Calendar Giveaway!


Design des Troy is giving away five of our 2011 Teeny Tiny But Still Pretty Colorful Calendars to our fans on facebook. Click this like button , or visit the Design des Troy facebook page to become a fan.

We’ll select 5 fans at random on March 31 to receive one of our fabulous desk calendars. So, please spread the word. And, if you don’t win, or don’t feel like waiting to, there are a few calendars on sale at our etsy shop.

Etusi Sumetusi: Japan

Finding it hard to write anything snappy about how awesome Japanese aesthetics are right now. We love you Japan.

Blue puppy earrings from LianaKabel Celadon matcha bowl from shyrabbit Crocheted Totoro hat from amiamigos Katakana stamp set from VioletGiftShop Astronaut bag from tacdesigns Awesome paper tape from PrettyTape Cute HiFi Stereos Rings from YuraPockylover Kinkaku-Ji Wall Hanging from japanesqueaccents Drama! buttons from thepinksamurai

Flickr Mondays-Hues of Orange

So happy the sun is out today…even if it is for a short time.

Thought these 1960’s/1970’s National Geographic scans of photographs were so beautiful…and that they all tied together so well with the hint of oranges throughout.

More photos here.

 

Raffle for Japan

There are a number of artists and designers creating work to help in Japan — including Scout Books, Jesse LeDoux via Tiny Showcase, and W+K Studio to name a few. But, we just heard from Diem Chau (who we’ve blogged about in the past 1, 2) that she is holding a raffle on her site to raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society. Raffle tickets will cost $10 and two winners will be selected at random to receive a 3-crayon family portrait. She’s already sold 400 tickets and is aiming to sell 1000 by March 23 when the raffle ends. Diem is donating 100% of the raffle earnings to Red Cross, so it seems like an awesome way to help out and maybe get some art in the process.

Complete raffle details can be found on her blog. If art isn’t your thing, you can donate directly to a number of organizations here.

Etsy Schmetsy-ish: Sapling Press and Dear Blank Please Blank

We at the Experts have been a bit busy of late, and sadly had little time to prepare a full Etsy Schmetsy today. I did however come across this awesome project and though that in lieu of a Schemtsy, we’d feature an etsy seller. These hysterical prints are a collaboration between Sapling Press and Dear Blank Please Blank. Go check out the rest of the prints here.




via Design Work Life

Etsy Schmetsy: Totes Specific

This week’s schmetsy is a little bit more narrow in focus than usual: tote bags. No, no, black-and-white tote bags. Wait, design-geeky black-and-white tote bags! This one runs the gamut, from letterforms to parts of letterforms to Thai letterforms, parallel lines to Bauhaus shapes. Enjoy!



Row 1: Serif Tote Bag from TheLittleFactory; Screen print Tote Bag – White ampersand from  PiccoloNegozio; Thai Alphabet Tote Bag from studiowonjun
Row 2: feel like helvetica tote from afavorite; TOTE / lines from PAWLING; Design Shopping Tote Bag from Marideestudio
Row 3: ABC ETC. hand silk screened tote from  trulyloved; Bauhaus Block Canvas Tote Bag from mediumcontrol; a shadowy alphabet in a tote bag from cuadrado

Flickr Mondays—Angeles Peña

I was having a hard time finding someone to post about today until I happened upon Angeles Peña’s beautiful work. I love that she’s able to capture so many different types of shots with the rainbow. Amazing.

Flickr site here.
More photos here.

 

Corrine Vionnet: Photo Opportunities

Corrine Vionnet’s series Photo Opportunities is a collection of pieces on iconic landmarks, each one composed of hundreds of self-similar tourist photographs layered together into a new composition.

While the three essays she reproduces on her site focus on the sightseers/tourists and their consistent, shared, unimaginative “shared memory” view of the monuments, I am more interested in the layers of meaning that can be extracted from the finished pieces.

The effect of the dissolution and blur on these icons sometimes works to invoke  associations: Big Ben for instance is lost in the fog, while the Twin Towers are lost in grief.

The way that the photos are layered also creates some interesting readings, especially in the ones with very clear focal points where the pictures are registered. The cooperative tourist shots combined do what a single one cannot: make into a beacon the portrait of Mao in the Forbidden City, make a grinding gyre around the black rock at Mecca, or complete the Colliseum. Interestingly, there most photographers choose an angle that shows its damage — the aesthetic normative — and the small group that shoot from another angle fill in ghostily what the eye can only imagine.

And my favorite layer of meaning: some seem to consciously refer to or homage art history. Clearly the whole project is a variant of cubism, assembling different views, but the dynamism referenced in the Golden Gate Bridge composition is apparent: compare to Balla’s Dynamism of Dog on a Leash. Likewise, you can’t assemble hundreds of pictures of Mt. Fuji without referring to Hokusai. Her composition, like his series of prints, seems to show Fujiyama as being a constant, unchanging icon while the days, nights, seasons and crowds change around it. The blurry Eiffel Tower in a series of chromatic greys looks all the world like a piece of lost Impressionism – Caillebotte‘s pallete and Monet’s brush? And the texture at the bottom/foreground of the Matterhorn piece feels remarkably like the scraped brushwork of a late modern painter like Kiefer.

One of the primary instigators of early modern painting was photography’s effortless encroachment into the realist space painting had long occupied. With these recombined works, Vionnet collages cliché photography into something that recapitulates the project of modern painting: expressing different aspects of time, light and viewpoint, abstracting and dissolving its subjects into impressions, thumbing its nose at photography which can only represent realistically a single moment.

15 more plus essays at Vionnet’s site.

Local Weather


Who knew weather forecasts could be so pretty? Apparently, Steffi Gloor and Kurt Riedi did. That little rain image is making San Francisco seem a little less dreary today.
Check out their awesome local weather forecast site here.




via The Daily Smudge

Flickr Mondays-simply photo

These beautiful photos by simply photo are getting me really excited for Spring! I can’t wait for warmer weather, fruit, flowers, and all the other greenery that comes along with it.

Enjoy!

 

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