Notes from Notchcode

providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.

-Gaston Bachelard

blog

Notes from Notchcode

1.26.2010

Color Theory From the Archives

I made this ~~ten~~ TWENTY years ago, in my freshman Color Theory class at SCAD. I always liked it, despite it resembling absolutely nothing from my Colorado upbringing. I only knew two kids who had a pool, and we were in an older 1950's-era neighborhood, less uniform than the mid-'80s tract homes seen here.
Labels: art, color, SCAD

posted at 1:58 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

1.01.2010

HOORAY FOR 2010

Labels: art

posted at 12:01 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

12.21.2009

Heartbeat City

Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop by Peter Phillips, 1972

It probably was indicative of my future career path in art and design and that it would eventually move away (slightly) from music when as a young teenager I got my copy of The Cars' Heartbeat City LP and was more interested in the cover art than in the music. Although I thought (and still think) the music is pretty good (and fun) too.

James Rosenquist had a retrospective down at the Denver Art Museum in 1985 (just a year after Heartbeat City was released), and I thought the cover art on the album was cut from the same cloth as Rosenquist's F-111 (better detail view of the painting, which is huge, here), which to this day remains one of my favorite pieces of art. Both the painting on the album cover and F-111 were visually explosive, fun, odd, and full of symbolism.

detail of F-111 by James Rosenquist, 1965, installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photo by t_a_i_s

Later on, I found out that Heartbeat City's cover art was a painting called "Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop", and was painted by British pop artist Peter Phillips, who has some strong stylistic ties to Rosenquist. So at least I wasn't too far off the mark back in the '80s. Phillips' use of typography, symbolism, cars and exploded views of car parts (and, not incidentally, a Vargas-style pinup girl) make for a dynamic image that recalls the macho muscle car culture of the late '60s and early '70s as well as Pop Art's objectification and elevation of everyday objects into the realm of "art".

Plus, as a teenager, I just thought it looked really cool.

You can see Rosenquist's 1965 F-111 at MoMA in New York, and Phillips' Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop in your record collection.
Labels: art, music

posted at 9:48 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

10.05.2009

Soft vs. Hard in the Entertainment/Design mega-complex

My old school chum Jason Apollo Voss has some interesting things to say on the value of good design and art in business today over on his blog.

a snippet:

It used to be that good art and good design were the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Now good design is everywhere and accessible by everyone. Look at the packaging on products, look at the shape of the toilet, look at the lamp options at Target, etc. The public loves what they love. And that comes courtesy of an artist. In short, art is everywhere.

Check it out.
Labels: art, b2b, b2c, craftsmanship, design

posted at 2:48 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.29.2009

Which workers spend the most time working at home?

Turns out it's arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media people. About 55% of our total weekly work hours are spent working from home (or from an office on a home-based property, one would assume). Not really a surprise, but still interesting to know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is tracking such things.

A few takeaway points from this data: It looks like there's an institutional bias against letting salaried creatives work from home, compared to other service professions whose self-employed hours-worked-from-home is above 16%. Personal care, management, and sales-related workers who are wage-earners and salaried employees all get to work from home more than their salaried brethren in the legal, business & financial, and creative professions. I know that when I was a salaried employee there was strong resistance to allowing creatives the freedom and flexibility of working ex-office. Granted, that was in the late '90s, but it appears that trend has stuck around well into this decade.

The other point is how much time self-employed workers aren't working at home. Nearly 45 percent of the time, creatives are somewhere else. Where? Client offices, off-site meetings, research, and vendor locations are likely candidates. And I am wondering how many of these self-employed workers are in-house contractors, who, while self-employed, have to show up at a client's office and work there.

Here's my take on the chart from the BLS. You can also download a CC-licensed print-quality PDF of it here as well.

Thanks to Planet Money's Laura Conaway for twittering about this data!
Labels: art, design, information graphics, productivity, work

posted at 4:46 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.03.2009

If you aren't creating to communicate, what's the point?

...oh, yeah, THAT'S WHY.

Just proving that once again, artists and designers, etc. need to read Cat and Girl every time they have the chance. After all, this is the woman who brought you Future Corpses of America.

