Visual Culture

Noah Scalin over at ALR Design is looking for submissions for The Design Activist’s Handbook a book that he is working on with writer Michelle Taute and is being published by HOW Books next year. Here’s what their looking for:

Artwork and interviews: Socially conscious design projects, both self-initiated and client projects, with good stories to go with them. We’d like to hear about failures and successes:
• Your first efforts at socially conscious design.
• Projects/situations where you struggled with ethics.
• How you manage to pursue socially conscious design and still pay the bills.
• What socially conscious design means to you.
• Situations/projects that helped you discover your power as a designer.

Referrals: Know someone else we should talk to? Or something you’d really like to see in the book? Please let us know! We’re especially interested in talking with in-house and agency designers who are working to affect change at their companies from the bottom up.

For more info submissions and referrals go here. All entries must be sent by July 16th of next week.

Inneract Project, is an educational program conceptualized by prominent Bay Area graphic designer Maurice Woods. Its mission is to expose under-served youth to careers in design by providing free classes and mentorship. The idea came to fruition when Woods was a graduate student at the University of Washington and has found success in the Bay Area where he coincidently grew up as a child.

We had the opportunity to dialog with Maurice over the last few weeks and asked him to share insight on the program—how the program came to be, where it is now, and his long-term goals on where he would like it to go. Summer Session for the program is scheduled to begin in early July. To learn more on how to apply go here.

VC: How did the Inneract Project concept come to be?

MW: I started IP because I figured there were other creative kids out there who might not be fortunate enough to go to college. The concept of the program is to expose kids at an early age so that they might be able to find careers in something they have an affinity towards and love to do. (more…)

Follow the games in style with David Watson’s double-sided poster set in Gotham. The piece was developed for Soccer Aid, a British charity that raises money for UNICEF. No doubt we will be following the U.S./England match come this Saturday.
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Dig this clever find we stumbled upon the other day.

To celebrate the upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Happy Socks has developed a collection of tubing based on the national colors of a selection of the world’s leading footballing nations. The usual perennial’s are represented from Brazil, to the 2006 World Cup Champion, Italy. The threads will be available on May 21st - just in time for the much awaited month long event.

48 Hour Magazine is out with their first publication appropriately named ‘Hustle’. The creatives behind the experiment explain, “From noon on May 7th through noon on the 9th, a team circled up around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones’ offices to transform 1,502 submissions from around the world into a chorus of voices, all harmonizing around the same theme: hustle. 48 Hour Magazine features 60 pages of writers and artists from your favorite magazines sharing space with previously unpublished new talent, shaped by some of the best editors in the business.”

For a peak click here.

We’re all for self-expression, but these font inspired tees appear a tad passé. The battle rages on right here…

From The Province: “Activists have entangled two sculpted porpoises in a giant plastic six-pack ring to protest the use of throwaway plastic and its impact on West Coast marine and wildlife.

The downtown Vancouver demonstration has been organized by the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) and Vancouver advertising agency Rethink. The PPC is trying to draw attention to the fact that plastic pollution covers millions of square kilometres of ocean in the North Pacific and in the North Atlantic. Scientists expect to find similar accumulation areas in the remaining oceanic gyres. There is no known way to clean up the plastic pollution in the oceans as the plastic particles are very small and circulate throughout the entire water column. (more…)

Good Magazine has posted an informative infographic on the present cost of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. See the expanded version here.

Germany’s premier horror and suspense channel, 13th Street, has a branding system that is well, pretty damn gory.

You can view the whole series on behance.net