I’m away for one week, heading south.

new coordinates: 44°2′43″N 3°51′17″E

Here is a regularly updated site dedicated to the art of book cover design.

picture: The Dead Beat – Marilyn Johnson, HarperCollins, 2006

“The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.” This is the claim supported in a feature article in Scientific American this month that delves deep into the expert mind. Using case studies observing chess players as a primary point of reference, the article examines various theories on expertise – on how it is attained, how long it takes to develop, and how it can be accelerated by dedicated practice, competition, and access to new learning tools. The insights reveal clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.

The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others. …

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam–most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields. …

[M]otivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports–all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing–professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.

Beautifull picures by Bill Henson

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A video-loop made with 787 Cliparts by Oliver Laric

A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union
A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union II

via KIFKIF

Noam Toran lives in London. He received a fine arts degree at the University of California and worked in architecture and film design before receiving an MA in product design at the Royal College of Art. His work uses products and film and their distinctive positions in culture as a means with which to investigate anomalies in human behaviour; anomalies which specifically reflect a retaliation against imposed social conformity. In almost all of his work there is a darkly humorous conflict: What types of identity do we project onto objects? What does this reveal about the human condition and the systems that organize society? His recent work has been exhibited and screened in London, Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris, Jerusalem and Venice and has been published in the Phaidon Book Spoon – 100 Designers. He currently teaches at the Royal College of Art.

Read the interview with WMMNA

In the short time they existed, The Libertines accomplished the impossible: they kick-started the new British music renaissance. They erased the barrier with fans, they inspired thousands, they gave away entire albums of material free on the internet. Yet on the whole the media failed to grasp what the band really stood for, preferring live-fast-die-young-cliches and headlines screaming for Kate Moss to abandon ‘Junkie Pete’ Doherty.

Award-winning journalist Anthony Thornton and celebrated photographer Roger Sargent witnessed the whole messy story of The Libertines, and have remained on good terms with the two battling creative geniuses of Pete Doherty and Carl Barat.

THE LIBERTINES: BOUND TOGETHER documents their extraordinary highs and lows, and the fallout from the breakup. In words and pictures it traces the singers’ unique relationship from their first meeting up to Autumn 2005, revealing the full story for the first time.

This is the definitive representation of the band in words and pictures – a unique, beautifully produced record of the most important British band of this generation.

Design Times Square: The Urban Forest Project brings 185 banners created by the world’s most celebrated designers, artists, photographers and illustrators to New York’s Times Square. Each banner uses the form of the tree, or a metaphor for the tree, to make a powerful visual statement. Together they create a forest of thought-provoking images at one of the world’s busiest, most energetic, and emphatically urban intersections. Following their display, (September 1–October 31, 2006) the banners will be recycled into tote bags and sold at auction, with proceeds going to scholarship and mentoring programs that benefit students of the visual arts. Some banners embody visceral responses to pressing environmental, political and social issues. Others use the evocative power of nature to develop rich patterns and abstract forms that delight the viewer. All contain passion, thought, and energy—qualities that only emerge when the world’s finest creative minds apply themselves to a brief they truly believe in.

Etsy – craft sharing
ThisNext – cool stuf, from cool people
Loc.alize.us – Geotag flickr
Diigo – Social bookmarking
Ning –
Blinklist –
Ma.gnolia – Social bookmarking
Listal –
Simpy –
Stylehyve
Popurls –
Wists –
Dandelife –
Pixrat –
Reddit –
Stumbleupon –
Frappr –
News Cloud –
Wetpaint – Social site – wiki etc.
CoComment – comment tracker

will be updated regularly…
Or go here.

Damian Loeb’s hyper realism paintings.

Are you a Planner who thinks about design? Maybe you are a designer who obsesses about the business impact of your designs. Or you might be an Information Architect who thinks about motion, transitions, multimedia, and uses tools like storyboarding and visual scenarios. Or how about a Developer who comes up with the “big idea”?

If you haven’t noticed, creativity is evolving.

The perception of creativity itself is slowly but surely transitioning into a mutated and adapted life form. In the traditional world, a “creative” person usually meant someone with savant-like talents excelling in a specific creative discipline defined by fairly concrete parameters. Copywriters wrote copy. Art Directors directed art. There are still talented visual designers who can make anything look good. Brilliant copywriters who can come up with that magnificent tagline which stops you in your tracks. And don’t forget about smart, methodical Information Architects who devote their existence to usability and being an advocate for the end user.

