Meet Hong Yi aka RED. RED is an artist. She likes to paint but not with a paintbrush. And she made a splash recently with coffee stains and socks. Yes, seriously.

In her latest project, she used 750 pair of socks to create a sock portrait of famous Chinese film director Zhang Yimou. She spent over three weeks on the project and used black, white and grey socks, stringing it using bamboo sticks and stitching patiently until the portrait emerged.

She was inspired by bamboo sticks poking out of windows in the alleyway with laundry hanging onto them. “To me, that was incredibly beautiful. And the amazing thing is seeing something so traditional in a modern, pumping city like Shanghai,” says Yi.

Why Zhang Yimou, the famous Chinese film director behind Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower, and the Beijing Olympics? According to Yi:

“Many of his movies reflect the beauty of the Chinese culture, through the use of bamboos and traditional costumes. I thought Zhang Yimou’s portrait done in a Shanghainese laneway, with bamboo and laundry would be perfect for this project.”

She ended up using 750 pairs of socks (shirts were too big and expensive) and she found an interesting way to pin the socks together, creating a diamond-shaped piece of skin. “It was interesting to see the different angles of shadows casted on it throughout the day,” she added.

Yi is not new to using unusual objects as a tool for creating her art. In February, she created a portrait of Jay Chou (a Taiwanese musician, singer-songwriter, music and film producer, actor and director) a using nothing but Nescafe coffee stains on the bottom of a mug.

She was inspired by the first in Jay Chou’s song, ‘Secret’ about lifting a coffee cup off the saucer and the last line, about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces. Hundreds of individual coffee stain rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, formed a whole portrait:

“The singer tells a heartbreak tale of a lost romance with a girl from 1979 who time-traveled forward 20 years and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched a portrait of him. My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story.”

The project took about 12 hours to finish. Yi admits that coffee is “quite a challenging medium to use — too little water and the rings wouldn’t form easily, too much water and the rings would blend into each other, resulting in just a deformed pool of coffee. I had to also wait for the lighter parts too dry up before stamping on the darker rings, or else the rings would not be visible.”

As a little kid, she dreamt of becoming an artist. Modestly, she explains how she creates her art: “I like to grab whatever I can get hold of – rocks, ketchup, milk, salt, shirts — and turn them into art. It’s more fun that way!”

Check out her art, like the Yao Ming potrait and the homage to the controversial Ai Weiwei using 100,000/7kgs of sunflower seeds.

You go, Red! Visit her blog, Oh I see Red!

 
Opening at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on Friday is the retrospective ‘Goudemalion’ of the work of Jean-Paul Coude, a defining 80′s artist, art director, photographerand image maker. The exhibition examines the work through the lens of the Pygmalion myth — a humorous nod to his most important muse, lover and the mother of his son, Grace Jones, to whom he is, as he laughingly puts it, her ‘Pygmalion.’¹

Goude didn’t like studying; in his own words he “was bad at it.” Luckily he was good at drawing. He began his career in the 1960s as an illustrator for the department store Printemps in Paris. he began his career in the 1960s as an illustrator. In 1964 he became the Artistic Director for Esquire in New York and 10 years later, he joined New York Magazine. It was there that he first met and photographed Jones and became instrumental in honing her public image, exaggerating her androgyny and producing many striking work, including the famous photograph of her impossibly twisted pose used on the cover of her 1985 album, Island Life.

 
First published in New York Magazine in 1978, this image is in fact a montage of several photographs spliced together. In the days before Photoshop, this was Goude’s trademark: Using scissors to chop up photographs and then reassemble them, elongating limbs and exaggerating lines and curves. He called this technique ‘French Correction’² — which is mostly concerned with glorifying and revealing the body, by exaggerating and subliming it. He redesigns the bodies of his models, photographing then transforming them.³

Aside from creating several well-known campaigns for brands such as Perrier, Citroën and Chanel, Goude is also a filmmaker; his film ‘Heartbeat’ traces his eclectic influences and highlights his diverse portfolio which has led to some describing him as a ‘polymath’. What is apparent from the film is that Goude was and is heavily influenced by black American culture and French colonialism — a result of having grown up in a predominantly black neighborhood in France. “I was an illustrator who used to illustrate other people’s fantasy. I naturally became an “image maker,” he says.

