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Writer and illustrator Austin Light recently shared a funny series of sketches from his notebook that reimagines movie titles with one letter removed. The idea started on reddit where users were asked to, “Pick a movie, remove one letter, give a brief description“.
As a daily art project, Light took the concept one step further, drawing a scene from the imaginary film. He also penned a brief synopsis for each. You can see the entire album on Imgur. For more from Austin, check him out at the links below....
No design experience?
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Fonts bring your words to life. Learn how to easily choose fonts that emphasize your message and make your designs look beautiful.
Color can be used to convey moods and create emphasis in your designs. We show you how to build meaningful color relationships to create visually stunning graphics.
Whether you upload your own, or choose from our library of over a million, images are a vital component of eye-catching designs. Learn how to use simple Canva tools to compose and enhance your images for greater visual impact....
While working for publications like National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek, and for NGOs like UNICEF and Oxfam, photographer Ami Vitale has found herself shooting in some of the most beautiful, diverse, and dangerous places in the world.
A highly experienced professional, she still finds it something of a challenge to describe herself: Conflict photographer? Photojournalist? Documentarian? Travel photographer? At various times her work could fit into any of these categories. To her, it’s not the label that’s important; it’s the stories. And it’s the people and their cultures that she wants to reveal, with the ultimate goal of bringing people closer together. “Understanding that we are more alike than we are different…that’s important,” she says....
When Hatsune Miku comes on stage, she can't hear the crowd cheering. Nor can she see her fans swinging their green glowsticks to the beat. That's because Hatsune Miku isn't a person; she's an animated character.
Despite the Japanese superstar's lack of humanity, the crowd reacts to "her" like any of the other (human) acts that come through New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom. The audience, a mixture of teenagers and middle-aged men in plaid shorts, sings along, squeals at the first notes of their favorite tunes, and dances to Hatsune Miku's movements, which are about as complex as a bar mitzvah line dance, thanks to the fact that she's projected onto a screen.
The electric-blue pigtailed 16-year-old--yes, she has an official height, weight, and age--can work a crowd, nevertheless. Check out this call and response at a 2011 performance in Tokyo....
Looking for an innovative business card for yourself? Check out these 32 ingenious examples that are sure to leave a lasting impression. It’s interesting to see not just creative businesses like agencies, design firms and photographers using unconventional cards but also lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, etc. If cost is a concern, you can also create two sets – one conventional/economical and the other radical (in lesser quantity). Use the appropriate one depending on the type of client, budget, etc.
The 10 best designs of the year include a soccer cleat, a campaign to end gun violence, and much more.Fast Company hosted its annual Innovation By Design Awards and Conference in downtown New York today.
It culminated this evening at our awards celebration, where we revealed the 10 best designs of the year.It was long road getting here. We received 1,587 submissions from around the world. From that, we pared entries down to 53 finalists. And from there, our esteemed panel of judges fiercely debated, voted, stalemated, and debated again to reach a consensus on the top 10 designs of the year....
"More isn't always better: no more in information design than in poetry..."
Nate Silver, the author of The Signal and the Noise, considers the two factors that make an infographic compelling — providing a window into its creator’s mind and telling a story that “couldn’t be told in any other way.”
He writes: Design has traditionally been seen as a field for “right-brained” types: those who think visually and spatially rather than with symbols like words and numbers. But modern information design is equal parts art and science, form and function, architecture and engineering. It combines the best of at least three fields of achievement: aesthetics, technology, and journalism.
By aesthetics, I mean all the usual things, but especially proportionality. For information designers, this quality is not so abstract as it might be in other mediums. Their goal is tangible: to convey as much information as possible given some set of constraints....
I guess I’m in a metaphysical mood today. Thinking about writing for the internet, how it’s different, and finding your own style.
So, let’s set the scene…
Seth Godin, Lao-Tzu and I walk into Hemingway’s Bar & Grill. Godin says, “I’ll have a Purple Cow.” I say, in my best Homer Simpson salutation, “Beer me.” Lao-Tzu says, “Ommmmm.”
Drinks with Seth Godin
That’s me channeling Seth Godin, echoing Lao-Tzu.
Except I’m not a bald guy and I don’t wear saffron like either of these wise men....
For my part in the 2014 Future of Storytelling Summit, I had the pleasure of collaborating with animator Drew Christie — the talent behind that wonderful short film about Mark Twain and the myth of originality — on an animated essay that I wrote and narrated, exploring a subject close to my heart and mind: the question of how we can cultivate true wisdom in the age of information and why great storytellers matter more than ever in helping us make sense of an increasingly complex world. It comes as an organic extension of the seven most important life-learnings from the first seven years of Brain Pickings. Full essay text below — please enjoy.
