaced by technology, an underfunded school system, the politics behind a white mayor in a primarily black city, and a local newspaper struggling with its credibility and buyouts. Next to Six Feet Under, I would say this is the best show to appear on HBO, and one of the top ten to appear anywhere. This Sunday will end its five season run; it will be missed.

Colourful Notions is an excellent documentary program, for designers and nerds alike, that aired on the BBC television show Horizon in 1984. It explores what colour is, how the human eye interprets it, and how colour is transmitted via RGB channels through your television or computer monitor. The video is after the cut.

via Computerlove

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I never thought I’d be one to praise Dolce & Gabbana’s marketing strategies, but I was pleasantly surprised by their new T.V. ad campaign. I won’t say too much about it simply because it’s far better to just watch. However, I will say this was a nice change of pace, at least for me. I was impressed to see it on a prime time spot, and even more impressed because it was on Fox.

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Finally updated wordpress to 2.3.1, and everything appears to be working smoothly. There are some new things in the works, so this site hasn’t received the love and attention that it deserves. The next couple months should be interesting; time will tell.

It’s been a while since an update, so I figured I’d post up some more excellent videos from the 80s. Watch out for some hotness from The Cure, Blondie, the English Beat, Duran Duran, and Crowded House.

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Fundrace, from the Huffington Post, is an interesting look at the money being raised for the popularity contest known as the 2008 presidental election. The Horserace shows who has raised the most money, their popularity on social networking websites, and recent news articles written about the candidates at the Huffington Post. The Neighbor Search allows you to lookup contributors by name or location. This is fun for your inner cyber-stalker; to see who in your area is giving money to whom or to see who George Clooney is supporting this year. Today it seems that most people in the US vote politicians and not politics, making their decisions based on 30 second commercials and talking points. Something that makes this even more interesting is the Presidental Brands website, which unintentially idolizes the cult of personality.

As I know from my own experience, art can inspire and inform design. What seems more uncommon is when design inspires and informs art. I stumbled upon a book last night called International Lonely Guy by Harland Miller, a writer and painter. It contains an amazing collection of his large scale paintings of penguin and pelican books complete with coffee stains and torn edges. The paintings are very graphic and bold, but have a softness and depth to them. Careful attention also seems to be paid to the content of the original books. The paintings have playful titles that reference authors works or pieces of his own life. The book provide me with a refreshing and inspiring interpretation of art and design.

I have recently come across a box of old family photos and keepsakes from my great great grandmother (or something not really sure), which contained a plethora of goodies. Yes, goodies. Regardless of my lame description, it is a pretty good find. I’ve started archiving the contents of Flickr, beginning with the business cards. My goal is to post a few each day. The contents of the box seems to range as far as dates, but I’ve come across a few thing from the early 1800’s. Enjoy.

After a short hiatus, music video Thursday has returned. There are so many amazing New Wave videos that it’s difficult to choose sometimes. They are sweet and little poorly produced shorts backed by radical tunes, what more could you ask for? This week I selected some lesser known (possibly?) bands, along with A-ha and one of the most famous music videos ever. After the jump there is The Style Council, Figures on a Beach, Missing Persons, English Beat, and A-ha.

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The Radiophonic Workshop was a studio at the BBC that was created in the late 1950s to produce sound effects and experimental music for various radio and television programs. Their task was to find the right sounds to accompany the new wave of programming coming out on the BBC, especially science fiction shows.

One important early member of the Radiophonic Workshop was Delia Derbyshire, who joined the group in 1962. She was a mathematician and composer who was actually turned down a job at Decca Records before joining the workshop; Decca did not employ women in their recording studios at the time. To listen to a good range of her work, download or try to find a copy of‘Music From The BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, which was released on Rephlex Records in 2003.

Her most famous work for the BBC was the Doctor Who theme song. Originally composed by Ron Grainer, the song was truly realized through the hands and ears of Delia (sadly, she never received any credit for the song during her lifetime). Without synthesizers or drum machines available, she experimented with musique concrète, or the sampling of sounds from everyday objects (and not so much everyday objects such as oscillators), and then tweaking them through pitch bending and various other audio manipulation techniques. At the time there were also no sequencers available, so she would have to record a single note and then play that note back on magnetic tape loops to create a beat. Multiple tape loops were then manually synced and layered to create the composition.

