Visual Culture

We all can relate to this one.

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Check this humorous cartoon by artist Lunchbreath. It’s a slight dig highlighting the myriad of ways companies work hard to brand their product as sustainable or eco-friendly.

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With the ruling on Tuesday by California’s Supreme Court to uphold the ban on same-sex marriages we felt this info-graphic by Good Magazine was appropriate. The graphic visualizes the history of Gay Marriage Bans in the United States.

The ruling leaves five states that allow same-sex marriages— Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Iowa—and four of those are in New England. The other states (more…)

Designer Nadeem Haidary has developed three case studies of everday products like the ‘fork’ as seen above. Below is an excerpt of the designer explaining his process:

Statistics like these may be striking when you first read them, but without context or placement in the physical world, they are rarely remembered and rarely change people’s behavior. What if this kind of information crawled off the page and seeped into the products that surround us? In-Formed provides three case studies in embedding contextually relevant information into everyday objects.

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Spanning four decades, this design competition honors outstanding work in print, packaging, and interactive design. Deadline for submissions is June 10th. To learn more on the specifics click here.

This weeks cover for the New Yorker was developed by artist Jorge Colombo. What separates this cover from previous ones is that his medium was an iPhone apps. called ‘Brushes’. The artist explains his process below:

The drawing was created by Colombo in just an hour, while he stood outside the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. “I got a phone in the beginning of February and I immediately got the programme so I could entertain myself,” says the artist on the New Yorker website, where a film of his process can also be viewed. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” Colombo also stated that drawing on the phone had the advantage of allowing him to draw without being noticed, although he does mention one drawback of phone painting: that when the sun is up, it is hard to see, “because of the glare on the phone”.

To see additional work by the artist you know the drill.
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Convert your empty paperbag into a fun origami animal. The designer behind the idea exlpains, “Empty paperbags, containing simple step by step instructions on how to fold the bag into an origami animal, in order to become a sustainable designer toy in paper. The cost of the bag is directed to the WWF to help save the endangered animal and it’s dying population.”

See the step-by-step process below: (more…)

The Miles Davis Foundation commissioned LUDWICK to produce this limited edition T-Shirt to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the release of his jazz masterpiece ‘Kind of Blue’.
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NOTCOT has put their unused canvass bags to good use. We especially like the Shepard Fairey Saks Fifth Avenue pillow. Find out more here.

(Credit: James Geary)

Here’s something to think about this morning found over at Designmind.

Amidst all the Twittermania, it’s good to remember that the short form has a long history: Aphorisms revealed “truisms” long before 140-character tweets became the predominant art form of the short-attention-span-economy. “An aphorism is a novel packed into a single line,” said Oleg Vishnepolsky, using an aphorism himself, or as Wikipedia puts it, an aphorism is a “concise statement containing a subjective truth or observation cleverly and pithily written.” Unlike tweets, aphorisms are philosophical rather than mundane, but like tweets their beauty lies in their economy: they’re accurate while leaving the all-too-literal unsaid.