Labels: advice, art, comics, creativity, graphic design

posted at 7:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.10.2009

There's some new art at the Denver Art Museum

I headed over to the Denver Art Museum this afternoon for some inspiration, and was pleasantly surprised to see some new art on the walls of the Western American Art collection, notably this contemporary realist oil painting by Chuck Forsman, titled "Aggregate":

Forsman is represented locally by the Robischon Gallery.
I'd love to see more contemporary realists featured there, as they tell many of the same sorts of stories I tell in my photographs.
Labels: art, photography

posted at 3:04 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.05.2009

A Cause Close to my Heart

I first supported Project Angel Heart years ago, helping Ellen create some pieces for their fundraising events. And for 15 years, the Colorado chapter of the AIGA has been putting their heart and soul into supporting this worthwhile effort. I've bid on art at the auctions in years' past, and it's all great stuff! Come on by Feb. 11th and check it out. Deets are below:

AIGA Colorado Presents: The 15th Annual Heart Art Auction

When: Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Time: 5:30-9pm
Location: Colorado History Museum
1300 Broadway Denver, CO 80202
Admission: $20 (for both members and non members)

FOR THE LOVE OF IT

Please join us for an evening of exciting bidding on magnificent handcrafted artwork, live jazz by one of Denver's top jazz ensembles, delectable food, and drinks (open bar this year folks!). AIGA Colorado is proud to have hosted this truly unique event for the past 15 consecutive years to raise money for Project Angel Heart. So please, mark your calendars and come out to support this really great cause -- if for nothing more than for the love of it.

SPECIAL HONOR

Not only does this year mark the 15th year for Heart Art, this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the Colorado chapter of AIGA. To mark this special occasion we will be honoring the 23 founding members of the Colorado chapter and recognize their contribution to the Colorado design community. Many of our founding members will be present and examples of their design work will be on exhibit during the Heart Art event. Please join us for this special celebration as our chapter celebrates its 20th year.

WHO BENEFITS?

Project Angel Heart

Project Angel Hearts mission is to promote the health, dignity and self-sufficiency of people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illness by providing nutritious, home delivered meals with care and compassion.

AIGA Colorado

AIGA's mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. AIGA Colorado is one of the most active and largest chapters in the nation. Our members are dedicated to raising the bar of graphic design through collaboration, communication and contributing support with fellow designers.

Special thanks to our event sponsors: Unisource, Spectrographics Printing, FOILS + DIES Vintage Pressworks, Urban Dwellers, Eye Candy Graphics and Tom Ema, of Ema Design for designing our event collateral. A very special thank you goes to Marian Halliday and Carrie Martin for putting their hearts and souls into planning this very special event.

SUBMIT NOW

We are still accepting donations of handcrafted artwork for the Heart Art auction. While the deadline to drop off your work is this Friday, it'll help us greatly if you alert us that you'll be submitting something. Enter our intent to submit form to let us know you'll be donating artwork. You'll also want to download our artist form ( http://www.aigacolorado.org/events_images/artworkartist.pdf ) that you'll attach to the artwork you'll be submitting so we know whose work we're putting on the auction block! Art work is should be submitted at one of our drop off locations by Friday, February 6th.

Please RSVP here.

For questions about the event or donating artwork, please contact AIGA CO President, Mindy Nies.
Labels: aiga, art, ebd, ellen, food, fundraising, nonprofits

posted at 11:22 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.03.2009

I Lego N.Y.

Christoph Niemann posted a love letter to New York from Berlin, in Lego. Great stuff.
Labels: aesthetics, art

posted at 6:41 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

1.26.2009

The Year of the Ox: It's here!

For those of you who haven't seen the little change to the home page, check it out.
Labels: art, illustration

posted at 9:01 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

12.19.2008

Santa's On His Way

Before everyone leaves town for the holidays (or as I call it, "the two weeks at the end of the year when I can't get anyone to return my calls from the office"), I wanted to wish you all a wonderful holiday season. I hope you've all been good little boys and girls, because Santa is on his way right now!

Labels: art, holiday, illustration

posted at 8:59 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

9.10.2008

Itunes 8 has a new visualizer

I downloaded iTunes 8 yesterday, and was happily surprised to see a new visualizer in the mix, based on (it is said) a similar visualizer from the Barbarian Group. I know of the Barbarians from their work over at Hello Health, where they're making Jay Parkinson and crew look great.