It’s hard to think of all this as too impressive, but at the time everything was completely new and some real tinkering, experimentation, and ingenuity went into the work coming from the Radiophonic Workshop. Not much is known to the general public about the workshop, but the work done there in the 50s, 60s, and 70s played a prominent role in the furthering of electronic music. After the cut there is the seven part BBC documentary ‘The Alchemists of Sound’, which showcases a complete history of the workshop and those whom were involved. For the parts about Delia, check out the end of part 4 and beginning of part 5.

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Some friends invited me along to an opening this past Friday at the Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery and I’m now recommending it to all. Seonna Hong was the artist who was featured. The work shown mainly consited of whimsical animals, that were sometimes accompanied by a little girl. Her technique was both striking and suddle, and the images she created have lingered in my imagination long after first seeing them.

Pleix films, a community of motion designers from Paris, has just posted another kick ass video. It’s for a song called Get Down by Groove Armada and was produced by Chased by Cowboys. After watching it, I just want to party with a bunch of bunny rabbits. Other Pleix hits include Birds, which features an all star cast of different dog breads, and Beauty Kit, which educates young girls on the advantages of plastic surgery.

Last night Kurt Vonnegut passed away at his home in NYC. I don’t have much to say, except that he was one of my favorite authors and his work is some of the wittiest and most imaginative writing that I have ever connected personally with. I would like to share my favorite short story of his, Harrison Bergeron, with everyone. If you have not read it, I definately recommend it.

Kurt Vonnegut
1922—2007

It’s been a long week and I have a few other things I want to post, but first let me get some videos on here. I decided to keep going with new wave/pop groups from the 80s. This week there is Tears for Fears, China Crisis, Bill Nelson, A Flock of Seagulls, and Phil Collins. Word.

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Apparently I only post on days that begin with the letter T. This week I selected five more rockin’ 80s videos, from five different artists. I’ve also included a commercial this week. It’s for Kirin beer from Japan, and it features the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Behind the cut there is Information Society, Erasure, Alphaville, Nena, and Falco. I think that next week I may switch it up to a different genre of music videos . . . or maybe not.

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For over a decade Max Cannon has been writing and illustrating one of my favorite comic strips, Red Meat. I remember reading it online, as well as in the Metro Times while in Detroit. It also appears regularly in The Onion’s A.V. Club. After not checking out any new ones for a while, I went to the Red Meat website to discover some funny stories with my good friends Milkman Dan, Ted Johnson, and Bug-Eyed Earl. I also noticed that Max Cannon has been working on an animated web comic for Comedy Central called Shadow Rock. Although not quite as funny as Red Meat, the shorts are equally as twisted and it’s worth watching a few if you think dead clowns are good for a laugh.

Another Thursday has arrived, and I have selected another set of sweet music videos. Hopefully I will have a chance to write some other entries that aren’t music video related in the near future. Behind the cut there is Kraftwerk, Fad Gadget, Kas Product, Cabaret Voltaire, and Duran Duran.

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When I first moved to the city I started noticing stickers that said “you are beautiful”. I finally decided to look them up after seeing one while in a particularly bad mood. I was pretty impressed by what I found. The stickers are just one part of a slew of projects that revolve around the simple phrase “you are beautiful”. The one project that interest me the most was a conversation that took place through the placing of plastic cups in a fence. Their statement of intent says they are trying to create “moments of positive self realization”, and in our current apathetic surroundings this idea seemed surprisingly unselfish, and well, just nice. It allows the designers to indulge themselves, but in the end, it is a good thing.

It’s Thursday again. That means more Aeron chair dance party fun. There are a good number of rockin’ New Order and Depeche Mode videos out there, but I wanted to try and find some new artists so I wasn’t repeating myself so soon. Behind the cut there is the Human League, John Foxx, Soft Cell, Ultravox, and Bronski Beat.

