Vacation Postcards

Laura Schreiber, a freelance illustrator, took a nice vacation on a lake. She painted some watercolors and sent them as postcards to her friends here. Each was beautifully done, but the real gas was when they line up together. Click the changing picture above to see.
*The artist tells me this is an ocean, not a lake. Oops. I thought those were lakegulls.

Studio Crew in 3-D

I finally got to try some 3D phtography myself, with a second-hand Bell & Howell Colorist camera. I'll go into some tech details later in the comments. Here are some of the great 3-dimensional folks I work with; and a good capture of their brilliant spirit.

Nice Basic Bookbinding How-To

Designer Michael Shannon shares a sweet little tutorial on bookbinding. No real detail on correct cover making, but it's goodness is it's simplicity. Sewing and joining signatures with easy steps and clear pictures. Just enough to inspire a person to make a first attempt. What could be better.

Link

Light Hook

A really neat idea just a little off in execution. This is a light switch modified as a clothing hook. The problem is it's off when down, on when up. I'd buy in if hanging my jacket on the hook lit the lights, and taking my jacket off the hook to leave turned them out.
To be fair, there is a slew of real genius at this designer's site, Amron Exptl. I especially look forward to commercial production of the Brush and Rinse, the hardest "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" moment of my life.

Via Design Spotter

Hair Type

This has to be an ad for a barbershop, my guess is Korean. All I know for sure is I like it, and I want to find out what it says.

Visual Trend Graphing

Jim Bumgardner creates these beautiful images that illustrate trends. He'll pick a topic, like for the images shown: sunset, and then make/use software that places images gathered from Flickr onto a graph by time and date taken, assigns a translucency to the photos, and the pattern or trend reveals itself in the resulting composite image. The cool thing here is the trend revealed actually signifies the changing time of sunset. The bottom of the "curve" is summer solstice. I especially liked his trend image for photos tagged breakfast, lunch and dinner. The best thing is, I think he just does this for fun. He works at Yahoo! and facilitates some nice collaborations at Flickr.

Link to Flickr set of trend images

via visualcomplexity (an awesome site also)

Freeset™ does interactivity

I came across this neat "humanlocator™" at Swiss Miss, and dug just a little into the development company, Freeset. There's a lot to learn from them about smart use of interactivity. I've heard a lot of succesful bizmen who based their operations on collaboration, and common core advice from them boiled down to requiring partners, big or small, to have skin in the game. Good interactivity does just that, requires the viewer to put skin in the game, and make them a partner. Even their company introduction page reveals their headline only as you rolll over the words, and you have to keep rolling over to keep them up as they fade. "What if people don't bother to point there? They won't see it." If they don't have to interact with it, they may not bother to point their brain at it. Engaging is better.

Link to the humanlocator demo, I liked bubbles.

Via Swiss Miss

3D image

I like 3D stuff. I like the kind you use a stereograph for, the red and blue glasses (anaglyph), and the perpendicular polarizing glasses. Though I could never see those magic eye posters, so I hated those. Lately I've seen a 3D imagery technology on the internet that gives a 3D feel even if you're missing an eye. It kicks back and forth from left to right eye view. This attached image is an example I especially like because it mixes 3D imaging with a nicely done time lapse.

Follow this link to see more.

Via Notcot

Thomas Allen Pulp Fiction

Minnesota Photographer Thomas Allen cuts up and folds old pulp paperbacks and photographs these little scenes. His manipulation adds drama to every one of them. It's the kind of artwork that can show you how to find beauty in the commonplace. You won't pass by the box of 5¢ used paperbacks so quickly next time. Really delightful.

Link
Via Advertising Design Goodness

Visual Data - Tufte made compelling

We've been starting to collect examples of charting solutions here at work, since so many of our assignments are to chart clinical test data. It's a challenge to produce a new way to visualize a bar chart the hundredth time. This company, Catalogtree, seems to thrive on that challenge. Solution after solution. They're a good inspiration to offer new and better solutions; to get away from the dreaded "way it's always been done."

Link www.catalogtree.net/projects/2007
Found via Core77 Design Blog

Philippe Halsman's Dali Atomicus

In case you don't know what you're supposed to do when you check into a hotel, you're supposed to photograph each other flying through the air from bed to bed. Then you upload the best photo to The Hotels by City Bedjumping page. In keeping with the current theme, we present ours with Philippe Halsman's (who invented jumping) photo of Savador Dali.

We scored a complaint from the front desk 15 minutes after checking in, by the way.

Picasso's "Two Girls"

Here's my attempt:
Picasso's Two Girls
I'm hoping the great quality of the Previous "Last Supper" post and my hapless attempt will encourage more. The little one was a little too wiggly to get her facing at the right angle, but big sister proved a thoughtfull model; and both good sports with more or daddy's craziness. It was good fun.

My older daughter, seeing Picasso's original, asked, "Did he mean to do that?"