When the masses only connect to the net without a keyboard, who will be left to change the world?
It is possible but unlikely that someone will write a great novel on a tablet.
You can't create the spreadsheet that changes an industry on a smart phone.
And professional programmers don't sit down to do their programming with a swipe....
From retro juice cartons to floral fashion campaigns, these botanical marketing examples look to nature for inspiration. Drawing from the fashion world's recent obsession with botanical prints, this list of marketing strategies aims to influence consumers with the help of vivid visuals and transparent packaging designs.
Whether turning to vibrant floral imagery or focusing on a product's natural ingredients, reputable companies are choosing to affect their consumers with this bold and eye-catching branding concept.
These botanical marketing examples include food and beverage packaging designs that are adorned with plant graphics along with fierce fashion campaigns that are lensed against floral backdrop vignettes....
The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard weighs in on the ancient art of joking....
Dear Laughter Lovers, Have you ever wondered why I always start my newsletter with that salutation? Well, wonder no more. It’s because “laughter lover” is the English translation of philogelos, the Greek word that serves as the title of the world’s oldest joke book.
In last week’s magazine, there was a fascinating Profile by Rebecca Mead of the noted Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. What especially interested me was the mention of Beard’s most recent book, “Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up,” which is published by University of California Press. (She is incredibly prolific, so by the time you read this she may have an even more recent book.)
Coincidentally, I had just finished reading this title, which I found to be as enjoyable as it was erudite. It includes a chapter on the Philogelos. I contacted Professor Beard to see whether she would write a bit about it. Being the agreeable sort that she is, she said yes. Take it away, Mary.
A few years ago, the English standup comic Jim Bowen presented a show with jokes that were based entirely on the one surviving ancient joke book, the Philogelos. It’s a collection of some two hundred and sixty short gags, written in Greek; it probably dates, in the form we have it, to the fifth century A.D., but some of the jokes go back centuries earlier.
I particularly like the one about the thuggish, philistine Roman who destroyed Corinth in 146 B.C. When he was overseeing the transport of the precious antiques that he had looted from the city, he said to the ships’ captains: “Don’t break anything, or you’ll have to replace it.”
Bowen’s show was apparently successful, or, at least, it was widely reported as such in the U.K. press, which at first sight was a bit worrying for those of us who think of laughter as much more a cultural than a natural human response. By and large, the rules of laughter (at what, when, when not, et cetera) are something we learn—we’re not born with them. So how come people still laugh at the jokes in the Philogelos almost two thousand years later, in a completely different culture, one whose rules of laughter we ought not necessarily to intuit? I have various explanations for that, none of which involve abandoning my basic position on the cultural aspect of laughter and joking....
1) No one knows you exist.You make a great product. But the world isn’t holding its breath waiting for you....
But when you look at this way, things look different: Goliaths have more meetings, more committees, and more red tape. More ideas being killed by research, more to lose by taking risks, and more outdated business models that they are stuck in. More rules, more regulations, and more good people leaving. So who cares if they never run out of photocopier paper?
Use your strengths: your speed, your instinct, your passion. Back your ideas with hard work. And yes, love can and does scale. Good luck.There has never been a better time to be a maker.
Thank you, Internet. You have levelled the playing field.
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...Lens choices, camera angles, color palettes, editing rhythm, and more are all elements in a specific vocabulary created to best express the story.
Here’s the insight for color: instead of trying to map colors back to cultural associations (which are not fixed across all cultures, but change with every micro-culture), it’s better to assign meaning to each color and stick with it.
This trick works perfectly as long as you never break your own rules, unless, of course, the shock itself creates a greater truth....
While we appreciate it in the abstract, few of us pause to grasp the miracles of modern life, from artificial light to air conditioning, as Steven Johnson puts it in the excellent How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (public library), “how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera.” Understanding how these everyday marvels first came to be, then came to be taken for granted, not only allows us to see our familiar world with new eyes — something we are wired not to do — but also lets us appreciate the remarkable creative lineage behind even the most mundane of technologies underpinning modern life....
There are two paths in life: Should and Must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again. And each time, we get to choosme.
Over the past year I’ve chosen Must again and again. And it was petrifying. And at times it was dark. But I would never, ever, trade this past year for anything. This essay is my three biggest takeaways from the experience. It’s for anyone who is thinking of making the jump from Should to Must. Anyone looking to follow the energy deep within their chest but aren’t quite sure how....
Design is hot. Design executives are being tasked with being design driven, but don't have the tools or processes to sustain this effort.
