Updated Survivor Color Swatches For The Adobe Creative Suite

Wow, 23 sea­sons so far of Sur­vivor! I know it’s been a while since I last updated my Sur­vivor Swatches. I had updated them at the begin­ning of this sea­son, but I waited until the tribes finally merged so I could get all three tribal col­ors for this sea­son. So here ya go! Updated through Novem­ber 2011. Enjoy them and the tribe has spoken.

Click here to down­load the swatches. >

A quick side note, as a fan of the show and of Tiki iconog­ra­phy. I have to say this sea­son has had the absolute best look­ing Tiki’s. The immu­nity idols, the sets and the gen­eral set dec­o­ra­tion has been top notch this sea­son. Maybe because it’s named Sur­vivor South Pacific it didn’t have to rep­re­sent one sin­gle island chain or cul­ture, but was inspired by the entirety of Poly­ne­sian cul­ture and influ­enced by Polynesian-pop iconog­ra­phy. Maybe not, but it’s pretty out­stand­ing nonetheless.

Check out these images from the show to see what I mean. Pay atten­tion to the Tiki’s in the background.

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.

Survivors get ready to RUMBLE!

Design Some­thing Every­day 16/365

After read­ing the amaz­ing tuto­r­ial “How to Creat a Retro Box­ing Poster in Pho­to­shop” from James Davies I was inspired to give it a whirl. I didn’t get quite as faux-vintage as James did, but went in my own direc­tion. Turn­ing it into a pre­view of some upcom­ing clashes in Sur­vivor. If you’re a fan of the show you’ll get the gags.

Design Something Everyday: Retro Stephenie

Day 7 and still design­ing, though 2 days behind sched­ule in post­ing. Be that as it may, in honor of tonight’s pre­miere of Sur­vivor Heroes vs Vil­lains my design of the day is a lit­tle WPA inspired retro-esque poster in honor of one of my favorite play­ers, Stephe­nie LaGrossa. Star of two pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions of the show.

She was a con­tes­tant dur­ing sea­sons set in Guatemala and Palau. In Palau she was the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of her ini­tal “tribe,” a first for Sur­vivor. On Sur­vivor: Guatemala she placed sec­ond and was robbed of vic­tory by a petty and annoy­ing jury. Hope­fully, as in my dig­i­tal doo­dle, Pal­las Athena will be her aegis and like she did for clever Odysseus, guide her to vic­tory. Sur­vivors ready…

Sur­vivors ready?

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links: Pal­las Athena Clip Art via Arthur’s Cli­part

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.

Design Something Everyday Day 2: Retro Rupert

Day two and here is  a retro styled poster for Rupert Bone­ham, a con­tes­tant on the CBS real­ity show Sur­vivor: Pearl Islands, Sur­vivor All Stars & the upcom­ing Sur­vivor Heroes vs Villains.

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Pho­to­Shop, Wacom Tablet.

Link: Rupert’s Kids, Sur­vivor Con­tes­tant Rupert Boneham’s non-profit group to help at risk youth. A wor­thy cause.

Updated Free Survivor Tribal Color Swatches for Illustrator and Photoshop

Another sea­son of Sur­vivor, my favorite tele­vi­sion show, has run its course. In a sur­prise to me and most of the fans of the show, the con­niv­ing and bril­liant tac­ti­cian Rus­sell Hantz won every­thing but the game, being defeated in a lop­sided vote to Natalie White (link). I guess that Sur­vivor can be like chess, in that you can be a bril­liant tac­ti­cian, but if your strat­egy is flawed then even being up in mate­r­ial and posi­tion, you can still be mated.  For more about my strange obses­sion with this show, I refer you to my last post with the topic here.

In honor of another great sea­son I thought I’d update my Sur­vivor tribal color swatches for the Adobe Cre­ative Suite, they are in the Adobe Swatch Exchange for­mat (.ase). They are now updated and include the tribal col­ors for the pre­vi­ous two sea­sons of Sur­vivor, Tocan­tins & Samoa .

Click here to down­load the free color swatches.

