Updated Survivor Swatches for the Adobe Creative Suite

It is almost August and I real­ize that I haven’t updated my Free Sur­vivor Tribal Swatch Palettes since the con­clu­sion of last sea­son! Yikes I’ll prob­a­bly get voted off the island for that omission.

The past sea­son was fan­tas­tic! Full of drama, dou­ble crosses, schem­ing and titanic strug­gles between the forces of good and evil. That may be lay­ing it on a bit thick, though Rus­sell might just be evil. Obvi­ously the show is con­trived, but what nar­ra­tive isn’t? Sur­vivor, like most works of, dare I say it, art are really vehi­cles to explore larger themes. Even if shows like this  aren’t intended to be rev­e­la­tory, we can still find some mean­ing or food for thought in every prod­uct of cul­ture, well maybe not Car­rot Top.

After all, the pro­duc­ers of the show have com­mented that Sur­vivor is meant to strip peo­ple from their com­fort­able and famil­iar life and force them through stress (hunger, dis­com­fort and para­noia) to reveal their inner nature. So it is not much of a stretch to add greater mean­ing to Sur­vivor. True, the shows first and fore­most role is to be enter­tain­ment and it is easy to over ana­lyze these things, but if one watches as much Sur­vivor as I have, you will  (besides becom­ing slightly brain dam­aged) dis­cover that the show is a micro­cosm of human emo­tions set on a smaller stage. An emo­tional petri dish where the 7 deadly sins are revealed one at a time in the micro­scope of tele­vi­sion and the angels of our bet­ter nature stoop under the blaz­ing trop­i­cal sun.

A deadly sin that that per­me­ates the show is wrath, notably in the form of revenge. The struc­ture of the show forces a group of strangers to bond together for secu­rity and com­fort, all the while real­iz­ing that they will even­tu­ally have to betray one another at some level to win. Betrayal is a suck­ing wound that is dif­fi­cult to close, it is no acci­dent that Dante placed betray­ers at the low­est level of his inferno. Betrayal leads to feel­ings of revenge, the form this usu­ally takes in Sur­vivor is a wince-inducing harangu­ing at the final Tribal Coun­cil, where the betrayed con­front their betray­ers and a win­ner is decided. Watch­ing these speeches makes me think of some­thing that Homer said in the Iliad:

It (revenge) is sweeter far than flow­ing honey.”
– Homer, the Iliad Book 18.

The best exam­ple of the sweet flow­ing schaden­freude in Sur­vivor is most elo­quently exem­pli­fied by the famous “Rats and Snakes” speech from Sue Hawk. She was betrayed by one time ally Kelly and she lets both of the final­ists have it. It is an amaz­ing piece of ora­tory, maybe not up to Per­i­cles’ stan­dards, but a pretty impres­sive bit of invec­tive nonethe­less. Watch it for your self and see.

Design Something Every Day: Day 4: Russell: Finder of Lost Idols

Day 4 brings me back to one of my favorite muses, Sur­vivor of course. Here’s a lit­tle sort of vin­tage styled poster high­light­ing the arch vil­lain from the TV fran­chise, Rus­sell Hantz, bet­ter known to fans as Evil Rus­sell. In the show he had a knack for find­ing idols, which would keep him from being kicked out of the game. That explains the tiki idol in the poster. Since he was con­sid­ered evil, the styl­ized flames seem appropriate.

Evil Rus­sell

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor
Links: Rus­sell Got Screwed, a site defend­ing the honor of this often maligned cast away.