Swedish Designer
Interesting portfolio website.
Archive: view as text. view as image.
check it out.

extreme images of violence in Iraq so be prepared.

So, Friday March 21, 2008 QBN presents The Art is War, a QBN Official
Photoshop Battle. The source image will be selected from this thread.
Then on Friday at 5:00AM PST the 19 hour battle begins, commencing at
12:00AM PST of the same day. On Monday, March 24th we will post The
Finalist Thread. You vote, winners will be announced….

Oh, and the Grand prize winner gets a Macbook Air.

Met Russel in Portland at W+K Seeking.
He has some funny stuff.

Check out Walter’s stuff too.

So, i’ve been wanting to blog about this, and finally, after the last few days of overwhelming activities, i have time now to sit down and give an account of what happened in Portland, Oregon.

So what is this all about? For those whom i haven’t spoke to, Wieden+Kennedy launched a campaign in November seeking interesting people from all walks of life. I applied in December (we had to send in a pdf of 20 slides) just for the heck of it and surprisingly, got selected in March out of 1500 people from more than 24 different countries. Only 40 people were selected and invited to Portland with airfare and accomodation fully paid. From the beginning to the end, no one exactly knows what’s going on; they’ve been pretty vague about their intentions, although they mention that it’s somewhat about recruitment. Part of this trip was also to meet other creative people out in the world, which was really cool too. We all made new friends whom we probably never would have met if not for this event. 

———————————————————————————————

Portland, Oregon  March 6-9 2008

Day One (thursday):

Flew to Portland. Took the Max train to the Ace Hotel and checked in. It’s quite an awesome hotel as every room was unique and they even had bicycles for rent. We had a reception at 7pm in the hotel with some drinks and finger food. It was pretty awkward at first as no one knew anyone, well except for some who came with their friends, and it was kind of like ‘forced-socialization’. The people from W+K weren’t around, so we were left to ourselves wondering what’s going on. Some of us thought maybe they weren’t coming and that this was all a scam, or maybe this was some sort of reality tv show where they installed cameras in our hotel rooms, which we later realised that none of that was true. Some of us were not used to socializing with so many strangers at once, me being one of them, but later on felt more comfortable as we started to know more people. The people from W+K finally came, and they came around to shake hands with us, and i remmeber going around with Chemin to mingle with the others coz she was too shy. I also met Jim of the famed Body Report.

———————————————————————————————

Day Two (friday):

We began the morning with breakfast at The Living Room Theatres. Then we made our way into one of the rooms and presented our pdfs that we submitted to each other on a huge screen. This was one of the best highlights of the weekend because we learned so much from each other; just seeing all the different personalities presenting their ideas and work in the same room was such an inspirational experience. There were some famous people in that room: the creator of xanga.com was there, the guy who branded the whole TV Asahi was there, who was also the mind behind this famous Japanese variety show Matthew’s Best Hit TV (which was featured in Lost in Translation), the girl who came up with the idea of the manila envelope laptop sleeve for the MacBook Air was there and so on.  After that, we went down to W+K for a tour of the office. It was surprisingly huge, and it looked alot bigger than the photos that you see in their blog. We had lunch on the 6th floor, and after that, John Jay gave us a presentation on what W+K is up to around the world. It was really enlightening and alot of the good work that we saw weren’t exactly featured on their main website. It helped me understand that W+K is not merely just an adveritisng firm, where they take clients’ briefs and solve problems, but that they also generate their own content. In short, they aren’t really looking for designers, but for people who can come up with original ideas.

After the presentation, we met up with the creative directors at W+K individually, in a sort of speed-dating fashion. It didnt seem like an interview though, they were basically asking us if we liked Portland and if we would wanna move out here. Most of them had already seen our work, but we showed them anyway just to remind them of who did what. The creative directors were really nice and humble, oh and i got to sit in that nest in the sixth floor! Dinner came after at the hotel, and we all had dinner together,the participants and the W+K people. They mixed us up so that we would mingle again, and i got to sit with Tyler, who was the CD on the Nike account, and Christian from Belgium. Dinner was filled with lots of food and chatting, but it was also our last interaction with W+K for the weekend. The next day in Portland was meant to be a free and easy day.