Also, today is the win­ter sol­stice and is offi­cially the first day of win­ter here in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. In Seat­tle the rain has been pour­ing for weeks if not months already. How­ever, thanks to Sur­vivor and Her­man Melville I have been trans­ported to the lush and mys­te­ri­ous islands of the South Pacific.  I have begun read­ing a clas­sic in the field of pop­u­lar­iz­ing and mythol­o­giz­ing (for good and ill) the world  of Poly­ne­sia, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Her­man Melville (for some rea­son I’ve also seen it sub­ti­tled in some edi­tions as A Peep at Poly­ne­sian Life).

Long before Melville had his read­ers chase a great white whale, he marooned them on more tem­per­ate shores. This book is a highly fic­tion­al­ized account of some of the true adven­tures Melville had as a young sailor when he jumped ship and lived with the natives of Mar­que­sas Islands for three weeks in 1842. Coin­ci­den­tally , the Mar­que­sas played host to a sea­son of Sur­vivor (Sea­son 4).

Schol­ar­ship is divided on the mer­its of Typee as a work of lit­er­a­ture and espe­cially his por­trayal of the native islanders. I find it inter­est­ing that even though Melville is now known pri­mar­ily for Moby Dick, this was by far his most suc­cess­ful work dur­ing his life time.  I think that is because this book is at its heart an adven­ture story of escape in a lush and mys­te­ri­ous land. Which is the under­ly­ing mythol­ogy of the west­ern view of the South Seas, some­thing that Sur­vivor and Poly­ne­sian Pop has cours­ing through their blood­stream. To end here is a quote from Typee that sums this mythol­ogy perfectly:

‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a set­tled thing; next week we shape our course to the Mar­que­sas!’ The Mar­que­sas! What strange visions of out­landish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoanut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bam­boo tem­ples; sunny val­leys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes danc­ing on the flash­ing blue waters—savage wood­lands guarded by hor­ri­ble idols—HEATHENISH RITES AND HUMAN SACRIFICES.

For more information

Online Ver­sions of Typee:

• Project Guten­berg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1900
• Libravox.org audio book: http://librivox.org/typee-by-herman-melville/

More about Typee:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typee
• Sparks Notes (no cheat­ing, just ref­er­ence… read the book!) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/typee/

More about Her­man Melville & some of his other works:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
• http://www.melville.org/
• http://www.mobydick.org/

Sur­vivor:

• http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor

More about Adobe .ase format:

• http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/04/adobe-swatch-exchange-ase-files.html
• http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html

Free Survivor Tribe Swatches for Adobe Illustrator

I am very excited that a new sea­son of the great­est show in the his­tory of Tele­vi­sion has returned. No, not Heroes or Lost, it’s Sur­vivor of course!

In  honor of the sac­ri­fice of my Thurs­day Nights and count­less hours oth­er­wise spent on pro­duc­tive enter­prises now devoted to con­tem­plat­ing  the fate of strangers eat­ing insects halfway around the globe;  I am giv­ing away my col­lec­tion of Sur­vivor Tribal color swatches for Adobe Illus­tra­tor for free. As a fan/addict of the show I’ve been col­lect­ing the col­ors of the tribes or teams and cre­at­ing swatch pal­lets for them. These swatch palettes have the  color of each tribe up through the last sea­son, Sur­vivor: Gabon.  View the swatches in the list view in Illus­tra­tor and you will see that each swatch has the name of the sea­son and the name of the tribe that the color once proudly represented.

DOWNLOAD SURVIVOR SWATCHES!

Swatches for Illus­tra­tor / Adobe Cre­ative Suite ASE swatch palettes.

