Action Sport à la Jed Mildon

Myeongbeom Kim

Interesting work, sculptures and installations done by artist Myeongbeom Kim (and 2008 SAIC graduate).

A reason to visit D.C.

Up until today I hadn’t seen anything really impressive as far as the user or listener experience goes, plenty of advances on the production side but little intriguing on the consumer side. With the introduction of applications such as the AmpliTube iRig and the BreakOut pedal and app the focus of new devices such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch have been focused more on music creation rather than music consumption. This is where the new album from Washington, D.C.-based band Bluebrain comes in. The album titled The National Mall consists of 3 hours of music and is contained within a location-aware app available from the iTunes store. What makes this project unique is that the album can only be heard or experienced when within the stretch of park called the Mall, just outside the capitol building in Washington, D.C.. The music contained within the app is written to accompany you as you make your way through the park to various key locations.

The promo video below was released and explains the concept visually.

“Unlike a number of other music apps out there, this one isn’t a companion to a normal album or an app that gives you tour dates or things like that,” Holladay says. “It actually is the work itself. The music has been composed to work specifically in this landscape. So, for instance, at the Lincoln Memorial, as you ascend the steps up to the giant statue, the sound of bells increases to the point where, when you are standing at Lincoln’s feet, they are surrounding you.”

Having heard nothing of or by Bluebrain until today, this has definitely caught my attention. Read more about the project and the rest of the interview quoted above on Mashable.

The most awesomist celebrity endorsement ad (of the 80s).

I hate celebrity endorsement ads. At their worst, they’re either lazy or just plain pandering. You know the ones I’m talking about: this guy drinks this stuff, and he’s really fast, so you should too–maybe you’ll also be fast. That sort of crap. The shame of it all is that it probably works. Like this disaster of a billboard featuring Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz. A shame, since he already has to endure 45,000+ calling him the Panamanian word for pit odor.

Which makes this one all the better. I was expecting a cringeworthy “oh, here’s another nostalgic look at how schmaltzy Philly can be at times” when suddenly Shmitty plants one in the face of all those lawyer fat cats—AND delivers a friggin product benefit.

If you want people to buy your celebrity endorsement ad, make it believable, and give the celeb a reason to be there in the first place.

Walker Evans’ Greensboro

Over the last couple years, I’ve been really interested in studying the role of typography within photography — looking at how different people capture type within an image. Walker Evans, widely considered the originator of the documentary tradition in American photography (with many thanks owed to his appreciation and collection of the picture postcard), is a photographer I’ve often looked to during this research. Much of Evans’ work captures the American street signage vernacular of the 1930s and 1940s.

Last week, I was going through the snapshots I took during my visit to Greensboro, Alabama and was thrilled to make this connection to Walker Evans — that Greensboro is indeed one of the towns that Evans documented for much of his acclaimed collaboration with writer James Agee in 1936. Their collaboration resulted in the honest and revealing book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and grew out of an assignment that the two accepted from Fortune magazine to produce a magazine feature on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the South.

WALKER EVANS: “Storefront, Greensboro, Alabama.” Summer 1936.

WALKER EVANS: “County seat of Hale County, Alabama.” 1935/1936.

Above: Greensboro’s Main Street, then and now. Much of the architecture remains unchanged.

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In the spirit of Evans, below is some of the inspiring signage I encountered while exploring Greensboro last week — a graphic designer’s gold mine! Fun fact: Evans went on to teach graphic design (and photography) at the Yale University School of Art from 1964 to 1974.)

“The Catfish Capital of Alabama”

Last Friday I left the City of Brotherly Love for a trip to the American South. For my first ever visit to Alabama, I was heading to Greensboro to volunteer a couple days of my design time alongside a friend who works with HERO (Hale Empowerment & Revitalization Organization), a non-profit housing resource center.

Greensboro (population 2,731) is located in Hale County, one of the most poverty-stricken counties in Alabama, and draws the support of many non-profits and community service organizations. It was great to visit this town that I’d heard so much about — a design Mecca that has been receiving a good deal of press over the past few years. I met so many energetic and engaging people who were completing degrees, fellowships, or AmeriCorps service programs with various groups in town, such as: HERO, YouthBuild, Project Horseshoe Farm, Rural Studio, Pie Lab, and Habitat for Humanity.

While it was an inspiring and insightful trip, it was also an intense time to be visiting this region of Alabama. Although Greensboro was mostly untouched by the April tornadoes, many of the surrounding towns are suffering from extensive damage. The HERO office on Main Street was transformed into a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center for three of the days of my visit, as those affected community members came by for disaster assistance.

A big thank you to all the welcoming people of Greensboro that I met this past week! Looking forward to visiting again soon. (And stay tuned for an upcoming blog post that details the logo design process that my friend Julie and I created for a new program within HERO…!)

Above: Inside an in-progress schoolhouse behind Greensboro’s Main Street.

Above: A peek at the front counter and open kitchen of Pie Lab, described by the NY Times as “a combination pop-up cafe, design studio and civic clubhouse.”

Above: Two of the amazing $20k Houses ($10k labor and $10k materials), a concept created and realized by students of Auburn University’s RuralStudio. “The 20k house project seeks to address the pressing need for decent and affordable housing in Hale County. The aim is to produce a model home that can be reproduced on a large scale, becoming a viable alternative to the trailer in this area. The challenge is to build a house for $20, 000 that can be bought in conjunction with the ’502 Direct Loan.’”