Who wants a freelance job?
A friend of a friend, etc, needs someone to design a record sleeve. A gatefold no less. There is hardly the scent of money involved, but vinyl gatefold jobs don’t come around too often.
It’s for a “disco/lo-fi punk” artist with strong political influences. The brief is very tight, but could be fun to work within. The person who takes the job will need to be able to illustrate something along the lines of the rather hyper-galactic design of the Rod Stewart sleeve below.
If you are interested, please email me and I will forward the details.
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Tags: freelance, job, record sleeve
Do good get fit
Social Design Site reports on the Good Gym, a project where participants get fit whilst doing some good for the community. For example, whilst on your daily run you could also deliver a newspaper to a less mobile member of your community.
The project is particularly targetting loneliness and isolation for older people in Britain and is supported by Thinkpublic and has been given seed funding from Unltd*, an organisation who provide funding to people wanting to create positive social change.
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Tags: Get fit, Good Gym
Presentation Tips
I can hardly believe that in about a month I will be in another country and back in school – I think the last exam I had was my driving test – so this will be interesting.
I have given my fair share of presentation tips over the last couple of years whilst teaching, but now I will need to heed some of my own advice. To this end, I am bookmarking these two sites to remind me of how good presentations can be made.
43 Folders has a list of things to consider when making presentations to make them a little better, and ZuiPrezi is a funky little online presentation editor which lets you create “non-linear” presentations. Certainly a hell of a lot more interesting than powerpoint.
Thanks to Communication Nation for the tip.
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Tags: presentation tips, ZuiPrezi
BMX Bandits
Thanks to the LA Times’ graphics department I now know that BMX riding makes its Olympic debut this year. Cool. Off to watch BMX Bandits now to get in the mood… There’s more of the graphic at the Times’ site.
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Tags: BMX Bandits
Font Conference
A slightly amusing pastiche of classic heroes and villains dressed up as common fonts.
Thnx Surfstation
Filed under: Typography, Video | 0 Comments
Tags: type video
Organised
Moving to another country is great if you like cleansing your life of the detritus of past lives. Today I recycled all my teaching notes and archived the originals electronically. I’ve also been tidying up my bookmarks in Firefox (yes I have Delicious, but I still prefer to see my links in tidy folders) and clearing my mac of useless information.
Yesterday I even had enough spare time to design my own icons, a fairly pointless exercise as I am going to sell this machine, but like everything else I will be migrating it to my new MacBook Pro.
I used this Pic2Icon software to make lovely transparent icons based on an original template from Martin Lexow found at MacThemes. I have used colour to categorise each of the programs (red for creative, green for office). So far the use of type over image icon is not proving to be a problem with readability or speed.
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Tags: Icons, Martin Lexow, Pic2Icon
Sweet
Industreal is an Italian company with some very whimsical designs. DesignBoom has a brief post about their new collection, including a pic of my new favourite soup bowl, complete with shark fin. Pearly, this one’s for you.
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Tags: Industreal, Shark Fin Bowl
Tour de Bondi
I have been watching the Tour de France these past few weeks and wanted to put the mammoth climbs these men accomplish into context. For example, yesterday’s stage was a total distance was about 135km with the highest climb at an elevation of 2,802m above sea level – a spectacular scene if you feel like having a look, (scroll down to see the video highlights of Stage 16).
The two big climbs of the day were about 25km in distance, which is about 8 times the length of the start of my morning commute; a climb that quite frankly hurts sometimes. I feel quite embarrassed to compare my this with the super-human efforts of the Tour cyclists, but never-the-less, that little black triangle is my pathetic little attempt at scaling the heights of the world.
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Tags: cycling, Tour de France
Photo Finnish
On the weekend I was in Canberra, home of the Australian parliament and fabulous embassy architecture. I had not seen the Embassy of Finland before, and I must say that the design is quite beautiful. Designed as part of a competition by the Finnish architect Vesa Huttunen of Hirvonen-Huttunen, the building was completed in 2002.
The Embassy has many environmentally friendly features such as maximum use of natural daylight, controlled by features such as the louvres shown in the photo below. The construction also uses local and re-used timbers plus a geothermal heating and cooling system using pipes which are over 100 metres long.
© John Gollings. More photos here.
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Tags: Finnish Embassy Canberra
Buckminster Fuller
If I was in New York I definitely be going to see an exhibition at the Whitney on one of my favourite design visionaries, Buckminster Fuller.
I first came across Buckminster Fuller when designing a newspaper for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for Fairfax Publications (publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald). As part of the project we wanted to include graphics which would educate and inform and provide interest for more than one age range.
One of the graphics I wanted to include was a Dymaxion projection of the earth that Buckminster Fuller drew and patented in 1946. The projection was made up of rectangles and triangles and was drawn with the minimum amount of distortion. It had not occurred to me until this point that many of the traditional projections of the earth we see in atlases distort the shapes of the continents.
The Dymaxion Projection
Unfortunately the client thought that the inclusion of the map wouldn’t be appropriate for the audience (they thought maps only related to kids!), so we didn’t get to use it.
The exhibition is on until September 21, 2008.
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Tags: Add new tag, Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Projection, Whitney