... In some ways, designers and design managers have shot themselves in the foot — design thinking neither negates nor replaces the need for smart designers doing the work. And because design thinking has many paths through parallel phases, it seems fuzzy compared to the process of creating code. Compared to analytical thinking or science, our industry still doesn't have a consensus on what design thinking means. Most designers couldn't tell you what it means
.It's been 20 years since I was ingrained with the concept that the designer mind could think much differently than a marketer, engineer or the guy in a suit-and-tie. Yet, for all its power and inspiration, I still don't completely understand the meaning of design thinking.
Should we abandon the concept? Absolutely not. I use the methods and ideas that it espouses daily. I believe we just lack some of the tools necessary for the practical application of these methods to stick within organizations....
San Francisco artists Ransom & Mitchell blend photography, digital painting and 3D CG to produce portraits of sideshow acts seen in traveling Carnivals from long ago.
These pieces were created by Jason Mitchell & Stacey Ransom for The Rough and Ready Sideshow, a group show at the Bash Contemporary. The show also includes artwork by Stephanie Vega, whose work I shared with you last Halloween, Alexandra Manukyan and Aunia Kahn.
Director/photographer Jason Mitchell and set designer/photo illustrator Stacey Ransom create highly detailed and visually lush portraits and scenarios by combining their talents with elaborate costumes, hair and make-up, props, hand-painted backdrops and set design. Then they add their own unique style of digital illustration and 3D computer generation.
Even the most lazily prepared home offices have more character and warmth than the sun starved, lowest-common-denominator melamine clad shame cubicles so many of us inhabit for half of our conscious hours these days.
This week, corporate word abuse was taken to a new level. As Fast Company senior editor Jason Feifer notes in this week's episode of The 29th Floor, yogurt slingers Chobani and a consultant named Dov Seidman are battling in court over who owns the word “How.”
Brands are trying their hardest to rewire the way you speak--renaming products, what we call ourselves at work, and even how we think about ourselves as customers. And you shouldn't play along. Jason tells you why in the above video. You'll never order your Starbucks coffee the same way again....
It’s well known that cartoonists have very fertile imaginations. Case in point: this cartoon by Joe Dator, which appears in the current issue.
Yet, as it turns out, the surreal scenario envisioned by Joe owes less to his imagination than you might think. I’ll let Joe tell you about it. Take it away, Joe.
“The gondola is based on one I saw at a stoop sale in Queens. They had some nice sweaters, too.”...
...But it wasn’t until 1999 that Tim Berners-Lee, who had invented the World Wide Web and launched the first webpage on August 6, 1991, coined the concept of the Semantic Web — a seminal stride toward cultivating wisdom in the age of information, bringing full-circle Otlet’s vision for an intelligent global network of organizing human knowledge. Much like Johannes Gutenberg, who combined a number of existing technologies to invent his revolutionary press, Berners-Lee was simply bringing together disjointed technologies — electronic documents, hypertext, markup, the internet — to create a new paradigm that changed our world at least as much as Gutenberg’s invention. But how, exactly, did we get there?
The 98 landmark technologies and ideas that bridged Otlet’s vision with Berners-Lee’s world-changing web are what digital archeologist Jim Boultonchronicles in 100 Ideas that Changed the Web (public library) — the latest installment in a fantastic series of cultural histories by British indie powerhouseLaurence King, including 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design, 100 Ideas that Changed Film, 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture, 100 Ideas that Changed Photography, and 100 Ideas that Changed Art....
While some people have successfully 3D printed buildings, others have taken the same approach to the car manufacturing business, as a company has just come out with a car called the Strati that's t...
Via Tiaan Jonker
With music festival season and summer (finally) upon us, many clothing companies are showcasing their warm weather lines with bohemian fashion shoots. If you are looking for inspiration for how to showcase your free-spirit style this season or for outdoor festival outfit ideas, these hippie-inspired looks are a great starting point.
Whether you have an adventurous soul and a wild heart with fashion sense to match or you just want to fit in at Bonaroo next week, these romantic editorials showcase the ongoing tribal trend in fashion. Incorporating florals, fringe and flowing fabrics is characteristic of boho style. Between boyfriend jeans and tomboy-esque themed looks and romantic lace dresses, boheman fashion shoots are ubiquitous these days. A nomadic sense, earthy hues and lots of layers are also important....
Gisele Bündchen kicks butt in a new ad breaking today for Under Armour's "I Will What I Want" campaign by Droga5. The supermodel and wife of NFL quarterback Tom Brady (a fellow UA athletic endorser) also shows off her kung fu and yoga abilities at iwillwhatiwant.com/gisele, which will stream real-time comments from social media. Leanne Fremar, executive creative director for UA's women's brand, gave Adweek a sneak preview of the 60-second film, which rolls out Thursday on YouTube. Look for the raw, real video to go viral—much like the previous one with Misty Copeland, which has been watched nearly 6 million times.
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Here's a little creativity with your coffee and some fun with movie titles.