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Super_Collider is the combination of electronic/experimental music producers Cristian Vogel (Tresor/NovaMute) and Jamie Lidell (Warp). In 2002, the German television channel ‘VIVA’ aired an hour long special called SC_TV, which is an experimental audiovisual collage based on Super_Collider’s Raw Digits album. The audio is a mix from Vogel/Lidell that combines their older work with various influences that inspired Raw Digits. The video, animation, and editing for SC_TV were all done by ZEROH and red design, the British design studios that also did the album artwork for Raw Digits. There is a ~2 minute preview available, as well as the entire hour broken into eighteen separate sections.

Today is New Wave/Synthpop/Whatever music video day. I found so many good ones, but I selected just five for now. Maybe next Thursday? Behind the cut there is Peter Schilling, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, New Order, and Visage.

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On Wooster Collective I just saw a video that I have been trying to find for several months. I first watched it back in the summer, but could never remember who did it or what it was called. It’s a black-and-white short made by Studio Smack, a Dutch design group that has created some interesting animations. Their description of the project . . .

“Kapitaal (Capital) is a typo-animation about legible signs in a city, it’s an impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that we are harassed by every day. The amount is so big that it’s commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.”

Check out the Studio Smack website for a high-res version of the video, as well as their other work. There is a youtube link of Kapitaal after the jump.

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Carri Munden’s fashion label Cassette Playa is something truly special. It’s as though a bunch of candy-kids met up with the mooninities and were munching on funny gummies and decided to do some clothing sketches for Cross Colours with neon crayons, and then one day Carri found them hidden in a secret level of Rad Racer and decided to start actually making them. There are so many reasons why Cassette Playa is great, but not everyone will agree. First of all, the Cassette Playa website is low-tech AMAZING. Second, the video for the 2006/2007 autumn/winter collection is dumb-fresh, backed by some breakcore from shitmat. Third, Carri played a big part in M.I.A.’s galang video, which is equally intense. So there, you should check it out. You will either hate me for wasting your time, laugh, or be in love with it. Hmmm, probably not the latter of those three.

Depeche Mode covering Billy Joe Royal’s ‘Down in the Boondocks’? Yup. Last night I discovered a random folder on a French web server, with no explanation, containing about a dozen demos with Martin Gore singing. Although Gore is their main songwriter, Depeche Mode’s lead vocals are generally handled by David Gahan. Gore does manage to hold his own though, singing on two of my favorite DM tracks, ‘Sweetest Perfection’ and ‘Any Second Now (Voices)’. In the demos be sure to check out the version of ‘Enjoy the Silence’ — it includes a harmonium and is especially creepy.

I just discovered a wonderful, catchy stop-motion video dedicated to one of my favorite typefaces, Akzidenz Grotesk. The link comes from Type for you, where they have an excellent post on the history of the typeface along with plenty of relevant AG links.

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Grafik Magazine and Designers are Wankers are currently accepting entries for their Future Perfect writing competition. The aim of the competition is to discover the latest and greatest in design writing talent and is open to all previously unpublished writers. There are five possible topics to select from, including ‘Graphic design’s best kept secret is…’ and ‘Designers are Wankers. Discuss’. There are also some interesting prizes involved, including a MacBook and the opportunity to interview an international design studio for an upcoming issue of Grafik.

Remember Pangaea? That “super continent” from your Earth Science class? Well it turns out there might be another explanation for continental drift. Legendary comic book artist Neal Adams is promoting a new theory that the Earth is actually growing; and he does so very convincingly. He has put together several videos that display what is called “spreading”, which appears to show the outward growth of multiple planets and moons. Prepare to be dazzled.

‘PSST! Pass it On…’ is a collection of films where designers, directors, and animators collaborate to create shorts based on every art-nerd’s favorite game, Exquisite Corpse. The first PSST! project contained six films and was released in July 2006. The next installment, PSST! 2, contains nine films and is to be released online March 10th. There will also be a screening held in Tribeca on Wednesday, March 14th.

Dutch design studio LUST has recently opened the Generation Random: 10 Years of LUST exhibition at the <> tag gallery in The Hague. For this event LUST has created a new touch-screen interactive catalog to present a decade’s worth of work. To coincide with the event there will be various workshops and events happening while the show is up through the month of March. This includes a two-day workshop by David Reinfort on Semi-Automatic Generation and a city tour led by LUST and Luna Maurer that looks at physical locations where design, interactive media, architecture, and urban development overlap. I really wish I was in the Netherlands right now.

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