Designed by Goude himself, the retrospective is a giant installation retracing his 40 year career. The show is organized into different sections: One a chronological journey from his early days to his most recent work, another recreating the most celebrated moments of his career — special areas dedicated to his most influential projects: Les Galeries Lafayette, cut-up slides, neon furniture, Chanel, and his muses, from Toukie Smith to Grace Jones to Karen, his last muse and current wife.³

 
According to Amelie Gastaut, co-curator of the exhibition:

For Jean-Paul Goude, as for those of us who curated the show, there’s not much difference between Applied Art, commercial arts and Fine Arts. Behind each of these lies an artist and his singular and original universe. When the advertising world solicited his work in 1982, he had started his artistic career for about 20 years, and he’s still a major element of today’s French artistic scene.⁵

A highlight of this season’s cultural programme, surprisingly, it will be the first ever retrospective of the work of the now-iconic Goude on the French advertising and fashion scenes. And the perfect opportunity for viewers to gain an understanding of his unique world view.

 
Visit jeanpaulgoude.com

Goudemalion opens today and runs through March 18, 2012. More info (in French only): Les Arts Décoratifs — Goudemalion. Jean-Paul Goude une rétrospective

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^1,2Wallpaper: Goudemalion: Jean-Paul Goude retrospective, Paris

^3,5Elle: Jean-Paul Goude Paris Exhibition

⁴Art Photo Expo: Jean-Paul Goude

Photo credit: Jean-Paul Goode^®

Although BBC claimed it lived with and loved the distinctly ‘web 2.0′ design for a while now and it’s done them proud, it time to move on and before the end of  last year they resurrect the redesign project.

BBC stated:

We set out to broaden our ambitions; to create a design philosophy and world-class design standards that all designers across the business could adhere to. We wanted to find the soul of the BBC. We wanted something distinctive and recognizable; we wanted drama. We knew whatever we created needed to be truly cross-platform and that we needed to simplify our user journeys.

This is where Neville Brody and his agency, Research Studios, comes in. have collaborated closely with the BBC to redesign their online Global Visual Language (GVL) and take the organization and its users into a more compelling digital space. At the heart of the project was the joint desire to bring joined-up cross platform concepts and experiences to users of bbc.co.uk and bbc.com now and into the future.

Here’s their recap:

After four months, countless hours and countless iterations of designs, components, mastheads, footers, polar maps, word documents, PDFs and grids…, this is the latest in BBC’s design philosophy and the latest version of their global visual language styleguide.

The team wanted to create a design philosophy, or a set of values, to unite the user experience practitioners across the business. They settled on nine keywords which we think sum up what we’re about and what they’re trying to achieve:

Modern British
We want to create a modern British design aesthetic, something vibrant and quirky that translates outside our national boundaries.

Current
It needs to feel current and reflect what’s happening in the UK right now, in real-time. We curate a timeline of Britain and create links to the past – to our rich archive.

Authentic
Wherever we are heard we need to sound authentic and relevant, warm and human. We want to reference the BBC’s iconic design and broadcasting heritage. We value the trust placed in us.

Compelling
We engage our audiences with compelling storytelling. Our voice ranges from serious and authoritative through to witty and entertaining.

Distinctive
We stand out from the crowd. We strike a balance between overly templated, cookie-cutter design and beautiful anarchy. We are bold and dramatic.

Pioneering
We pioneer design innovations that surprise and delight. But we take our audiences with us.

Joined-up
We view all services and platforms as one connected whole but deliver experiences that are sensitive to their context of use.

Universal
Our services are open and accessible. Our interfaces are simple, useful and intuitive.

Best
Our ambition is to be the best digital media brand in the world.

Armed with the new philosophy, they began creating conceptual designs for various properties: BBC news, homepage, search, iPlayer, program pages and the embedded media player.

Through doing this work we began to distill the essence of a new visual style. Here are some of the key elements, starting with the page grid.

The new grid is based on 31 sixteen pixel columns with two left hand columns that can be split into four, and one wider right hand column, which accommodates the ad formats that appear on the international facing version of the site.

They’re looking to create the effect of interwoven vertical and horizontal bands, making a feature of the right hand column across the site.

Along with the 16 pixel vertical grid they’ve also for the first time got an integrated 8 pixel baseline grid so that they can align elements on a page both vertically and horizontally.

A key feature of the new GVL is a much more dramatic use of typography. As well as Gill Sans they’ve introduced big bold type in Helvetica or Arial and restricted variations in size so that they have much greater consistency across the site.

They’ve developed a highlight colour palette for non-branded areas of the site, or areas where the BBC masterbrand talks directly to the audience (e.g. the BBC homepage, search, some of our genre areas). Each color has a tonal range to be used in contrast or in unison with each other.

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The redesign covers a lot of grounds. It goes to show you that it’s not just a “re-skin” as clients like to call site redesigns, which often times gets me going.