These skills, talents and abilities are needed—no doubt about it. But what’s also needed is the evolution of them—the next iteration. But what does this look like? An Information Architect who completely grasps Human Computer Interaction but can also think fluidly—can do things like rapidly create prototypes, facilitate user testing, understand visual design and occasionaly write copy. This kind of individual possesses a multi-dimensional creative brain that has evolved over time.

This type of mind is capable of creating customer experiences which provide competitive advantage in a fast moving world where customers are increasingly calling the shots.

In this world marketing/advertising/technology/and customer experience all blur together. So what does this mind look like?

Continue reading The new creative mind

Original post from Logic + Emotion

Recent research from Canada shows that Web users make decisions about a site in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing. While many communication specialists are obsessed with telling a narrative story, this research shows that people will not even get to the story unless the visuals are clear, simple and understandable. With this evidence in mind, it’s clear why loading times are so critical.
It would be interesting to view further research to see if there are differences by age and gender, and exactly what elements impact perception and how. In addition, it would be great to see how quickly people make up their minds about staying with a print ad, an outdoor board and even a television commercial.
In an ADD world, images travel faster than words, which accounts for the recent obsession with design. Perhaps this will lead to more importance being placed on art direction and production quality.
It seems like Malcolm Gladwell’s world of Blink could and should be applied to communication—impressions in the first 50 milliseconds count for everything.

From Influx Insights influx thought pack vol. 3

Aaron Bondaroff is 29, part Puerto Rican, part Jewish, Brooklyn-born and a high-school dropout. His life weaves through the most elusive subcultures of lower Manhattan. A-Ron, as he is also known, is one of those individuals who embodies a scene. “I’m so downtown,” Bondaroff is fond of saying, “I don’t go above Delancey.”

Even so, he longs for something bigger, like the cultural noise made by the Beats in the 1950’s or Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960’s or the bands and fans who clustered around CBGB’s in the 1970’s. He wants to “make history” and join “the time line” of New York. He is not an artist, an author, a designer, musician, filmmaker or even a famous skateboarder or graffiti writer. So in another era, Bondaroff might have had to settle for his cameos in some of the acclaimed images of youthful outsider debauchery captured by his photographer friend Ryan McGinley. He could be, in other words, a counterculture muse, like Neal Cassady or Edie Sedgwick.

In our present era, however, he may not have to settle. There’s a new alternative, one that’s neatly summed up in a question that A-Ron has been asking himself lately: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

continue reading >

The Exposed Color in Contemporary Art and Culture.

From the rosy tint of wind-reddened cheeks to the first flush of arousal, from cherry blossoms to Pepto-Bismol, pink is a sweet, intimate, fragile and sickening shade. Few colors trigger more contradictory associations and emotions—tender, childish, plastic, pornographic—or are so symbolic of both high and low culture. Pink is sometimes awkward, even embarrassing, but on the other hand it is enjoyed and associated with the idea of beauty. Artists of all hues, from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Pablo Picasso, Caspar David Friedrich, Louise Bourgeois, Sylvie Fleury or Pipilotti Rist, have studied it in their works. The examples collected here include those and more, featuring Caspar David Friedrich, the early Joseph Beuys, Willem De Kooning, Andy Warhol and Yves Klein, not to mention contemporaries like Christo, Nan Goldin, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans and Takashi Murakami. In addition, Pink gathers work by a group of young talents from the Bauhaus University in Vienna and the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where working students cooperated over an interactive web site to investigate the color’s most current perceptions and uses. Their final selection suggests, among other things, that viewer reactions are determined by cultural factors. For example, the positive perception of pink in Japan seems strikingly masculine to the Western viewer; every year the country pauses to contemplate the pink blossoms of the cherry trees, which, after just a few days, drift like snow to the ground, symbols of the death of the samurai, who falls in the bloom of youth.

On 11th August Science magazine, under the low-key heading “Public Acceptance of Evolution”, published research by Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott and Shinji Okamoto which showed that only 14% of adult Americans think the theory of evolution is “definitely true” (around 40% give more qualified consent to the idea). In Europe and Japan, in contrast, around 80% of the adult population believes that human beings developed from earlier species of animals.

continue reading >

Here’s a list of photo-eye’s best photobooks of last year. And i can mostly agree!

Image by Bruce Goldfarb

Beautiful drawings by Marcel van Eeden.
unfortunately its temporarily closed.