Sorry for the delayed posting! These beautiful photos from Katie Quinn Davies reminds me how beautiful food can be. I’m already missing the delicious Thanksgiving food!
Sorry for the “X’s” in the upper right-hand corner–these are screenshots taken from her site.
Animated gifs have come up for me three times this week. I know, the word might make you think of that chain email your aunt sent on back in ‘aught six. But no, not those: contemporary animated gifs.
1: The artistic
Found on superb culture curator blog Lost at E Minor, Brandon Jan Blommart’s series of Americas Most Haunted animated gifs are fascinating and soothing.
2: The ZOMG
Gawker’s feminist(ish) blog Jezebel made a roundup of dozens of a newish sort of animated gifs as sort of “Like using emoticons, on steroids!”* which you use in a comments forum when you want to applaud someone:
or tell them to shut up, or that you will kill them,
or just “whatever.”
*This is actually a reference to the static face reaction shots of myfacewhen but applies even more to these. The quote was introduced to me in a metafilter’s comment about the jezebel post by dreamyshade, who continues: “instead of having text abstractions stand in for our faces, they/we use other people’s faces to stand in for our faces when talking anonymously and virtually.”
3: The uh, professional
I made one, for a google ad for my day job at Speck. It featured these new super limited edition lowbrow creature art iPhone cases. But… it was 160k, much too large for a google ad. In an attempt to get it under their 50k ceiling, I saved a severely lossy dithered 16color version.
We didn’t end up using it because well, it is terrible. But! Strangely compelling, in a vhs reticulation Prince of Darkness nostalgia way. (If you concur, maybe post in the comments a nodding Ms. Jay or something).
Further reading:
Slate has an article on the Glorious GIF Rennaissance and Artfagcity calls 2010 The Year of the Animated GIF. Neither of these articles mention iOS’ continued nonsupport of Flash as a contributing factor to the renaissance, but I don’t doubt it: the first wave of animated gifs predated Flash and all but disappeared to livejournal and myspace for years once Flash hit the scenes.
And as for the retro cheestastic style of that first wave of animated gifs, if you’re still hungry for em, perhaps you’d like to watch that new MIA video? Frankly I couldn’t get through it…
Happy Monday! Brandi Strickland, a multi-media artist, and also one of the two people behind “the paper whistle” site has some really lovely collage pieces that I’m really enjoying. Hope you do too!
Check out Brandi’s flickr site here. Personal site here. Company site here.
You’ve probably noticed that the World Cup is going on, with people cheering in bars at 6am and taking large swaths out of their workday to watch another 0-0 tied match. If you haven’t been personally caught in the fever, you might not yet have seen Nike’s Write the Future ad, which is, in addition to soccerfantastic, also funny and smartly done and unbelievably ambitious.
And Diem Chau, whose embroidery we featured a while back, handcarved crayons as part of the press kits they sent out in conjunction with the ad. Lovely — many more pics and more information at her blog.
Last weekend we saw Typeface at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It’s a documentary about letterpress, woodtype and especially the Hamilton Wood Type Museum by filmmaker Justine Nagan. We enjoyed it for its empassioned subjects and typegeekery of a level not seen onscreen since Helvetica typegeekery. However, it’s a somewhat melancholy film: its noble agenda seems to be to get people enthusiastic about preserving typographic history, it’s just not terribly optimistic about it.
A few posters for the film printed at Hamilton and available for purchase.
Hamilton was the leading American producer of woodtype through the 20th Century: if you’ve spent time in any type shop undoubtedly you’ll recognize their imprint on the handles of the drawers of type cases. Their early history – where they bought out more-elaborate Victorian competition then, once they’d achieved a near-monopoly, promptly doubled their prices – is covered unsentimentally in the film. Indeed, the juxtoposition of what an industrial operation Hamilton made of woodtype and what an artsy crowd inherited its remains is one of the animating tensions of the film: oldtimers who were cutting type when they shuttered two decades back shaking their heads at the abstract collages being printed by visiting letterpress artists. The closed facilities of Hamilton, barely transformed, became the Hamilton Wood Type Museum and it seems a pretty fascinating place. Next time we’re through Wisconsin (or even a state away) we’ll definitely make the detour.
Three pics courtesy of Nick Sherman: a print from an enormous point-size numeral 2, the cover of a specimen book, and pantograph scraps from the cutting of Matthew Carter’s contemporary Hamilton-cut woodtype face, Van Lanen Latin.
Just ran across this beautiful stationery for Vista Caballo (a ranch retreat in Dove Creek, Colorado), designed by the amazing letterpress/design house, Studio On Fire. The simplicity of this work has me in awe. Love it!
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