A website redesign is not just changing colors and moving things here and there; It’s analyzing the existing website and the interactive landscape, looking at comparable companies within and outside the industry, and exploring potential improvements based on best practices and audience expectation.

If you do it right: It’s not just a redesign. It’s a rebirth.

To read more: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services

Using 350,000 of the colorful stickies in the U-shaped foyer of Melissa’s flagship store in São Paulo, the Post-its act as “pixels” in the video, with become these impressively trippy images of prancing elephants, balloons lifting folks aloft and pulsating heart-flowers. It’s part of the brand’s “Power of Love” campaign, which was appropriate because it took 25 animators five months to create and I bet they loved every moment of it.

On top of the animation, the company got passers-by to jot down messages on 30,000 Post-its, and it has since gone viral online. There are some environmental types who are concern about the ultimate fate of all those notes, but I don’t see why you can’t totally recycle those notes by passing it to the next person. It’s the power of love, man.

Make sure you watch the making of it.

Via Adweek

I love Sharpies. I always have one with me. They can be fine or fat markers or anything in between; I’ve used them to doodle in class since I can remember, and I can always rely on my red fine point to mark up anything (yes, the dreaded “Imelda is marking up the printouts again”). And I have the ink-stained fingers to proof it.

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Sharpie’s latest campaign, Start with Sharpie, draws on “Self-Expression,” and it reminds me of all the things I love to do growing up: Writing, drawing, tic tac toe, crosswords, “permanent” tattoos (yea, you had one of those). It taps into the idea that Sharpie gets you to express yourself, be creative and make anything you want. With nearly two-million incredible Facebook fans, what’s better than using their avid fans?

They recruited three of their Sharpie Squad members: Cheeming Boey (you may say “Jimmy who?” but get ready to be blown away), Erica Domesek (DIY Expert) & Mark Rivard (skateboard artist).

Cheeming Boey

Cheeming Boey is the “coffee cup artist” who drew intricate, finely-detailed drawings on those 4-cent Styrofoam cups with a Sharpie. Styrofoam gets a bad rap because it’s cheap, disposable and it never degrades. A landfill nightmare. But Cheeming has turned it into something you gape at.

“About the only time it makes the news is when some city bans its use – as more than 20 California cities have done. Or when some art auction sells a foam cup with a dead ladybug in it for $29,900 – as happened in 2001. All of which makes the simple, 4-cent cup the epitome of pop art. It’s at once kitschy and unhip and dismissed by all. Yet it can be a demanding medium to master. It’s curved. It smudges. You can’t redo mistakes. And every drawing must re-connect to its start.”

Cheeming’s work has been displayed in galleries nationwide. In his ad, Cheeming demonstrates how a Sharpie Pen and a simple Styrofoam cup can be combined to create something truly inspiring.

Note that not even bananas are safe from his wandering Sharpies. In this picture, “mistake” cups are used for drinking.

Erica Domesek

A DIY expert, author and creator of P.S.- I Made This, Erica’s creations are inspired by some of the biggest names in fashion. She has been featured in top entertainment and fashion media, and both her website and her book feature several Sharpie DIY projects. In her Sharpie ad, Erica breathes new life into a standard-issue pencil case using new Stained by Sharpie^® fabric markers to create a chic purse.

The good news is you can make too—just follow the steps listed in the D.I.Y. with Domesek blog post!

Mark Rivard

Mark is a super-talented skateboard artist who has figured out how to manipulate Sharpie markers like a paintbrush to create some amazing skateboard art, complete with the kind of nuanced brush strokes and shading that makes a Sharpie blog editor proud. Using skateboards as his canvas, Mark’s designs have appeared in sports commercials and viewed in galleries worldwide. Mark demonstrates how he uses Sharpie Mini markers to create coveted custom boards.

In addition, the print campaigns will include QR codes where you can unlock exclusive content and videos of each Sharpie project.

The campaign supposedly aimed at teenagers, with new website to boot (not too crazy about it). However, I don’t feel that it alienates older age groups (heck, I’m in that way older age group), so one fat check mark for you, Sharpie!

To read all about it, go to blog.sharpie.com

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Images courtesy of Sharpie

Would you let people take a picture of you after you just finished your jog, out of breath, sweaty and disheveled? French photographer Sacha Goldberger asked random joggers to do exactly that and here’s the results.

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Sacha Goldberger loves coming up with interesting projects (check out his fantastic “Mamika” series, featuring his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika as a superhero). So last summer, he decided to start another interesting project. He created an outdoor studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park near Paris that’s 2 1/2 times the size of New York’s Central Park, where he stopped joggers and asked them for a favor: Would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera?

