Frame magazine covers by COMA

the Frame magazine covers which were designed by COMA between 2003 and 2005 was the most impactful exhibit for me. The Frame magazine is published in the Netherlands and features international interior and architectural design. The magazine covers which are powerful expressive artworks pay tribute and compliment to what the content is inside. The choice of fonts are bold and innovative yet ordered in a structured 'architectural' way. Each magazine has a completely different aesthetic appeal yet all look like part of the same magazine. The use of photography for the covers creates a more dynmaic and 'pop culture' feel, yet again still appealing to various age groups. I couldnt leave this spot at the Triennial, each time i reviewed the works there was something new and interesting which stood out. Boldness, simplicity and a balanced compsition are the hallmarks of these works creating a somewhat quirky and edgy appeal.

Below is the link to the COMA designers website which is great! you should all check it out
www.comalive.com
http://www.peoplesdesignaward.org/designlifenow/designers/coma

Cooper-Hewitt

Overall, the exhibit was pretty entertaining. Graphically, it was eyecatching and thought-provoking. The setup of the actual exhibit was also well done. I especially liked the political posters and the hidden messages within them. If I had to pick one designer that inspired me, it would be Hunter Hoffman, who is a cognitive psychologist and studies pain and fear in humans. His latest projects include a virtual reality game used for severe burn victims. The theory is that a cannot feel as much pain if their attention is focused away from it. The game puts the person in a 3d environment where they are racing down a snow mountain and throwing snowballs at penguins. The perception of cold, as well as the distraction offered by the new environment, has been proven to significantly reduce pain.I think Hunter Hoffman shows that designers are extremely influential, now more than ever. It's also interesting to see psychology and art combine for a common cause.

I really really enjoyed this exhbit. I was interested in Trollback + Company's display on their branding, advertising and motion work- I thought the court TV ads around the city using phrases like "getaway car" on taxi's and "lookout" on telephone booths was really eye catching and intriguing. furthermore I also liked the Pixar display, thought it was cool to see the different characters and animation that goes into the final sequences. Overall I thought the Design exhibit was inspiring and interesting, and helped fuel some creative ideas personally.

KIDROBOT

I fell in love with this section of the exhibition. KIDROBOT was founded in 2002 by Paul Budnitz. KIDROBOT has a commercial website, as well as retail stores in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, they specialize in toys created by artists and have selected imports from Japan, Hong Kong, and Europe. Most items are produced in limited numbers and are considered collector's items. Each of the three retail stores features a gallery of designer toys and artwork related to the toys. KIDROBOT often host artist signings to celebrate the release of limited edition figures. One example if the "Bondage Labbit" by Frank Kozik. They've also produced a plastic character out of Chanel's designer, Karl Lagerfeld, even including his signature silver-haired ponytail. So cute_

The KIDROBOT exhibition was described as "The toys sold at Kidrobot feature urban street trends mixed with creative design and fine art to produce collectible pieces of art. Many Kidrobot toys are designed by world-renowned artists with backgrounds in graffiti, fine art, industrial design, graphic design, illustration, and music. Kidrobot is erasing the boundaries between street culture and art at an affordable cost to people of all ages."

-go visit Munny: www.kidrobot.com

Design Life Now - MAKE Magazine

The Design Now exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt features scores of artists and design firms, some well known, with the main question of this being how does design affect our lives in contemporary society. I think the visuals offered in the exhibition gave a pretty decent look into this issue.

Overall the show was nice. I was particularly attracted to the magazine display, especially one done by the company Make Magazine, designed by O'Reilly Media and focuses exclusively on increasing your hands-on skills through detailed do-it-yourself projects (mostly electronics related devices).

The exhibition's works for the most part stayed within the realms of graphic design, product design, digitial media, & architecture. Other sections of the exhibit that grabbed my attention were the refugee tents, the IDEO Kidney Transporter, Google Interactive Maps, the NASA Research robot, kidrobot & of course the Joshua Davis drawings.

One quirk I had w/ the show, the annoying security guards and the fact that you couldn't take pics. Other than that, good show.