———————————————————————————————

Day Three (Saturday):

 So a few of us gathered to have dim sum in chinatown. It was pretty awesome and cheap and we walked around after to look at books and clothes. We bumped into John Jay in one of the stores and he invited us to visit his studio which was nearby. He was really friendly and for some reason he took a group shot of us in his studio. It felt kind of unreal, checking out his personal studio after his inspiring presentation the day before. We journeyed on to explore Portland and ended up in Powell’s books in the afternoon, the largest bookstore in USA, or so they claim. The good thing about Portland is that they have no sales tax, and so some of us splurged on books as much as we can before we went back to our tax-filled cities. Dinner was at 6.30pm, and a bunch of us decided to check out the Lebanese restaurant. One of the participants in W+K Seeking was performing that night in a bar in Portland, so we made our way down to give our support. It was pretty cool seeing a whole bunch of people from different cultures filling up the bar and making a whole lot of noise. I flew off that very night and that was the end of my W+K Seeking adventure.

———————————————————————————————

So what happens from here? I have no idea. 

link to Christian’s report of the Portland weekend.

to john: this is an interesting way to display a portfolio, check it out.

http://www.suture.com/

Established in November 2001, The Future Laboratory is recognised internationally for its innovative approach to trend forecasting, consumer insight and brand strategy. Via our 3,000-strong global LifeSigns Network and in-house team of trend analysts and ethnographic researchers, we offer clients qualitative and quantitative insights into future consumers and how to target them. Clients in the retail, technology, finance, automotive, food, fashion and creative industries sectors use our daily, weekly and quarterly news feeds, insight reports, analyses, strategy documents and brand personality audits to keep their brand on track, and their marketing, strategy and research teams informed and insightful.

A guy in W+K Shanghai stumbled upon a little town near the border between China and Korea where all the kids in this town were into beatboxing. The beatboxing culture is so intense there even though they are in a rural area. W+K later on took 4 of these kids, brought them to Shanghai, put them on stage and had a blast of an event.

This is fucking awesome.

A portfolio site-windows within windows.
on the subject of port sites, check out theirs!

feedback on the site please! let me know if anyone finds any bugs or anything.
requires IE7, FF2 or Safari 3 to view site properly.

old portfolio site.

even older portfolio site.

Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.The system has been developed in Java and PHP. First, a PHP script makes a Google image search of the words entered by the user. Then, the Java applet retrieves the images one by one, and uses them as input to generate an ever-changing drawing.The pictures are never actually shown. The drawing itself is produced by 1500 autonomous particles in perpetual movement. The last image loaded serves as a sort of virtual terrain for them. The direction and speed of each particle is given, at each step, by the color values of the pixel they are stepping on. Different sets of formulas translate the hue, saturation and brightness of the pixel in angle and velocity values for the particle. The path of each particle is traced to the screen, and this forms the output seen by the user.

“For their program at the New Museum, Improv Everywhere will present never-before-seen footage of several missions. Scott Brown will moderate a discussion with Charlie Todd that investigates Improv Everywhere’s unusual process, from development through execution to online promotion, including a survey of the unique problems surrounding hidden camera documentation. Additional discussion topics include how the Internet is changing the way we interact with live performance and the delicate balancing act between anonymity, purity of vision, and sustainability in a world intent on co-opting our imaginations in the service of any potential new marketing opportunity.”

