The life of a designer

I found this hilarious video today that shows the relationship between a graphic designer and a client. The 2 animated robots argue throughout the video as the client makes annoying requests like asking the designer for ads without giving the right dimensions, asking him to use microsoft word because that's the program the logo was designed in, and wanting him to come up with some creative advice while watching tv so that it's not billable time. I definitely feel like I've had to deal with some of these situations over the past few years and it's funny to see just how many ridiculously absurd requests a client can make because of their lack of design knowledge!

NYTimes Style Magazine

I just found an interesting article on NYTimes that shows a retrospective of all the best "T" cover designs for the Style Magazine over the last 5 years. There is definitely quite an array of images, from illustrations to photographs to surreal combinations of the two as the artists are given little direction on the pieces. It's interesting to see the degree to which they vary, considering the shape of the iconic "T" remains the same and the focus of the design. Here are a few of my favorites:

orbasquara

I found this fantastic site today promoting the album "the trouble with flying" by orba squara. The site is basically a scrolling flash documentation by Jose Cabaco and the Random Collective of a road trip across the country to follow the band's tour. Its a great collection of typography, photography, illustration, hand-drawn lettering and collage and it's really interesting to scroll through what looks like a digital accordian style book. It also definitely makes me want to go on a road trip and document my own adventure. Surprisingly it also makes me want to start writing... Here are a few screenshots:

Seriously?

There's an interesting and controversial article up on AdAge today discussing similarities between a spot by Grasshopper and one by Ogilvy & Mather for AmEx. David Hauser from Grasshopper is arguing that Ogilvy stole the creativity of their spot, which after seeing the 2 together is ridiculous. Yes they both discuss the importance of entrepreneurs in today's economy and both have similar music but the similarities end there. Discussing the importance of entrepreneurs is hardly anything ground-breaking, over the past few years I must have seen dozens of videos saying the same thing, for a variety of different companies, and type "entrepreneur" into google and you'll find millions of hits about the importance of going out and doing something, as well as how to do it.
The Grasshopper execution is hardly original, using Flash to make the words form in blocks of text across the screen. I've seen this a dozen times in commercials for Midol, Ford trucks and everything in between. One of the responses on AdAge reminded me of TheGirlEffect.org that I saw last semester, which in essence is the same as the Grasshopper spot with the same moving blocks of text and imagery and a slightly different message...yet still is a call to action for the viewer to get up and do something to help the world! The fact that he is arguing that the music is similar is ridiculous as well, since piano music has been around forever, and is commonly used in "inspiring" messages such as this...and what a coincidence that the GirlEffect website has similar music as well!
David Hauser needs to realize that when you decide to use a popular style of execution in current advertising to talk about an extremely general topic there is bound to be some overlap, and just because an ad discusses that same GENERAL topic does not mean that its a blantant rip-off of your work.

it's nice to see that this kind of thing bothers other people too...

I walk by this "your being set up" message every day in the subway and was really happy to see that yesterday someone corrected the spelling!

photoshop trick

I found another tutorial on psdtuts.com and learned how to use the photoshop displacement map tool and clipping masks when placing vector images over a photograph. I switched it up a little bit from the tutorial and left the base image visible, and I think it would have been better if I had better illustrator brushes on my work computer but all in all its a pretty neat trick:

google

Here's an interesting article I found on AdAge about the dangers of Google and their "cloud computing"...my favorite quote is a response to WIRED's magazine cover asking: "'Is Google a monopoly?' -- which is sort of like asking "Are grizzly bears dangerous?" even as one is munching on your left leg."

I always knew google was important but its a bit scary to think that it has become such a powerful monopoly throughout the world...