::TJ::

Design Life Now!

The exhibition showed several aspects of contemporary design. Although I really enjoyed the exhibition, just felt like it wasn't as an effective exhibition in terms of the layout of the exhibition overall...since all of the pieces from product, fashion, architecture to comics and web design were kind of mixed together.It was hard to concentrate on one piece when there was such a different one beside.

I especially liked Christopher Douglas's KDDO(Knock-Down/Drag-Out) table
I think its just amazing you can build somthing that can hold weight with only three pieces of panels that are only three quarter inch thick. and the fact that it looks so elegant too. I guess im also amazed because Ihad a project of making a collapsible chair in my foundation year and found it so hard to make.
Anyways I also found a site "http://materialfurniture.com/#" which shows more of his designed furnitures (most of them are also collapsible)

J-J-J-Joshua Davis

Alright, check this out. Joshua Davis, if you don't know who he is, get on top of that right away. He is someone i use to look up too (i still do btw) during the whole dot com explosion of the late nighties, he uses the philosophy of randomization and customization to make stunning graphics with the computer. Now some people might say that his art shouldn't be considered art because the computer does the actual "drawing" or however you want to call it. He writes a program that tells the computer what to do, in other words, he's just putting the paint on the table so the computer could do the painting. He was one of the first to establish himself as a flash artist, or use the program flash to do amazing things. He is influenced by the whole abstract expressionist movement Basically, this guy loves what he does. Not many people can say that, he's been through hell with his whole drug addiction thing, and then he did illustration for kids books (pretty funny if you ask me, just comparing drugs and kids books.)

Couple of sites of his to check out... (just a note, keep in mind that these sites are 6 - 7 years old, and all of this stuff is still fresh)

• http://ps1.praystation.com/pound/v1/
• http://ps1.praystation.com/pound/v2/
  
• http://ps2.praystation.com/pound/v1/
  
• http://ps2.praystation.com/pound/v2/
  
• http://ps2.praystation.com/pound/v3/
  
• http://ps2.praystation.com/pound/v4/
  
• http://ps3.praystation.com/pound/v1/
  
• http://ps3.praystation.com/pound/v2/
• Once-upon-a-forest

Here is what the designlifenow website had to say about him....

The work of Joshua Davis reveals the power of tools—and the importance of understanding them—for designers in today’s world. Davis explores the technical and aesthetic limits of the software programs Flash and Illustrator, industry standards in the design of images and interfaces. Davis writes his own code, in Flash ActionScript, to produce surprising interactions with users and to generate unique visual compositions according to rule-based, randomized processes.

Flash and Illustrator both produce vector- based graphics, which consist of relationships among points and lines (rather than pixels), and thus can be reproduced at any scale. (In contrast, a digital photograph breaks down when excessively enlarged.) In addition to working commercially for clients ranging from Nokia to the musical group Red Hot Chili Peppers, Davis exploits the scalability of vector art in his ongoing experimental project Once Upon a Forest, a series of “art-making machines” that allow users— including Davis himself—to generate one-of-a-kind images. Davis writes custom algorithms that randomly select elements from a database of hand-drawn imagery, then automatically transform, compose, and connect them. According to Davis, “The end result is never static. I’ll program the ‘brushes,’ the ‘paints,’ the ‘strokes,’ the ‘rules,’ and the ‘boundaries.’ However, it is the software that creates the compositions—the programs draw themselves. I am in a constant state of surprise and discovery, because the program may compile compositions that I would never have thought to execute, and would take hours to create manually.”

Davis’s process yields magical landscapes where organic and geometric components swirl together across surfaces packed with complexity, taking the form of screen-based graphics, digital prints, or customized wallpaper. Disaster looms over some of these candy-colored dream worlds: a massive storm bubbles above 0282 – Coast of Kanagawa, while the shard-like city in 021 – Honey Hive is dwarfed beneath ominous clouds of smoke or dust. These images pulse with danger and possibility, depicting an artificial world whose destiny has slipped beyond the designer’s control.

Alright, hopefully you guys enjoyed that as much as i did.

Keep it fresh.

-lu15