NYT Magazine’s Year in Ideas

http://improveverywhere.com/

CHIP KIDD, an author, editor, grahic designer, (and now musician) who made a name for himself pumping out on average 75 book covers a year, now totalling over 1,500 is speaking at Pratt Institute on Monday, March 3, 5-7pm in Memorial Hall_ open to the public.

http://www.goodisdead.com/index.php?/chip_who/

http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEP/Article/28830

http://neversleepbook.com/

I always have the hardest time photographing posters or three-dimensional work for my portfolio. Do you have any tips how to get a professional looking picture when photographing work?
Inva Cota

Hey Inva, you should Invest in a high quality digital SLR (around $500 these days) and a quality flash (around $200). It’s best to shoot indoors at night or somewhere where you control the lighting. White balance the camera to the flash and whatever lighting you are using. When shooting, point the flash upwards so that the light bounces off the ceiling. Have a computer near by to see the photographs and adjust settings like the white balance and ISO to get the best results. It’s also nice to mock up work in the actual environment. Take street photos of posters and billboards and Photoshop your designs as though they were actually on the street. That will give your projects more legitimacy.

Are there certain types of internships that are more beneficial for students, other than the fact that they involve you more in the design process?
John Lui

Internships are a very personal thing John, so it’s hard for us to say what is best for you. But they are a great way for you to test the places you want to work and the types of projects you are interested in without a huge commitment. The more the merrier actually because you will see what works and what is a bore, while learning how different sized companies are structured and operate. Then when you graduate you will know what you want out of your dream job. Or you can stay at one place and work your way up through the ranks. By all means if you dig a place stay on board because people love to hire their interns. They are checking you out just as much as you are checking them out.

What’s the difference between thinking too big, and thinking too small as far as concepts go?
Matt Rappo

This is an interesting question to ponder matt. Thinking too small can be lame — the expected solution or doing what everyone else is doing. Thinking too big can lead you to a great idea, but it might be too hard to execute on time. Deadlines and budgets play a huge roll in the creative process when you get out of school. So it’s all about coming up with the best solution within the constraints that are given or rethinking or reframing the problem so it fits within new ones. Think big when you have lots of constrains to try and push the envelope of what is possible within the parameters and limit yourself when you have nothing holding you back or else you might get lost in a sea of options.

A lot of times, people talk about graphic design being “commercial art,” but there are lots of projects designers do that aren’t commercial or necessarily marketable. The question that a lot of students ask is whether something that’s not commercial is still considered “graphic design,” or if it starts to become “art.”
Nelson NG

Nelson, to me art is when I am servicing my own agenda and there is no client involved. Graphic design or commercial art is when I am doing a project for other people, I can still have an agenda, and most often do, in graphics, but the end product is for someone else and they give us money, opinions, or a pat on the back. To be honest the art versus design debate doesn’t concerns us much. We try to make good work and hopefully make ourselves laugh, no need to put a label on it. Milton Glaser and Stefan Sagmeister have both written on this subject and are much smarter.

We are pleased to announce open submissions for Grafuck 4!

We seek the most inspiring / challenging / smart / creative / brilliant erotic work from all fields.

Grafuck 4 will be published in full color, with images only.
Email low resolution RGB spread images (5.25″ high x 14.25″ wide @ 72 dpi) to love@grafuck.com by APRIL 20, 2008 for initial consideration.

A maximum of 3 spreads are allowed. Selected contributors will be notified and asked to provide high resolution 300 dpi files.

Work containing words or typography or not sent at the proper size will not be considered. Please also note that submission does not guarantee publication.

When submitting work, please follow this format…

EMAIL SUBJECT LINE
Grafuck 4 Submission - (YourName)

FILENAMES
(YourName)_01.(file extension)
(YourName)_02.(file extension)
(YourName)_03.(file extension)

Launch TBA.

Thank you all so very much. We look forward to seeing everyone’s work!

With love,
GRAFUCK
love@grafuck.com
www.grafuck.com

xxx

SUBMISSION FAQs

Q. Why do you ask for images at 5.25″ high x 14.25″ wide?
A. The extra .25″ is for bleed. The final book size of Grafuck Book 4 is 5″ high x 7″ wide. A final book spread is 5″ high x 14″ wide.

Q. Anything goes?
A. Anything goes. The more original, the better.