Anyhow, check out the new visualizer. It, alone, is worth the bandwidth.

UPDATE: I was reading some readers' lamentations regarding the loss of controls over the iTunes Visualizer (especially on their great new visualizer)...well, don't fret: turn on the Visualizer, press "?" and you'll see a handy menu overlaying the visualizer showing just what you can control. For the record:
? Toggle help screen

M Change mode

P Change palette

I Display track info

C Toggle auto-cycle (on by default)

F Toggle freeze mode

N Toggle nebula mode

L Toggle camera lock
Labels: art, music, software

posted at 9:51 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

7.27.2008

The best quote for artists I've heard in a while

There's a slideshow profile at nytimes.com on a show of emerging artists at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The reviewer has this to say in the last frame:

This show suggests that there is no point in spending time on "professional development" if the artistic kind is not well under way. And that kind starts with looking at lots of art, good and bad, from all periods and cultures. Don't go back to your studio until you have something you urgently need to say and a burning conviction that no one else can say it.

That is one of the most obvious statements made about working as an artist, yet it's one that's often overlooked. If you don't have something to say, don't bother. Instead, first work on finding out what it is you want to say, something that drives your art, something that compels you to go into the darkroom or the studio or the editing room and create. Because (like I've said a million times before) the thing you create is just an artifact, not art. The art is in the creation, in the doing; and if you don't have a compelling reason for the doing, then you aren't making art. You're just wasting time.
Labels: advice, art, creativity

posted at 7:59 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

6.04.2008

Creative Inspiration for the Week: The Malagan Fish Figure at the DAM

I was out with my girls this week at the Denver Art Museum, and they directed me towards the Malagan Fish Figure in the Oceanic Collection. Wonderful patterns, and a great color palette:

Notes from the piece's page online:

This sculpture was made by an unknown artist on the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, for use in an indigenous Malagan ceremony. The entire surface is covered with brilliantly colored geometric designs that serve to unify the three parts of the composition: the central fish and the two male human figures attached to its side and snout. The fish is carved from a single piece of wood; open projections form its mouth and dorsal fins.

As a bonus, there are three wonderful Motherwell paintings just around the corner. Go check out the third floor of the Hamilton Building, if you are in the neighborhood, for some creative revitalization.
Labels: art, creativity

posted at 9:30 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.25.2008

Happy Thought for the Weekend: Getting there is (at least) half the fun

I came across this photo of my dad and his older brother Bob from when they were kids, living in the dusty suburbs of 1950s Albuquerque (that's my dad in the back). It reminded me that the point of anything worth doing isn't the end of the process, but the process itself. I see plenty of photographs taken after the race is over, and the winners look happy. But I know from experience (racing and otherwise) that when you are in the act of Doing, and you are fully invested in it, you have the best, easiest opportunity to be happy.

This is very true in art, too. I could quote from a bunch of different sources that talk about the process being the real art, and the end "thing" being a mere artifact, or shadow, of the art itself, but I'll just digress briefly enough to ask you to read through Edward Weston's notebooks, and you'll get it soon enough.

This applies to the creative and business processes as well as the bigger picture. If I am creating a marketing strategy, or a branding strategy, or working on a web design project, and I really let myself go into the process—I do my best work. And if my client does the same thing, we have no choice but to not only create the best possible outcome for them, but have fun at the same time. I am fortunate to have clients who work this way, and hope all of you out there have success in enjoying the journey as much as I do.

Have a great weekend, everyone!
Labels: advice, art

posted at 10:13 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.14.2008

Site Launch: CarlSanderSocolow.com photography

I completed a gallery site for Guggenheim Fellow Carl Sander Socolow this morning, and I encourage you to check out his work, entitled Scenes from Civic Life.

His latest project involves documenting the town of Mata Ortiz, in northern Mexico. He writes,
This work is a photographic study of the ongoing transformation of a number of heretofore isolated northern Mexican villagers into a community of world-class ceramic artists. This transformation is having a profound historic impact on their lives, the life of their village and on the social, economic and cultural life of the surrounding region. I began this project three-and-a-half years ago with the ambition of depicting the harmonies and paradoxes shaping these artists and their village as both are inexorably compelled, by virtue of an event in the history of art, to confront the modern economic and cultural world and find and take their place within it.

