Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 152
July 12, 2012
Mr. Div
A totally mesmerizing series of motion graphic experiments done in a 1980s sci-fi style.
See them all at Mrdiv.tumblr.com.
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Some Comics Links for Your Reading Pleasure
Here’s a quick round-up of comics-related links that have come across my desk recently. First, Comic-Con International opens today in San Diego, where there will be a a reunion of the “Firefly” cast on Friday. I think you could say that will be the highest concentration of pure geekdom this year.
In honor of the convention, this week’s issue of The Onion is a special comics edition. A sampling of my favorite headlines: “Economically Healthy Daily Planet Now Most Unrealistic Part of Superman Universe,” “Comics Not Just for Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story” and (I can’t find a link for this one) “Captain Actual America Overweight, Hopelessly in Debt.”
Over at The A.V. Club (the less satirical sibling to The Onion), there’s an excellent interview with writer and 20-year comics veteran Mark Waid. It offers great insight into how one of the super-hero genre’s best writers thinks about the form in the 21st Century, including thoughts on how comics will evolve in the digital age. Perhaps the best quote is:
“The problem with comics, and I’ve said this before, is that we have over the past 50 years very, very successfully taken what used to be a mass medium and successfully turned it into a niche market.”
Finally, a few weeks ago New York Times senior film critics A.O. Scott and Manhola Dargis published this dialogue on the cinematic and cultural impact of the modern super-hero movie. I tweeted that “the whole exchange is depressing in every way,” but it’s still worth reading if you’re interested in critically appraising this genre that has come to dominate so much of popular culture.
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July 11, 2012
Bow Bin
A wonderful hybrid design for a trash bin from designer Cordula Kehrer and hand-woven by the indigenous Aeta people of the Philippines. More information at Areaware.com.
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July 10, 2012
TextExpander 4 Feed Sponsorship
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Nobrow Press
This small publisher aims to be an “independent platform for graphic art, Illustration and art comics in the U.K. and abroad,” as well as “to become a leading proponent of quality in book design and a standard bearer for original creative content in print publishing.” They have a stable of incredible artists, including the French illustrator Blexbolex (whose children’s book “L’imagier des Gens,” though not from Nobrow, is still a favorite of mine). I received a copy of his Nobrow comic “Dogcrime” as a gift. Here’s a shot of another comic, “Abecederia.”
Find out more or order books at Nobrow.net.
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July 9, 2012
Wes Anderson’s Kingdom
On the whole, I’ve enjoyed most of director Wes Anderson’s oeuvre, and I count myself a fan. Enough so that I’m even partial to his oft-maligned Jacques Cousteau riff “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” one of his least-liked films. It’s far from perfect, I admit, but there’s enough of a through-line to it from “Rushmore,” his 1998 breakthrough, that I find it worthwhile. “Rushmore,” in case there’s any doubt, is a film that I found to be thoroughly wonderful and full of singular promise. It balanced a wholly novel worldview with indelible characters. There’s been very little like it from other directors since.
Over the weekend I went to see Anderson’s newest movie “Moonrise Kingdom,” which like his past works is another Joseph Cornell-like cinematic diorama, full of diminutive but delightful details and vaguely familiar but endearingly idiosyncratic characters. It tells the tale of two pre-teens who fall in love and plot to steal away to a remote part of a fictional New England island, and the comical search parties that pursue them.
Two Different Kinds of Direction
Part of the wonder of a Wes Anderson film, for me, is getting to see the kind of film a designer would make given a budget, a crew and a sampling of today’s most notable celebrities. Anderson populates his movies with big name actors eager to burnish their indie cred, and he surrounds them with the accoutrements of his obsessions: obsolete technology, dubious uniforms, imaginary cartographies, naive architecture, and more. Every single piece counts, and is placed exquisitely in relation to every other. Most filmmakers compose their frames, but it might be more accurate to say that Anderson lays his out, much the way print designers once pasted up pages in lavishly illustrated encyclopedia volumes. It’s not film direction, it’s art direction.
In this, Anderson remains at the height of his powers. “Moonrise Kingdom” looks great. The eye can’t help but pore over each frame, visually twiddling with the seemingly endless details festooned fussily on every object. No one can art direct quite like Wes Anderson, and together with his regular cinematographer , no one can produce films quite this visually rich. The story is set in 1965 and is rendered with an appropriately halcyon color palette that’s a wonder to behold; it evokes an intoxicating, imaginary past with the verve of an Instagram photo adapted for the screen by a true auteur.
Nevertheless, I found myself intermittently irritated by it. To watch “Moonrise Kingdom” is to be enthralled by the totality of Anderson’s vision, and even to be warmed by the obvious fondness that he has for his characters. But the movie is also ninety-four minutes of starvation if you’re hungry for any kind of substantial character development. The protagonists (and by the end, nearly everyone is a protagonist, undermining any real dramatic tension the plot had going for it) are little more than inventories of their scripted eccentricities. The director offers scant few arguments for why any of the characters do any of the things they do; they’re all just dress-up dolls at the beck and call of Anderson’s charmingly pre-adolescent fetishes.
Poor character development can seem like a petty complaint when Anderson also provides the visual riches that he does. His technical proficiency is clearly higher than ever, and if you can set aside the centrality of character development, you’d have no trouble arguing that “Moonrise Kingdom” is a remarkable jewel of a movie. (In fairness, the characters are not as horrifically ill-conceived as they were in Anderson’s 2007 travelogue “The Darjeeling Limited.”) This is perhaps how we should think of Anderson’s films from here on out: technical marvels engineered to show off endless quirk. That’s a legitimate credential; it’s just not the one I would have hoped for right after I saw “Rushmore.”
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July 6, 2012
Humanæ
A wonderful project from Spanish artist Angelica Dass: a series of photographic portraits in which she sets her subjects against a background of a specific PANTONE color that matches his or her skin tone.
View the full “Humanæ” project or read the write-up at Designboom. Via .
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July 5, 2012
Photoshop’s Blend Modes Explained
Like many inveterate users of Photoshop, I’ve never really known what the blend modes (found on the Layers palette) do. That is, I know the effects they produce, mostly through repeated usage, but I’ve never really understood the operations they perform to achieve those effects. (It doesn’t help that their names, e.g., Color Burn, Linear Dodge, Pin Light, Hard Mix, etc., are not exactly self-evident.) This blog post lists all of the blend modes and offers simplified technical explanations of each. For instance, here’s Pin Light in plain English:
“Pin Light replaces the colors [in the underlying image], depending on the blend color. If the blend color (light source) is lighter than 50% gray, pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.”
That’s pretty enlightening and actually very useful. Read the whole post here.
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A Library Where a Wal-Mart Used to Be
As is common when big box stores close up shop, when the Wal-Mart in McAllen, Texas shut down, the town was left with a 124,500 square foot building. They decided to turn it into a public library, with surprisingly attractive results.
In fact, the project won a 2012 Library Interior Design Award. Read more here.
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July 3, 2012
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