Posts Tagged ‘design’
June 16th, 2007 | 
Author: You’ve all heard about those hippy dopes who use trash to create “art”. Actually, it just looks like trash.
Well, here’s an example of piles of trash that are actually quite impressive.
I’m talking about this shadow art. Every pile of trash you see creates the shadow that’s also in the picture. This took me a second to figure out because the pile looks so different from the shadow.
I think that these are amazing works made by some very talented people. Looking at these without the shadow, you could never guess that there’s actually a figure lurking in there.
One of these pieces, HE/SHE, is a little tasteless, in that it’s showing a man peeing and a woman peeing (in shadow). Not really sure what the point of that is, it would be equally as cool without peeing…but maybe I “just don’t get it, maaaaaaaan!”
Anyway, if you can get beyond the peeing, the rest of the pieces are fine, and the technique to create all these works is impressive.
Tags: 
phpBB3 is on its way around the corner, and it’s looking pretty polished. It’s got an upgraded infrastructure, a fantastic new administration interface, and a slew of new features. Its new proSilver template is out and about now, and is very modern in design. All CSS-driven, tableless XHTML which makes it more flexible than ever, moreso even than its competitors.
Amongst it’s new clean interface is a fairly simple, unique little difference that sets it apart from virtually every other board: The author’s avatar and information are displayed to the right of the post rather than the left. The design decision was made in order to direct the eye to the post content rather than the author. It’s literally just a matter of modifying a couple values in the CSS to switch it back, but it’s caused a significant stir over at the phpBB forums. This will be the phpBB default, so altered or no it’ll be making its way onto many online forums in the near future. I personally am in favor of it as it makes the forum look more like an actual discussion rather than a post count warzone (not that it won’t still be one), but I’m curious to hear some of your opinions. Comment away!
“The Beauty in CSS Design”
The web is a very messy place. Web standards, in reality, aren’t. But I like to cling to them anyway, because they need the help and they make things much better in the long run. XHTML and CSS, when used properly, let the content writers churn out pure content and the designers worry only about making that content look wonderful, without all the toe-stepping that has plagued this process for years.
Of course, there’s no point in it if nobody uses it, and let’s face it: it hasn’t been advertised very well where it counts. XHTML/CSS is geek stuff. We made it to make our lives easier. It makes the designer’s lives easier too, but they’re not interested in the ramblings of evangelizing engineers. We can show them all the shifted, resized, repositioned and cascaded colored boxes we want; we simply aren’t speaking their language.
Which brings us to the CSS Zen Garden. It is a project that challenges actual graphic designers to try their hand at customizing their page using CSS alone, and the results are astounding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of what the guy’s over at PIE are doing, but nobody can show the true potential of CSS as a design layer quite like, well, designers.
Be careful over there though, it’s easy to lose an hour flipping through all the various designs. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Ever wanted to get your artwork on an authentic commercially released game cartridge? Now you can!
Spiceware is a company that is releasing a brand new Atari 2600 game called Medieval Mayhem. It’s a game that’s based on the Atari 2600 game Warlords and the very rare arcade game Warlords. It’s a four-player game where each player has to defend their castle while attacking other castles.
Spiceware is just about set to release the game in physical cartridge form, but they need some label art. That’s where the label art contest comes in.
The winner of the contest will receive a copy of Medieval Mayhem in cartridge form, featuring their winning label design. The winner will also receive a $50 gift certificate in the AtariAge Store. Oh, if only I had any artistic talent at all.
I was in a discussion recently about hidden symbols inside of logos. Most of the time, these are not obvious to me (though maybe I’m a little thick). I think it’s cool that some companies do this: it shows that they put a lot of thought into their logo design, what they want it to mean, what they want it to convey, etc. Here are some examples of logos with hidden symbols. See if you can figure them out, and then mouse over them to reveal the hidden symbol.
First up, FedEx. Maybe they want to convey speed, direction, reliability. Can you spot the hidden symbol?
Now that you’ve seen it, you’ll it every time. Next up, the Big Ten collegiate conference. The Big Ten has eleven schools, but they didn’t want to change their name. They did, however, change their logo…
The Atlanta Falcons logo. This might be really obvious, but I didn’t even think about it until recently…
The Iowa Hawkeyes (a Big Ten school), have a letter hidden in their logo:
The Montreal Expos. Their logo was always an enigma to me. What is “elb”? Well, this is a matter of some contention, but everyone seems to agree that it’s a large M smack dab in the middle. Stylized so much that it’s really hard to picture. Think of it like an M that starts and ends in a flourish.
Finally, Goodwill. A charitible company that wants to make people smile. Behind that smile is a sinister secret symbol!
Again, maybe obvious to everyone else but I didn’t really think about it being a letter. I think these are really cool; if I keep finding these, I’ll post more of ‘em.
Digg this article!