Check Out My Daily Design Experiments…

I’ve been cre­at­ing daily designs made in 15 min­utes or so and putting them up on spe­cial flickr set. I am using this as a way to exper­i­ment and hone my craft.  Check them out…

Design Something Every Day: Bigfoot, A Memoir

Design Some­thing Every Day 42 of 365

A lit­tle goof, an imag­ined book jacket for Bigfoot’s memoir.

Design Something Every Day: Purple Phoenix Productions

The fol­low­ing 5 logos were pro­posed ideas for a musi­cal pro­duc­tion company.

Design Something Every Day: Dr D’s Old Time Rock n’ Soul Revue

The fol­low­ing three logos were some pro­posed logo ideas for a Rock and Soul Revue that I was work­ing on.

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Design Something Every Day: Lucky

Design Some­thing Every Day 34/365: Lucky

A lit­tle prac­tice with com­posit­ing using some stock images from www.photoxpress.com and a pic­ture I took of a coin oper­ated Bud­dha for­tune telling machine at the Mir­a­cle Mile Shop­ping Cen­ter in Las Vegas. Mir­a­cle Mile is a very big and very strange Mall located at the Planet Hol­ly­wood Casino com­plex. The shop­ping cen­ter rapidly, ran­domly and often dis­con­cert­ingly switches it’s theme from casino to tra­di­tional mall to Mid­dle East­ern bazaar  to kitchy Vegas trib­ute; seem­ingly the mall was built in stages or the design­ers had very shot atten­tion spans.

On another note, it was the only place I found that you can get a decent micro-brew on the strip, at the aptly named Sin City Brew­ing Com­pany. I rec­om­mend the Sin City Amber.

Design Something Every Day: Tilt Shift Disneyland

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Another lit­tle test with tilt shift fak­ery from a pic­ture I took while rid­ing the Dumbo Ride over­look­ing Fan­ta­sy­land at Dis­ney­land a cou­ple of years ago.

I’ve learned from this exper­i­ment, that tilt shift tech­niques work much bet­ter with shots taken from a greater dis­tance than this one. The peo­ple turned out look­ing much too real instead of look­ing like mod­els. But the hyper-saturated build­ings in the back­ground turned out much better.

As is my way, here’s a video of the Dumbo Ride, mind you the ride just goes around in cir­cles so if you get motion sick­ness I’d skip it:

Twilight of the Idols

Design Some­thing Every Day 30/365

Very sad news. The cus­to­dian at my work was dust­ing and “acci­den­tally” knocked over on of my many Tikis. Trau­matic to say the least. Hope he doesn’t plan any surf­ing any time soon or he’ll find out, just like Greg Brady (see Sea­son 4 Episode 1), what hap­pens when you mess with might Ku. Or watch below:

Design Something Every Day 29/365

For this entry into my Design Some­thing Every Day project I cre­ated a dig­i­tal doo­dle for one of the great­est books of the 20th Cen­tury, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The book pulls back the cur­tain of civ­i­lized soci­ety and explores the darker super­sti­tious and bes­tial side of human nature. It is truly a must read.

Lord of the Flies has had a very deep influ­ence on the cul­ture, with ref­er­ences and allu­sions in works as diverse as LOST, Sur­vivor, the Simpson’s. Two major film ver­sions  of the book have been pro­duced, the fair Harry Hook 1990 ver­sion and the far supe­rior 1963 Peter Brook clas­sic. You can watch the Brook’s film on YouTube, if you haven’t seen this dis­turb­ing film, please do, it is well worth it.

Design Something Every Day… Dude 28/365

A lit­tle thing I made for an upcom­ing event at Tem­ple De Hirsch Sinai. It’s based on The Big Lebowski of course. The Dude abides.…

Design Some­thing Every Day 27 of 365

To fol­low this lit­tle bit up, here’s one of my favorite scenes from The Big Lebowski.

2001: A Design Something Every Day Odyssey

I am a big fan of film­maker Stan­ley Kubrick (1928–1999), so you can imag­ine my excite­ment when I saw this post of great pro­mo­tional pic­tures from 2001: A Space Odyssey on the blog Stan­ley Kubrick — Deserv­ing of Wor­ship. A nice sen­ti­ment for one of the great­est film mak­ers we’ve ever seen.

Kubrick was great film­maker and a real artist. His films have been com­pletely digested by the cul­ture and have become a sort of visual short hand.. the mono­lith, Dr. Strangelove, Alex & his droogs… These arche­typal images have burned them selves in or col­lec­tive con­scious­ness like ghosted images on an old CRT mon­i­tor. The great Mar­garet Cho is aware of Kubrick’s iconic power (see here). His last­ing influ­ence  is the true mark of a genius and con­sum­mate craftsman.

In that  vein I designed this desk­top wall paper for my com­puter as apart of my Design Some­thing Every Day Project.

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Here’s a few great Kubrick links and resources:

Stan­ley Kubrick: Inter­views (Con­ver­sa­tions With Film­mak­ers Series)
Ed. By Gene D. Phillips

This book includes the amaz­ing inter­view with Eric Nordern orig­i­nally pub­lished in Play­boy (Sep­tem­ber 1968). It has one of my all time favorite quotes, some­thing of a mantra for me:

The most ter­ri­fy­ing fact about the uni­verse is not that it is hos­tile but that it is indif­fer­ent; but if we can come to terms with this indif­fer­ence and accept the chal­lenges of life within the bound­aries of death — how­ever muta­ble man may be able to make them — our exis­tence as a species can have gen­uine mean­ing and ful­fill­ment. How­ever vast the dark­ness, we must sup­ply our own light.” — Stan­ley Kubrick

Some good Kubrick resources:

• The Kubrick Site — an Amaz­ing col­lec­tion for all things Kubrick
• The Offi­cial Warner Broth­ers Site for his films.
• Kubricks IMDB Site

Finally the trailer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, what inspired this post to begin with.