Posts Tagged: Art

Culture / Psychology / Relationships — 1 Comment
29
Aug 06

The rise of a truly literate class

I once heard that eighty percent of what we think of today, we thought of yesterday. I enjoy optimizing my world, so increasing the percentage of new thought seems a worthy goal.

Wikipedia lists the United States having a 99.9% literacy rate, citing the CIA World Fact Book. Check the footnote reading that 44 million people (one in seven) can read but not to level of understanding a job application, a food label or utility bill. Consider the fact that when I consider literacy, I do not include this group of 44 million.

Among the educated workforce – college level and above – I routinely witness great disparities in literacy. Being able to read and write are the single most important capabilities of an educated mind and those who write well often read.

Reading is an activity where the brain is engaged. Active readers comprehend the content, exploring what it means. The content influences the formation of language and founds our ability to create more complex conceptual relationships. This complexity adds layers of depth to our thinking and appreciation of the world around us.

Add to the list of what it means to be literate the appreciation of art and music and we get closer to what real literacy is about. There is a texture that only can be felt by wide exposure to new ideas through the mediums of text, images and sound. More importantly is for us to share the pieces of our overwhelming vast and growing collection of media that we believe are of meaningful quality.

The more we read the more we change and the less yesterday’s thinking is today’s.

Uncategorized — No Comments
27
Aug 06

PepsiCo. Sculpture Garden: A first slide show with SlideShowPro

I am always in the throws of the dilemma to share photographs. I tend to the side of the perfectionist, which means I spend an enormous amount of time with photographs I care about. This makes it prohibitive for me to start the activity of sharing photos, something I actually adore. Another aspect is protecting, what is in some cases my art. I know as well as anyone, once on the Internet, it is like an open market. In addition I am unhappy with the open-source photo gallery experience. Short of Flickr‘s other social aspects, none of them really excite me. So, I shelled out $20 for Slide Show Pro, a photo gallery viewer created in Macromedia Flash. It pulls in an XML file and dynamically renders a collection. Check out my first slide show of photographs taken back in July 1, 2006. They are from the sculptures that surround the PepsiCo. headquarters in Purchase, New York.

Screen shot of PepsiCo. Gallery in SlideShowPro

Culture / Design — No Comments
7
Jan 06

Learning from PIXAR’s 20 Years of Animation

Pixar Iris Video snippet from the installation at the MoMA

My first exposure to the world of 3D animation was the Luxo Jr. Movie shown in an Introduction to Computer Science Course lead by Lori Scarlatos now at Brooklyn College, CUNY. This past Monday (Jan. 2) I got the opportunity to check out the Pixar exhibit at the MoMA.

The amount of art – sketches, storyboards, colorscripts, and sculptures – was impressive. There were plenty of items that you might want prints of, all of it original and inspiring.

The idea of a colorscript is to visually communicate the color and often lighting of story, end-to-end. Colorscripts deliver visual emotional detail that informs the animation production. One of interest showed three rows of small monsters rendered in three different color palettes. Each color scheme represented a different part of the monsters you would find in different environments. For example, the blue and gray pallet represented the corporate characters. An interesting tie in here is the emotions that colors impart and connote. Thinking about Donald Norman’s work, Emotional Design, it would seem the proper use of consistent color potentially delivers more emotionally engaging work, even for your next PowerPoint presentation – making the visual part of a presentation be as informative as the speaker, appealing to different channels of perception.

There is also something to be said for the colorscript showing the whole story in small post card sized vignettes. I have seen many user experience and user interface presentations none of which show the entire application, end-to-end all at once. Often you see a rendering of sorts, often termed wireframes along side numerous annotations informing how the screen might be interacted with. What would happen if everyone had a copy of the entire application design on a 30” x 60” poster informing both the key views of the application, the position of relevant activity and interesting characteristics like color treatments, sounds and animation? There is something wonderful about having one effective record of a project that is seen in its entirety – the forest instead of the trees. It reminds me back to a previous posting on what happens when we limit our canvas and force only the necessary information to appear.

One of the interesting interpretations Pixar’s work was a 14 minute loop transitioning from the many irises of the characters. I took a small video clip of the projection to remind myself how we do not always know how something is going to be used, but if we do not create the work, it can never be used or (re)interpreted.

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