Looking at photographs and illustrations on the iPhone is a great experience. It helps if the artwork is great, of course. It’s such a rich, bright screen that images almost feel like little flat jewels in your hand as you flick through them.
I’ve banked a considerable collection of images that I’ve dragged and dropped from ffffound and other places to a folder on my desktop. Some of these find there way onto my phone as wallpaper.
This week I struck a little pocket of gold when my friend Promila posted a link to the work of Shinichi Maruyama. I went ahead and screengrabbed all his work, set up a 480 x 360 pixel Photoshop file and proceed to crop the photos to my liking.
Next step was to save out all the images as PNGs and drop them into a new collection in iPhoto.

The final step was changing the Sync settings in iTunes to include this iPhoto collection on my iPhone.

My friends over at Analogue have just launched The Eclipse Boutique Suites.
Nice job guys.

Mediations Biennale 2008 (via lookom, thanks Victor)

What does it mean for a painter to… actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t!

– Pablo Picasso

This is a perfect, coincidental continuation from the last post.
Speak Visual from NVIDIA. The ‘hide-away’ navigation on the spotlight page is smart and the transitions from section to section are also really smooth.
I will admit that I actually clicked on a banner ad to get to the microsite. Reason? There was a funny shot of a great digital artist, Joshua Davis.

I was talking with Victor and John the other day in our office at Roundarch about Adobe’s products and the problems we’ve been having with them as well as our ideas for what they could be.
Victor took it upon himself to crystallize the discussion very nicely:

Adobe’s software offering is growing so robust, and their control of the content creation pipeline so complete, that they need to look to another model for what the future will look like precisely because there no longer exists a sensible explanation for why Photoshop does not allow me to create a non-closed vector shape with a stroke – other than software bloat. Enter the case for an aggregated experience – with a twist.

and:

Imagine the Adobe footprint/OS as a (relatively) low cost software that bootstraps the ability to use other Adobe content creation modules at a metered rate – let’s say yearly for instance – with an integrated way to dynamically load modules from the cloud, as needed/wanted to your local machine through a subscription service.

My friend Jory has an interesting new project going on called birdsinthemorning.
The idea?

It’s really quite simple. One moment captured everyday and made available for download on the same day. A daily glimpse into my life over the course of a year.

These moments are also available as a video podcast on iTunes.

We will all be able to focus on things other than the election very soon, but I’ve run across some good examples of interactive content and data visualization about the election.
perspctv – They do a great job of aggregating data from disparate points on the Web into a great Human Experience.
Yahoo Political Dashboard 2008
ELECTION DAY 08 – What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?
* I’m curious if the last link is the work of Jonathan Harris or stamen design.

Google is forging ahead more and more every day with new innovations. These innovations within the fields of search, parallel computing, information storage, and cloud computing bring with them closer scrutiny by outsiders. Many people today are referring to Google as ‘The New Microsoft”. The new monopoly.

While many of these concerns are well-founded and MS and Google share some similar traits, there’s a key difference between Microsoft and Google that shouldn’t be overlooked. Google has a sense of humor.

Put another way – Google’s founders have a sense of humor, and they put this humor into their technology.

This might seem trivial, but this point becomes extremely important when you get involved with sophisticated technology and technology services for people and companies.

It’s easy to dismiss Google’s products as looking simple, naive and lacking sophistication. Google has been criticized repeatedly about not capitalizing on their minimalist homepage (ironic that they’re the kings of online advertising), but if you’ve ever used any of their products, you find that they’re simple and easy to use.

The most recent example of their sense of humor is the online comic that was ‘accidentally leaked’ (sorry, this was no accident), announcing yet another move into Microsoft territory with their Chrome web browser. I can’t think of any other large corporations who would have the balls to do this.

Fun with pagination:

Fun with deleting spam:

Fun with their logo:

Fun with taking down Microsoft:

He will be in the middle of a maneuver …and have the whole thing collapsing on him …and somehow, in the center of that disaster, he will make something else out of it completely which becomes art.
– Skip Engblom talking about Jay Adams, Dogtown and Z-Boys

I love my iPhone, but the amount of iPhone-related news these days is nauseating.
Gizmodo understands this and offers a solution:
http://www.gizmodo.com/tag/not:iphone
A very nice (and smart) gesture in my opinion.

I went onto Youtube looking for some clips of REVS I’ve seen before but I was only able to dig up one for the documentary, BOMB IT.
I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find some other interesting nuggets on him.
Some good shots of spray (and steel) tags at Streetsy.
via kottke’s Flickrstream (with some comments): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkottke/17610898/
Via WIkipedia:

“We think art should be dangerous,” Revs told a freelancer for ArtForum magazine in a 1994 interview. “Everybody’s into safe art,” he continued, “doing safe things in their studio. We’re bringing danger back into it. It’s got to be on the edge, where it’s not allowed.”
Known for such unorthodox views, Revs also refuses to sell his work. He’s even gone as far telling a Times reporter that “once money changes hands for art, it becomes a fraudulent activity.” This idea that art should be of pure expression, unconstrained by society’s wants or expectations, is manifest in the work Revs undertook in New York’s subways.