Filed under: Animation, Art, Design | Tags: Animation, blender, brilliant, bunny, Design
As we’ve mentioned previously, inspiration is all around us and can be found in all forms of art and design. One of the more inspirational forms of art for me is the cartoon. We have all seen Finding Nemo and Cars, which were produced by the incredibly talented people at Pixar. What, for me, makes them so special is the manner in which the animators build into the faces a real sense of expression. Since the early days of Warner Bros. cartoons, the expressions which would adorn the faces of Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote, were the deal makers for me, the humanisation of the characters helped you associate with them and the emotions they showed.
This is something that is played on by the modern animators at modern studios. The ability to melt your heart and feel real emotion with something as simple as a wry smile is a great one, and especially if the character only really exists as a bunch of 1s and 0s in a digital world. The blender software has been going for a good few years now, and has the aim of utilising open source code to produce awesome 3d rendered images and movies, comparable with the Hollywood studio level.
The latest release comes in the form of Big Buck Bunny, a 9 minute long animation produced by numerous artists from around the world. Produced by Ton Rosendaal from the Netherlands it is one of those things you can watch over and over again, I know as I have seen it at least 6 times since I downloaded it yesterday, each time seeing something else I didn’t spot before.
To see the movie you can click the youtube link above, but you can also download a much higher resolution version from the Blender website itself (by higher resolution, I mean full 1080i high def.)
Click here to go to the downloads page of the bug buck bunny website. This really is a download worth waiting for, and possibly the best 9 minutes viewing you will spend this week.
Filed under: Art, Design, innovation | Tags: Art, boat, Design, ship, shipping
Living here in Rotterdam, you can’t help be impressed with the size of the HUGE ships which transport containers around the globe, to and from the docks here. Indeed, something I really enjoy is sitting by the mouth of the river Maas at Hoek van Holland watching these monsters moving elegantly out to sea and off to other oceans.
Now, one of my pet hates is the horrible necessity of the “extension plug” which we end up buying to accommodate that new hard drive, or the scanner, sure you know the score. This little beauty is a great answer to that problem. The body of the extender is shaped like a ship, and when you add your devices’ power packs to the sockets, you add containers to the ships.
Hell, I’m even thinking about painting my scanner power pack in the colours of a Delta Lloyd, or Safmarine container… or if anyone wants to sponsor my printer plug I would paint it in the colours of their containers.
Once again this is a great example of someone re-thinking an everyday object which we take for granted and making it into something less ugly and something you can more easily live with on your desk. As before, if you want to tell us how you would re-think something, then let us know is the comment boxes, adding momentum to our “Everybody can design Innovation award” idea.
This is a great little thing. It looks like a simple 100 dollar note, but upon closer inspection it is made up from 10,000 little drawings. The artists, Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, produced a single image from data collected over a period of 5 months. Each small piece of the collage was produced by random visitors to a website, who were, in return paid 1¢ US for their art.
The website where the art is hosted is still available and you can see each and every one of the 10,000 pieces as they were drawn (each drawing was recorded and is played back as you roll over the portion and click with your mouse.)
I found it interesting to see just how far some people would go to make an accurate reproduction of the portion of image they were assigned, whilst others were clearly giving exactly 1¢ worth of their time. As you explore the image you can see a great example of pointillism, one artist gives us a great portrait which is not on, or part of the 100 dollar bill, and others choose to leave messages on the note. The resulting image is available for the cost of $100 and (surprisingly) limited to an edition of 10,000.
Art like this is a great use of the web and the technologies available for use upon it and also proves to us all that art can appear outside the realm of canvas and marble. Technically, the dwell times and footfall are incredible too, most websites would kill for stats like this.
Anyway, why not wander across to the site yourself and see just how interesting this project is, clicking the picture above will take you there.
Simple Illustration and a great fun feeling, make this website a great piece of brand communication for the Orange phone company in the UK. This is one of those feel good things that you don’t mind spending some time on, Everytime. Click the image above to go to the site to see for yourself.
As a Brit living in Europe, getting used to the ‘Euro’ as a currency has been a slow process. The thing which has always struck me about the Euro is how modern the designs are in comparison to the UK Pound. The UK coinage has been a traditional and historically based emblem for years, and The Royal Mint (who issue the pound) recently held a competition to redesign the images which would adorn the reverse (the ‘tails’ side) of the coins.
The winner of the competition was a Graphic Designer by the name of Matthew Dent. At the age of 26 the designer took the project to heart and invested time using research and revision to produce his series of designs. Thankfully the designs for the new coins are modern in design, using historic heraldic emblems and using dynamic crops of the image to create a very modern and appealing design.
We say well done Matthew, it’s time we had a revision of the UK coinage and this design is a great example of how design crosses old and new.