Enjoy the swatches, but let me digress a bit on why I find this pro­gram so inter­est­ing.
Why do I like this silly, con­trived show so much?  I’ve often won­dered that myself. Why devote so much men­tal energy guess­ing the effect of every con­ver­sa­tion, chal­lenge, reward, moon phase, tidal fluc­tu­a­tion or ascend­ing astro­log­i­cal aspect will have on the out­come of the game? Why fol­low the out­come of a show that I have no stake in? Why do I do it? Addic­tion to a triv­ial show? Prob­a­bly, but I’ll try to ratio­nal­ize it, if for no other rea­sons than my amuse­ment and to think about Sur­vivor even more.
The con­clu­sion I’ve come to is that Sur­vivor com­bines sev­eral ele­ments that I find irre­sistible. These irre­sistible ele­ments that Sur­vivor com­bines are:

• The roman­tic notion of escape
•    The exotic
•    Voyeurism
•    Cannibalism

Escape

In an age of anx­i­ety men seek a refuge. Because of some deep urge, con­stant through­out his­tory, trou­bled men tra­di­tion­ally dream of islands, pos­si­bly because of the small­ness of an island invites the illu­sion that here the com­plex­i­ties of con­ti­nen­tal soci­eties can be avoided, or at least con­trolled. This is a per­ma­nent, world-wide dream.“
- James A. Mitch­ner & A. Grove Day, Ras­cals in Par­adise, Tur­bu­lent adven­ture and bold courage on the South Seas.

Illu­sion of Paradise

Sur­vivor is endowed with the roman­tic ideal of escape. The show is a game, but the mythol­ogy of the show is no mere game. It begins with the “exile” of 16–20 west­ern “cast­aways” or “sur­vivors” to an idyl­lic trop­i­cal island or other exotic locale; and we the audi­ence go along for the ride. If you could draw blood from Sur­vivor and exam­ine its DNA, you would find the works of Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stephen­son, Jack Lon­don, Her­man Melville and Joseph Con­rad form­ing the rigid base pair­ings of the show.

The idea of escap­ing the world to craft a new civ­i­liza­tion in par­adise is very invit­ing. If you think I’m been bit grandiose here, you may be right, com­par­ing as show like this with giants of lit­er­a­ture; how­ever the show does coat tail off of many of the ideas and images in the works of those mas­ters. After all, it’s telling that the pre­cur­sor to Sur­vivor was a Swedish pro­gram called Expe­di­tion Robin­son, ala Robin­son Crusoe.

The Exotic

Sur­vivor is typ­i­cally set on a trop­i­cal island in the South Pacific, though some­times the cast­aways find them­selves marooned in the vast jun­gles of the Amer­i­cas, Africa or Asia.  These exotic locales feed into this feel­ing of escape.

Escap­ing to a deserted island is one thing, but the exotic isn’t com­plete with­out the will­ing wahine and the noble sav­age. Indige­nous cul­tures are present in the show, but often in  the lim­ited short­hand of the romance of colo­nial­ism. Every sea­son some of the cast­aways win a chal­lenge and are fer­ried to a vil­lage by the pro­duc­ers and par­tic­i­pate in some sort of con­trived bac­cha­nal.  The iconog­ra­phy of the native cul­tures are used not really to illu­mi­nate, but to be used as set pieces for the con­trived drama for the show.

Idol from Sur­vivor Fiji

A designer I really love the pop-exotic art direc­tion in the show and the pop cul­ture exotic flair. In fact, I have a 4 foot tiki statue in my back yard! Sur­vivor has always had a won­der­fully kitschy tribal coun­cil set where the can­ni­bal­ized mem­bers of the show are digested into the jury. The set is full of imagery rife with the exotic idols, fire pits, rat­tan, wicker, native(ish) art and the ubiq­ui­tous bam­boo.  The show changes it’s sets and iconog­ra­phy to suit the theme of each show. Be that pirates, African Tribes­men or South Seas can­ni­bals, the dec­o­ra­tions fit the theme and high­light the roman­tic exotic ideal of that environment.

The most vivid “prim­i­tive” icon is the “immu­nity idol,” a totem that keeps the player or team safe from going to tribal coun­cil and get­ting voted off the island. The idol itself is usu­ally a styl­ized vision of some prim­i­tive god and it lives some­where halfway between the real­ity of the local cul­ture and the idea of the exotic enchanted land where that par­tic­u­lar sea­son is set. A style that has it’s DNA, not  in the native styles of where ever the show is located, but in the Disney’s Adven­ture­land,  Trader  Vic’s  restau­rants and glo­ri­ous mid­cen­tury Poly­ne­sian– Pop ephemera. The immu­nity idols them­selves are fan­tas­tic pieces of art that look as if they should grace the cov­ers of the great Exot­ica leg­ends Lex Bax­ter or Mar­tin Denny, or be ren­dered in glo­ri­ous two dimen­sions by SHAG. Hope­fully they are being pre­served for future Urban or pop cul­ture Arche­ol­o­gist; pre­served for a future Sven Kirsten.

