neet, new daimlerchrysler car design which has a bubble top for less visual impairment.
in contrast to the aigala site, the aigadc site is really well done. excellent use of spot flash, good navigation, bookmarkable, well designed in general. i happened onto the site from a site unseen link (josh davis, mike cina, matt owens talk last month – details). kudos to grafik marketing communications. they rock.
the real king crime – just plain sad.
And rather than donate King’s personal papers to the Library of Congress, the family has tried to sell them for $20 million – even while excluding the most important historical documents and still trying to retain control of the copyright, generating even more lucrative royalties and control over access. It also cut a multimillion-dollar deal with AOL-Time Warner, giving the media giant exclusive commercial use of King’s speeches.
Ironically, as Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer David Garrow told the Chicago Tribune, the family crackdown “started out 10 years ago as a quite understandable and correct effort to ensure that Dr. King’s image wasn’t turning up in tacky situation.” Such as, say, commercials for tech companies.
But, added Garrow, “It is getting to the point where they are so focused on maximizing their income that they’re actively reducing the amount of distribution King’s words and teachings will have.”
holy shit i missed this: The United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change; Christie Whitman, the administrator of the EPA, announced that “we have no interest in implementing that treaty.” President Bush told German chancellor Gerhard Schröder that “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.”
bboy necko‘s sixstep tutorial is the best i’ve seen online so far.
there was this hiphop congress concert type deal at bovard auditorium last night which was decent. there were one or two breakers who were really good (super clean steps, crazy stalls, ridiculous power moves – one handed turtles and some monster flares), and a pretty good turntablist. also, there was a really good hip-hop duet, but the girl’s mike level was way too low for most of the performance. it went downhill from there though. lots of not that great rapping going on, one good mc interlude…
oh, this was fun too:
me: hey, so what are you doing after this deal?
friend: why?
me: oh, well i was wondering if you wanted to grab some coffee afterwards.
friend: oh, i can’t… i’m going bowling with some friends tonight.
me: hmm… bowling, sport of champions.
friend: i really have to pratice so i can.. um, get better.
me: cool, well have fun.
(crash and burn, exit left)
with all those dancing like a white boy posts, and my recent posts on my ongoing interest, i figured i’d put up some poplock / dance vids i found. i put some of the vids i like in a /junk/dance/ dir.
also, i was at this party last week, and talked to this guy brooklyn (guess where he’s from). he was telling me about shelter @ club vinyl in nyc, and how there’s an interesting convergence of house dancing and breaks going on. sounds like fun. of course, i have no idea if i’m going back to the east coast in the near future, but i’m sure i’ll be there to visit some friends sometime.
hmm, since it’s already halfway into this week and it looks like i won’t get a chance anytime soon to write any extended pieces, i’ll just sort of babble a little about some of the speakers/talks i’ve atteneded over the past week.
- stephen prina – part of the usc sofa visiting lecturer series, stephen is a contemporary artist, and last thursday afternoon, he showed one of his recent films, a 20 minute… visual and tonal study. actually, i was nodding off. too many all nighters last week. his talk afterward was very interesting though. i took notes for the time that i could stay (art history class forced me to leave early). he talked about some of his work revolving around transcription and translation, i suppose the actual work itself being a metaphor for what the work proposed. hmm, does that make sense? he was talking about as an artist, guiding, but not legislating interpretation. all in all very interesting. wish i could have stayed.
- matthew carter – typographic god, spoke for an hour and a half at a potlatch sponsored aiga event. i missed out on the open bar, free food, and the chotskies, but i got a great seat and heard him tell stories on designing mantinia (ligatures through kerning table), walker (0-width interchangable “add-on” serifs), vincent and fenway. um, also a font he did on secrecy (using each letterform to extend beyond the normal n-box to overwrite other text on the page. i don’t know if this was actually done with any programmatic elements or what…). he didn’t go in depth about the georgia and verdana commisions he did for microsoft and didn’t bring slides, although i did ask so he did talk a little about the screen vs print process (cap online has a good feature on georgia, trebuchet, and verdana (1997)). also, apparently type designers everywhere hate fontographer 4.x
- simon leung – he came and spoke tuesday at usc as part of the new faculty search. i believe the school of fine arts is looking for a new tenure track sculpture professor… simon’s work was very theoretically and philosophically grounded, reflecting, i suppose that he’s lectured art theory at uci and nyu. i had heard some of his stuff at the art in motion festival panels earlier. his synthesis and recall of theory was really impressive. um, i’m not sure it made some of his work more appealing, but i guess at least it justifies them to some degree. the annoying thing about art talks, is that there’s always some snobby middle-aged art lady (always, trust me) who will pose (and try to impose) a supposition and try to pass it off as a question which the artist will have to try to gracefully rebuff over and over and waste everyone’s time. some people just like hearing themselves talk.
oh yeah, i probably bitched about it before, but the aiga los angeles sucks so badly … i couldn’t really believe it at first. it’s quite sad (i was shocked). for some unfathomable reason, the whole site is served ssl as well. insync.media should be ashamed. luckily, the link to their site on the launch page is broken. and they’re “a new breed of communications company,” presumably one who can’t do web design worth shit.
eric costello’s new dhtml image viewer is super nift.
according to this episode of the body story i saw, matt should be be feeling better over the next few days as the helper cells turn his disabled macrophages into super bacteria killing machines.