Surprisingly, many obliged. Out of breath, sweaty, disheveled, these joggers let him snap away. He then asked these same people to come into his professional studio exactly one week later and using the same light, he took their pictures again in the same pose they had before.

As you can see, the difference is remarkable. The before and after comparison showed such visible signs of fatigue on the subjects’ faces after the sprint.

This is what Goldberger wants to show with the series:

“I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society. The difference was very surprising.”

How true. That’s why I prefer photo shoots in the morning hours. Trust me, it’s not the lighting. You just look better because the day hasn’t worn you out yet. So seriously, don’t let people take your pictures after you ran around the block unless you have a team of stylist & makeup artist to take that “yikes” out of your face.

I know Goldberger will continue finding  interesting ideas and formulating them into more interesting projects. Don’t forget to check out his “Mamika” series:

Grandma’s adorable, isn’t she? BTW, because of this photo series, grandma’s gone viral!

See more of Sacha’s Goldberger’s work & projects, visit sachabada.com

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Via My Modern Met. Photo credit: Sacha Goldberger

During Milan Design Week, Moleskine unveiled its Travelling collection: Versatile bags and cases with various add-ons that can be tacked on to the insides of your bag or detached so you can easily transfer it to another bag. And just like its notebooks, everything carries the brand’s signature look, from the simple design, black color and rounded corners, to the elastic closure and the “In case of loss” label inside.

What really caught my attention is the cool video, with its hyper stop motion illustrating the conception of the collection. Done by Rogier Wieland, the video offers “a close view into the new Moleskine bags and their design process. Freehand technical drawings, sketches and photographs all morph and merge together into each other.”¹

It portrays how Moleskine adventure continues beyond paper, which during the Milan Design Week seems to really transcend its traditional medium with Scriba , an installation by Giulio Iacchetti , and the Magic Box interactive demo from Zetalab.com to celebrate its new Writing, Travelling and Reading collection.

Taking a look at all these new installations and products, one must admit that Moleskine as a brand knows how to expand, extend, crossover between analog and digital without forgetting its core. Moleskine® is a brand that encompasses a family of nomadic objects dedicated to our mobile identity: flexible and brilliantly simple tools for use both in everyday and extraordinary circumstances, ultimately becoming an integral part of our personality.²

And in true Moleskine fashion of “oh, we have a notebook for that,” the Moleskine Passions collection was created in 2010—a series of notebooks dedicated to the passions of life, from Recipes, Wine, Travel, Books, Film and Music, to Wellness, Gardening, Baby, and yes, even Dog and Cat.

I encourage you to explore Moleskine’s videos, including the Moleskine Passion series (they make me want to buy them all!), because they are imaginative, passionate, creative and fun. And it sends a clear message:

Moleskine is no longer the notebook from the days of yore, used by artists and thinkers such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Hemingway over the past two century. These notebooks have become a symbol of latter-day nomadism, and with these recent crossover interactive efforts, Moleskine ensures it is intimately tied to the digital world.

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¹Moleskine^® — The Official Channel: Moleskine Bags in Hyper Stop Motion

²Moleskine World: Culture, imagination, memory, travel, personal identity

Photo credit: Moleskine^®

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When I first ran into a cinemagraph and realized it is basically a very refined animated .gif, I was thoroughly impressed. Jamie Beck, a NY-based photographer, and her fiance, Kevin Burg, have been making sweet images using this “cinemagraph” technique on her blog, From Me To You, and getting people to notice them.

By combining still photography and video to finely animate the image, the results are stunning; the still photography seems to unfreeze in front of your eyes. Sometimes the effect is a nice little peek-a-boo that makes you do a double-take and notice.

The Coco Rocha shot reminds me of the head-turning (literally!) Burberry Eyewear, with that little jolt of surprise. The date night shot below reminds me of the DKNY Uncoverthecity.com we created in in 2007, where the New York cityscape became the focus instead of the backdrop and the city came alive with the infusion of ambient animation.

It’s that special little something that makes you really notice. And here’s that word again: Notice. We—designers, photographers, artists—continuously look for ways to make something that people will notice. We use bold splashes of colors, big typography, quiet minimalism, fluid motion, 3-dimensional spatial movements…All to make the audience take notice and stop (to admire, to reflect, to feel what you want them to feel), and maybe stay and come back for more.

What I love about Jamie’s cinemagraph is its simplicity. Jamie describes it as “a traditional still photograph with a moment living within it.”¹

Of course it doesn’t hurt that Jamie’s photography is just stunning. (Yes, Jamie,  you make me wish I have your Hasselblad!) Love that she still uses film; it’s so old-school good, you can visually feel the film grains.