The Voyeur and Grub worms or another rea­son to hate Kobe Bryant.

Kobe Shoots the worm.

Sure it has an exotic loca­tion, but what makes it a fun is the addi­tion of two other ele­ments, first it is a real­ity show, so there is a strong voyeuris­tic ele­ment to it. It is inter­est­ing to see peo­ple osten­si­bly like you or me and putting them in such a strange  and stress­ful sit­u­a­tion and see­ing how they react. I first dis­cov­ered Sur­vivor not because of any fore­sight but because of Kobe Bryant. I acci­dently found Sur­vivor half way through the first sea­son in Bor­neo. I was watch­ing the NBA finals and being dis­gusted that the Lak­ers were blow­ing out my man Reg­gie Miller’s Pac­ers, I turned the chan­nel and saw a guy eat­ing a bug. Now this caught my atten­tion!  So you can blame my devo­tion to Sur­vivor to equal parts Kobe Bryant’s jump shot and the epi­curean delight of grub worms. All those Thurs­days lost thanks to that jumper and that bug.

Can­ni­bal Con­tes­tants

The show is a com­pe­ti­tion, that is why I think it became so pop­u­lar. It had escape, exotic loca­tions cou­pled with the voyeuris­tic car wreck. But we’d see all that before.  Sur­vivor was the first real­ity show, as far as I can remem­ber, that turned the con­tes­tants into cannibals.

The Lotu, or the Wor­ship, was pro­gress­ing slowly, and, often, in crab­like fash­ion. Chiefs, who announced them­selves Chris­tians and were wel­comed into the body of the chapel, had a dis­tress­ing habit of back­slid­ing in order to par­take of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat or be eaten had been the law of the land; and eat or be eaten promised to remain the law of the land for a long time to come.“
–Jack Lon­don, Whale Tooth

Soy­lent Green Burger?

The premise is very inter­est­ing. First, the con­tes­tants have to work together to cre­ate some sort of com­mu­nity and find com­fort in the wild. Of course it isn’t a real sur­vival sit­u­a­tion, the pro­duc­tion com­pany won’t let them actu­ally die, but they do let them get very, very uncom­fort­able. In a pseudo-survival sit­u­a­tion like this how do peo­ple react? Do they band together or save them­selves at any price. In the real world peo­ple most often band together. How­ever, the insid­i­ous genus of the show comes into play here,  since only one indi­vid­ual can win. In the real world groups win, but this is a micro­cosm of the world, so how does an indi­vid­ual impose their will with­out alien­at­ing every­one?
This makes  one sur­vivor Out Wit, Out Last and Out Play and thereby can­ni­bal­iz­ing friend and foe alike. To win you have to can­ni­bal­ize other mem­bers, but doing it in such a way that they will still vote for you as mem­bers of a jury that pick the win­ner 2–3 final­ists.  Kill and eat your rivals but be nice about it. To win sur­vivor, like chess you have to sac­ri­fice peo­ple on your own side. That is a dif­fi­cult thing to do on many lev­els. Watch­ing it unfold tells some­thing about the human con­di­tion. What I am not totally sure, since the show is on many lev­els arti­fice, to answer that I’d have to stop pay­ing atten­tion to all the eat­ing of bugs.

My visions were of ship­wreck and famine; of death or cap­tiv­ity among bar­bar­ian hordes; of a life­time dragged out in sor­row and tears, upon some gray and des­o­late rock, in an ocean unap­proach­able and unknown. Such visions or desires– for they amounted to desires– are com­mon, I have since been assured, to the whole numer­ous race of the melan­choly among men…“
–Edgar Allen Poe: The Nar­ra­tive of Arthur Gor­don  Pym