It’s been damn cold on the prairies lately. Bloggers like Schmutzie & Alyson have written with dismay and defiance about it. #stayinside trended in Winnipeg.
Here’s my contribution to dealing with January—a photo series that’s been forming around smokestacks in the industrial parts of Winnipeg. When you wake up in the morning, you can tell how severe the cold is going to be by the way steam and smoke hang in the air. It’s terrible and beautiful.
All fired up by the SOPA drama yesterday, this piece of direct mail from ING Direct had my eyes saucerous with outrage. How could ING use the famous “Keep Calm & Carry On” slogan? Doesn’t somebody own that?
50 years later the Crown Copyright expired and the iconic (who knew?) poster passed into the public domain. It resurface in 2000 & has been widely t-shirtified since.
Just how did this iconic design bubble back into the stream of consciousness, & who’s profiting from it?
Well, here’s the story.
In 1997 Dr. Bex Lewis, taken with a youthful visit to a museum’s propaganda collection, wrote an authoritative dissertation on the poster. This research is oft-copied but rarely cited (boo).
Anyhoodle, around the same time San Francisco designer Victoria Smith put Keep Calm silkscreened posters on Etsy, which is where I naively thought they were born.
At first, thinking the design was a 6-year-old inside Etsy joke, I wasn’t sure who’d be the audience for this “played out” slogan.
Now with an understanding of the history, I appreciate what ING’s doing in terms of assuring investors that saving still makes sense, even at the low interest rates the bank is giving. It works because it makes you feel mildly foolish for doubting the banks. The message is “be resolute & continue sending in your money.”
In fact, the New York Times suggests the recessions of the late 2000′s were probably what made Keep Calm resonate.
The banking crisis brought a wave of orders from people working for American financial firms (and, more recently, advertising agencies). In fact, the travails of the global economy seem to have given the slogan fresh relevance to many. —Remixed Messages, New York Times
So ING’s message is one that financial planners worldwide embrace. It’s a chipper little piece of well-placed propaganda in a bleak financial winter.
most popular story on the Metro’s site, submissions went up 4600% and we had around 1200 page views since this morning. Thank you, media!
So, Erica, why did you start a Winnipeg photoblog?
I was inspired to start the blog by Instagram’s “popular” page. Because Instagram has a global user base, you get these fascinating little glimpses into daily life around the world.
I thought it would be worthwhile for us to share Winnipeg with each other like that. If you have stereotypes about different neighbourhoods, maybe they’ll be demystified a little by a guided tour from the people who love them.
The more we get to know each other’s spaces, and by extension know each other, the easier it is to think of yourself as part of a collective and to care what happens here.
Not that I’m obsessed with it, but this isn’t the first “wash your hands” PSA poster I’ve created. I worked with Velocity to illustrate the one you see behind these two humping Spidermen. It’s greeted me in the washrooms of CBC, Red River College & many doctor’s offices, and it always makes me…wash my hands.
The OMGWTF, or “interrobang”, as it’s properly known, is
…intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”). —Wikipedia
Awesome, we need that! So how do you make this snazzy symbol‽ There are a few ways.
In documents
If you’ve got the font Wingdings 2, and it was certainly standard on my last 100 laptops, you can make it with the ` or ] symbols, like so.
On websites*
‽ Unicode decimal value ‽ Unicode hexidecimal value**
*I have no idea how you actually use this information. **From Grammar Girl, wherein she also details when to use the mark, in case you’re feeling tentative with your new punctuation powers.
In websites
You most likely want to insert this bad boy cavalierly into a tweet, amiright? It’s stylish and saves a character in the precious 140. Here’s howsies:
Method 1: Copy & paste. Google “interrobang” and copy the first one you find. Improve on this by bookmarking the page so you don’t have to google. Rating: ✭✭✭ Sorta slow and lame, but doable.
Method 2: Use a special characters browser extension. So far I haven’t found one that includes the effing ‽, but Fancy Characters for Chrome lets you paste in your own custom stuff, so do Method 1 to it & you’re all set. If you can find an extension that does it better, let me know in the comments. Rating: ✭✭✭✭ Pretty awesome. Loves me my browser extensions for special characters—so l33t!
Try making a shot this heavy without Gotham. Go on, try.
Instagram worked with @Colerise, a photographer who produces elegant, evenly-exposed shots to create the four new filters Amaro, Rise, Hudson & Valencia. His influence seems to have scaled back the drama. It may be tacky, but for some of us, loud is our aesthetic
The new option to apply borders or not is nice, but I’d go one further & allow them to be applied in either white or black. I stopped using the strongest saturation/contrast filter, Lomo-fi (any early favourite), because the black border drove me nuts.
The ability to rotate shots obviously rules.
Live preview is sort of neat, but I don’t shoot directly in Instagram anyway—it takes too long to fuss with choosing filters when the action is happening, and I save my bandwidth for late-night at-home wifi uploads. Often I preprocess in Camera+ or Photogene, and the absence of Gotham’s Brassaï-like drama, Apollo’s emo grit (and is it just me, or less juicy X-pro II?) is going to push me to that route even more often.
If your work is tied to contrasty black and white, maybe don’t update Instagram just yet. Or maybe the plan is to offer the old filters for a $0.49 in-app purchase after predictable user backlash—hey, well played, Instagram!
Take a look at my Instragram work here. Criticism aside, I’m in their debt for helping me dust off the ole’ photography degree.
Here’s a bit of an outtake from an upcoming ocean-themed illustration.