More importantly, the duo realize that not everything can be made into cinemagraphs—just because you find a way to “cinemagraph” it. This is their rule of thumb:

“A cinemagraph always starts with a photograph. As a rule of thumb, we only create a cinemagraph from subject matter that would also make a good still photo.”

Plus, it can take several hours of manual editing² to create each image with a level of sophistication that they have. Just because you can paint a Picasso, doesn’t mean you can paint like Picasso…or something like that. Yes?

The recent resurgence of the animated .gif has made some people notice (see my post “Fun Retro Web” in March 2010 on I’m Not An Artist animated .gif galore) and I’m glad some very talented people have taken it further and in a style better than I’ve ever put much thought into. Hats off to you, animated-gif-agitators!

Who knew you’d ever look at an animated .gif and see the potential, and yet here we are.

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¹Turnstyle News: So Long Animated GIFs, Hello Cinemagraph

²The Atlantic: How Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg Create Their Animated GIFs. There are a few tutorials by others attempting to decode and recreate (see Matt Braga‘s how-to) but none produces the results like hers—Jamie just did a superfine job and at, what I would guess, a really high framerate to give her cinemagraphs that ethereal quality.

Photo credit: Jamie Beck

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I first encountered Moritz Stefaner‘s talent through his Map Your Moves project, a visual exploration of where New Yorkers moved in the last decade. I was impressed with the simplicity of the interface and the clarity of the data presentation. That’s when I put his name in my hippocampus for future—and admittedly, frequent—recall.

Stefaner is a designer on the crossroads of data visualization, information aesthetics and user interface design. He calls himself an information visualizer and his  interests are in information aesthetics, interactive visualization, and how the web transforms our understanding of information. With a background in Cognitive Science and Interface Design, you only need to take a look at his work and you’ll understand why the fields captivated him, and how by weaving them together, he can create amazingly intuitive avenues for interactions between data and us.

Wisps of vibrant colors mark data points or connections that invites you to interact with them and makes you a participant instead of just an observer. In Map Your Moves, you have the ability to draw back the curtain and take a peek at why people relocate into or out of New York City. The result feels like a cross section of hidden lives—and offers the pleasure of voyeurism without the guilt.

Revisit project, a real–time visualization of tweets around a specific topic,  lets you search for subjects and users. Results then appear on a timeline and user icons are stacked vertically where those with the most mentions lie at the center and are larger. It has a hypnotic fluidity that makes you want to create your own Twitter wall projection or screen for ambiance. What he wanted to achieve is an interface that “provides a sense of the temporal dynamics in the twitter stream, and emphasizes the conversational threads established by retweets and @replies.”¹

Stefaner’s latest data visualization project featured by Fast Company’s Co.Design is Notabilia, which shows the debates behind some of the most controversial Wikipedia entries.² In his visualization of deletion discussions on Wikipedia, interesting squiggly lines curl across the middle of the page (unanimous), some go scraggly but slowly shot straight up the page (controversial) or the in between s-shaped trajectory (swinging).

What strikes me most in Stefaner’s take on data visualization is his level of abstraction. His work beautifully balances analytical and aesthetic aspects in mapping abstract and complex phenomena, which adds a layer of seductiveness that invites interaction. His data visualization turns visitors into participants.

Looking at his interfaces, data don’t just sit pretty; it moves, weaves, dances and commands you to come play. And that is definitely much appreciated in the land of sitting-pretty infographic.

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¹ Moritz Stefaner: Revisit

² Fast Company’s Co.Design: Infographic of the Day: The Fiery Debates to Delete a Wikipedia Entry

We all know goodbye speeches can be inspiring (I have Lou Gehrig‘s as an epitome of goodbye speeches). Grace, strength, humor, honesty…you can glean into someone’s soul through these final words.

Jacob Gilbreath, a graphic design student at Oklahoma State University, took to Conan O’Brian’s last monologue on his short-lived The Tonight Show run and created this beautifully done, three-dimensional kinetic typographic landscape.

Inspired by Lou Dorfsman’s Gastrotypographicalassemblage, Jacob created a literal wall from over 60 individual typographic layouts with various eclectic type design. He combined vintage-style typography and modern 3D letter forms to contrast between old and new, emphasize time and create a sturdy and timeless object which is the perfect metaphor for Conan.

To me, this is just one fun motion typographic journey with twists and turns that makes you smile and glad that you get stuff like this out of undergraduate school projects. Bravo, Jacob!