identikit picture

I found a very interesting article on my favorite Swiss online newspaper 20min.ch, and would like to share it with you. It is about the worst identikit pictures. Shouldn't a picture say more that 1000 words? Especially if it is on high importance. Well, in those cases.. UNFORTUNATELY it does not..

Check it out:

A criminal from Bolivia.

This person took Madeleine McCann from a hotel room in Portugal. The case was huge in Europe. Madeleine's parents were trying to find their daughter with the help of the News. And this is the identikit picture?????!!!!!!

This person robbed a bank in Thailand.

This picture is just funny...

Business Card

For our last project we had to design a business card, according to three adjectives that should describe our work(personality) by looking at the business card. It was a very challenging experience. Anyways, I would like to show you a very unusual business card, which was made by a German graphic designer:

How cool is that?? It looks like the graphic designer chose to work with tickets that were used for old movie theaters. It's a great approach I believe. But because of their size, the card might get lost pretty easily. Nevertheless, I am very impressed. 

Kim Bear at CSULA

Kim Bear held a speech today at CSULA with the title "life of graphic design: 30 years of fantastic four-grade field trips". What she meant with that title was that everything she has ever done or experienced in graphic design was so exciting like going to a field trip in fourth grade. 

Kim Bear started her presentation with a brief introduction about her path to graphic design. She delivered the information in a very honest and personal way, which I appreciated very much. It made it very easy to me to connect with her.

After the introduction she presented five case studies:

- Annual reports

- Branding

- Information Design

- Natural History Museum

- NHM Exhibit Design.

Her work was just amazing. It had so much variety in it. And it just proved to me that Graphic Design is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I am sure that many people in the audience felt the same way, especially the once who are truly passionate about what they do. 

Something very interesting happened during Kim Bears presentation. When she talked about branding, and presented her new logo for the Metropolitan West Asset Management, I think I got enlightened. The letter-spacing looked very off, especially because the logo was shown on a huuuuuuuge screen. Check this out. 

Please take a close look at the logo to the right. "E" is not centered between "M" and "T." The gap between "M" and "E" is the biggest compared to the letter-spacing between all the other letters. I know, it doesn't look too bad in a small logo like this one. But on a huge screen, where the logo was 100 times bigger, the gap looked huuuuuuuuuge in my eyes. I was like shocked.  

Did anyone who attended the event noticed that?? I would love to hear some feedback. 

And another thing I noticed today. Kim Bear was wearing a yellow-green sweater, and a nice (yellow)-green scarf. Her powerpoint presentation was...yellow-green. And most of her work had yellow-green. I wonder what her favorite color is. :-)

I am very thankful that Kim Bear took the time to share her story with us today at CSULA. She is a wonderful woman, and very inspiring. I hope she can experience 30 more years of fantastic fourth-grade field trips. I wish her all the best!

Betty Boop's skeleton

Ever wondered how the skeleton of a cartoon figure would look like?

I certainly did, and that's why I would like to share this image with you. 

Very bizarre, isn't it!?

Street Art

So I was looking for street art online, because I am a big fan of graffitis and I ended up finding this amazing artwork that was made on the "flat" ground with chalk.

I love how three dimensional it looks on the photograph. I am really wondering if it would look as good in real.

Check out the following website, it has many more pictures:

http://www.redjellyfish.com/fun/street-art.html

Venice Beach

I researched about Venice Beach earlier today, and I remember the great murals I saw when I went there the first time. I think I wouldn't lie if I would say that almost every house has a mural. It's just so amazing to walk around Venice Beach and see all those different people hanging out, playing instruments, playing sports etc.. Combined with the murals, it's like a walk through a museum. 

the robots are alive

After researching April Greiman, I really got into the collage thing. So I googled “collages” and found this very interesting piece, which lead me to the online portfolio of James Dawe. (http://jamesdawe.co.uk/illustratedape.html)

By looking at this piece I get a very cold feeling. It kind of makes me feel uncomfortable, because it's very robot like, but has a lot of human touch to it, which makes me relate to it. And I don't really like that. Besides that, I think this piece is a great work of collage art. I get a 3-D feeling, and the picture seems alive. All the different elements seem to work perfectly together to make the whole piece harmonious. 

Are colleges a Swiss thing??

This is a cover for WET magazine, designed by April Greiman, 1979. The work is very typical for her, because its made like a collage with all those different shapes and layers. If we take a closer look, we notice all those random objects, yet they work perfectly together. 

April received her Masters from the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. Since I am from Switzerland, I remember that we used to make collages all the time in school during art class. I think it's typic Swiss thing. Unfortunately I can't compare it to the American art classes, since I've never attended one until College. Maybe you can give me some feedback and let me know if you ever made collages at school?? I'd appreciate it!