Sea turtles are so relaxing, eh? So the reason the painting is an outtake is that the line drawing is going to be the basis for a turtle in a piece that’s not hand painted at all (left), but I couldn’t resist colouring the cute little guy after he’d been scanned.
The full ocean piece you’re seeing here is completely in-progress, obviously. The big mean shark is just there to remind me to design a strong focal point. I’m thinking jellyfish?
Where I’m confused is where chimps & bonobos diverge from humans.Does this work as it is, or should I switch the chimpanzee & bonobo labels? The way it is now sort of looks like bonobos & humans share the most recent common ancestor, instead of chimps & humans (to me, but I’m not used to reading these diagrams). Is this ok? I’m working from this cladogram.
For Venessa Miemis’ blog on Forbes as part of The Future of Facebook project, a six-part video series exploring the impacts of social networking technologies on our lives and business.
Facebook facilitates political organizing and could be a communication channel for dissidents, but monitoring is inherent to the system. The walled garden listens.
I ❤ couldn’t wait ❤ to see FriendsWithYou’s solo show “:)” at the Hole Gallery and their inflatable installation Rainbow City at High Line Park, New York. Here’s sorta what it was like!
Here’s some of the FWY stuff around our place – [Kid Robot blind boxes, stickers, plush Albino Mr. TTT, 'Blackfoot' print]. I’d like this for my birthday, please.
Ever wonder how cities become cultural meccas? Their governance has a lot to do with it.
An artist-certification law, a zoning provision dating back to the 1970s, requires that all Soho apartments be occupied by at least one “creative” artist, as defined by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Downtown Express, NYC, Jun 15 – 21 2011
Imagine the community you could create if creativity was a prerequisite to entry. Even the grime would have a little more flair.
A few yummy local visuals spotted in Winnipeg this week. If you designed any of these, let me know in the comments & thanks for pleasing my eye.
Winnipeg Folk Festival Illustration
Even better as a billboard, where the palette sets it apart from other advertising (& looks lovely against a blue sky). I’m not even mad at these guys for beating me out for a Signature Award in 08 anymore.
Baked Expectations Window Clings
Always with the cute branding, but these ones really shine typographically. And they’re shiny.
Plugin Institute for Contemporary Art
The new building is one of the more beautiful sights in the Peg, but get a load of the colour on the van. Pop!
I loves me a good camera app, and have been thirsting for an intangible more with Instagram lately. So let’s check it out.
Be prepared for a different vibe. The 80′s early-video look (I thought retro was inauthentic?) is carried through with a ‘Me Decade’ brand sneer. The copywriting on the app store suggests you just may be an aged loser if you hold the polaroid dear or were alive in the summer of ’73. I’ve tweeted over to app developer Kris Collins to see if he was indeed born in the 80′s.
So no rosy memories or gentle voices here. Decim8′s filtering—heck, I just wanna say mediation, you know?—is a different kind of aesthetic, visually & philosophically. The destruction is easily modifiable and kinda random. Where Instagram seems to decorate every shot, Decim8 desconstructs and destroys. It introduces pixels, artifacts, digital shifts, repetition, noise. Like when a DVD skips.
Using a filtering app with artistic sensitivity means knowing when its effects will enhance your message, rather than distract. I’ll use this app when describing things visually that connote newness, postmodernism, video, digital, cities, fragmentation, randomness, motion and DIY—a welcome tool set to compliment the rarified, elegant, stoic and static images rendered by Instagram and Hipstamatic.
App performance: smooth, simple interface, mercifully free of social networks.
The legendary animator was on hand to introduce the film and talk about it afterwards.
If you’re not a fan of alternative animation, you still probably know Bakshi from his work on classic Saturday-morning Spiderman. Yes, he admitted to the crowd, he is personally responsible for the amount of time Spidey spent swinging from building to building—a tactic he hopes wasn’t obviously being used to kill time. It obviously was.
Manitoba bombshell
Bakshi dropped the hopefully-happening bombshell that a Toronto backer wants to pick up production of his unfinished Last Days of Coney Island, and produce it here in Manitoba (thanks to our delicious tax breaks).
Huge!
Winnipeg isn’t too big and it isn’t too small. I think it’s perfect for artists. You’re very lucky.
On the “overwhelming totality” of social media
Bakshi was glad he didn’t start out in a time where you could see the other talent that’s out there 24/7 on Facebook & blogs, because it might have been paralyzing.
There’s nowhere to hide anymore. Everybody’s a genius. Sometimes being quiet & looking around is good.
On truth in art
[Disney] never looked around at what was happening in America. My thing in animation is not to lie to audiences. You have to choose whether you want to lie to yourself and make a buck, or try another way.
On filling Saturday-morning air time with excessive swinging
I spotted these friendly neighbourhood Spidermen getting cozy in the Y’s daycare, our last bastion of entertainment on an otherwise dead (get it?) holiday Sunday.
I know you’re clamouring for the blogular relevance—what do sexy superheroes have to do with marketing, media, art & design?
These amorous arachnids are getting it on in front of a government-issue health poster I illustrated with Velocity Branding (back in the day when they were Space Cadet).
I’m so proud to see the posters up everywhere—they’re even in the washroom at CBC—encouraging proper handwashing and cough-coverage. There’s nothing about safe public relations, unfortunately. I would have liked to draw that one.
I dearly wish animated gifs could have a soundtrack. You’d hear some Technologic-era Daft Punk at this juncture, so have your ears use their imagination. This bad boy weighs almost 2 megs, but that’s ok. We’re all friends here.