In a town of 3,000 people, more than 400 potters are now working in what has become recognized as a form of high art, he continues. This has an enormous impact on the economic and social life of Mata Ortiz, and Carl's documentation of it it touching for its humanity, artfulness, and compassion. These are real people in his images, not just stereotypes or one-dimensional characters. They are potters, fathers, mothers, daughters, cowboys, baseball enthusiasts, and more.

His other work from the US and europe are also worth viewing. His scenes of a debutante ball and of Venice are especially compelling.

Some notes on the site: we experimented with several navigation methods, including a sliding scroll of thumbnail images on the right side of the window, but eventually settled on an arrangement of squared-off elements of each photo, set in a grid, with links to the full image from each photo element. A Java Script runs the enlargement, which also includes title and date information. This format is hierarchically simple, and will make it easy for Carl to add more images whenever he wants by simply adding a thumbnail image to the grid, and linking it to a full-size image with the included script.

above: Courtship with Dog, Mata Ortiz, Mexico, 2004, © 2004 Carl Sander Socolow. All Rights Reserved.
Labels: art, clients, interface, photography, web design

posted at 10:55 AM Leave your comments here: 1 comments

4.07.2008

...and if I code all four by then, I get a cookie!

I am web interface boy this week, with three web site projects all hitting the user interface design phase at the same time. What kind of project manager let that happen? Oh, right; that would be me. In any case, it's all good: doing a lot of the same sort of work can improve the quality of work done on all of the projects I'm working on...you get in a groove, and just keep refining and making things better. I told myself when I rolled out of bed this morning that if I got all three interfaces done by Wednesday I'd treat myself to an afternoon by myself at the art museum, or maybe the Museum of Contemporary Art.

I also have another site which had the final bits of content land in-house last week, and am hoping to get that completed and live. It's a great little site, and I can't wait to share it with you guys. Stay tuned.
Labels: art, interface, web design

posted at 7:21 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

3.04.2008

Help out a great photographer and get some great art--all at the same time

My good friend Andrew Bale just got a commission to create work for a show at the Espace Ecureuil in Toulouse, France this summer. It's a pretty cool gig: they pay for a fair amount of his travel and his stay while in France. What they don't cover is expenses related to hauling hundreds of rolls of film around the countryside, printing the final images, and so on. Andy is raising money to fund his trip in a novel way: for a limited time, if you send him $185, he'll send you five images from his Europe portfolio, plus another photograph from his upcoming project in France.

Now, even if Andrew weren't my friend, I'd sing the praises of his work. Beautifully-crafted images, sought out in the wilderness, industrial backyards of Pennsylvania, and streets of America, Ireland, Paris and Italy. He and I both print using the lush platinum/palladium contact printing process, and he has also become an expert in digitally-printed archival ink pigment prints too. The images from this Five plus One portfolio consist of the latter.

Usually Andy's images sell for between $125 and $450 each. With this offer, you are getting six images for the cost of one. That's a pretty cool deal, and a great way to jumpstart your collection. Head on over to the portfolio page to see the images, and read more about the project and the artwork. Then buy a set and become a partner in Andrew's latest project.
Labels: art, photography

posted at 3:22 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.15.2008

Like Jenny Holzer, only about Barack Obama

See what Barack has done for you lately.
Nice use of that old standby typeface, Helvetica (which seems to be seeing a resurgence thanks to the epynomous documentaty film and other, less savory efforts of mass-produced graphic design).

barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com via kotte.
Labels: art, politics, typography

posted at 11:19 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

2.08.2008

Door as Power Plant: Looks like a famous work of art to me!

Found this neat idea for a revolving door at Fluxxlab (via Gizmodo) that generates power from the people pushing it this morning. Nice design concept, and the graphics to show off the concept and process are lovely. But it does look a bit like the structure in one of my favorite pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Have a look:

and here is a wonderful deconstruction of Duchamp's schema for his work, by Andrew Stafford:

(here's a detail of the bottom panel of the original Duchamp work too, which you must go see if you are anywhere near the Philadelphia Museum of Art:)

Labels: art, duchamp, illustration, information graphics

posted at 7:11 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments