Vootie's blog

The idea of a blank piece of paper is somehow a touchstone for all our hopes and fears. Each new analog sheet or digital file holds out the possibility of creating something fresh that matters, that can make a difference. With the flip side being yet another flawed creation that falls short. But the prospect of failure is not enough to keep us from constantly engaging and making the first difficult mark on that disturbing expanse of whiteness. It's from this struggle that paper company Arjowiggins Creative Papers launched its Blank Sheet Project in 2010, in association with D&AD.

You might think that creative communicators spanning the fields of the visual arts and design are busy these days just trying to keep their heads above water. And while staying financially afloat amongst current economic conditions is admittedly a challenge, there is no shortage of creatives' attention being devoted to helping solve the problems of those less fortunate. Sometimes this falls within a corporate framework, such as the Sappi Ideas That Matter program, which has to date funded more than 500 design-driven programs, adding up to $12 million in support of causes supporting the social good — that quaint concept that refuses to die.

Each year Pantone reveals its Color of the Year, a prediction of which color it thinks will be particularly significant in the months to come. Last year it was Tangerine Tango, which I don't recall being particularly pervasive, while this year it's Emerald. So how does this oracular pronouncement come to be?

Sure, times are still tough and the forces of neoliberal capitalism continue to run roughshod over the planet. But is that any reason to despair? I should say not. After all, the good guys are still out there beavering away on projects of benefit to the common good. Case in point is The Noun Project, which is dedicated to "building a global visual language that everyone can understand."

That's the question you might well ask yourself, after perusing the clip below. It provides a taste of what's on the DVD accompanying the latest issue of IdN magazine, which includes 96 minutes of work from 27 motion graphics practitioners. Compelling enough but the contents of this issue, devoted to the theme of Character Design, are also of interest, a few spreads of which are included below. The disc and magazine bundle can be purchased on the IdN site for $19.95.

We know Vincent Van Gogh pretty well, thanks to his many self-portraits, but actual photographs of him are rare. In fact, there seems to be just one (shown below) and it's not entirely authenticated. So Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern's project to create a "what-might-have-been" portrait photo of Van Gogh is not without interest. He shows the process in the clip above.

It's hard to know at this point whether Adobe has just pulled off a brilliant viral marketing move or has simply screwed up. I'm speaking here of the current abillity to freely download the entire Creative Suite 2 from Adobe's site, which almost collapsed from the load once this became known. Admittedly, using software released in 2005 isn't everyone's idea of a good time and in fact you might have trouble running it at all, given the hardware and operating systems for which it was created. But still.

It's certainly an experience familiar to New Yorkers, who live in what serves as the setting for countless movies — that sense of suddenly feeling that your locale is familiar, without quite being able to place it. When in fact you've previously only experienced your current location within a movie. Christopher Moloney had the inspired idea to take photos of locales used in movies in New York and around the world. He then superimposed on them stills from the movies themselves, while right on location, as it were.

Why not? After all, few bother reading traditional paper-based annual reports. So if you're a branding and design firm, creating a ssummary of your 2012 achievements that's expressed in graphical form makes perfect sense. At least, it worked out prettty well for St. Louis-based TOKY, which included such nuggets as a graphic demonstration of its new printer being the size of an adult rhinoceros. Thought: how would you go about expressing your own 2012 high points as an infographic?

So you thought the lingering global economic malaise had crushed out the once-promising global initiative that explored the possibilities for positive change within the intersection of design and the quaint concept of "service to the greater good"? Not so! In fact, this laudable trend seems to be gaining momentum, by what I can judge from the folks at Public Interest Design. They recently posted an infographic profiling 100 of those who are at the leading edge of what they dub "a groundbreaking movement." In the optimistic spirit of a fresh new year, let's hope they're right and that this soon shifts from being a movement to simply how things are done.