Icons: Chinese Opera Characters

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Icons: Beijing Olympic Games

From the official website:

Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals - the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow - and the Olympic Flame.

Each of Fuwa has a rhyming two-syllable name - a traditional way of expressing affection for children in China. Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda, Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow.

When you put their names together - Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni - they say "Welcome to Beijing," offering a warm invitation that reflects the mission of Fuwa as young ambassadors for the Olympic Games.

Fuwa also embody both the landscape and the dreams and aspirations of people from every part of the vast country of China. In their origins and their headpieces, you can see the five elements of nature - the sea, forest, fire, earth and sky - all stylistically rendered in ways that represent the deep traditional influences of Chinese folk art and ornamentation.

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Permanent Errors

A tattoo artist in Chicago is being sued for misspelling a customer's requested tat "Chi-Town" as "Chi-Tonw."

This cracks me up because graphic designers are typically very poor spellers. This is either a hemispheric brain thing or just the product of their intense training to look at text as a compositional and graphic element rather than reading it. As an editor I have had designers produce typographically-driven graphics which completely fall apart when a key misspelling is corrected.

The tattoo has been fixed as well as possible, but the lawsuit is still going forward. Meanwhile, fellow tattoo artists are signing up to let the offender replicate the misspelled tattoo on their own skin to show their support. Can't say I've heard of anything like that happening in the design community...

Good Morning, Meat Man. Why Hello, Cigarette Face!

From a series of images designed to illustrate the nutritive paucity of various "diets."

Many more frightful images at the link.

R.I.P. Johnny Hart

OurTVAd Sells Single Frames For 8.5-Minute Advertisement

You too can have your logo on TV for four one-hundredths of a second or less for only $39.

The individual behind this project is trying to sell individual frames for an eight-and-a-half-minute ad. Hurry, only around 13,000 frames remain.

If you like this idea, I would be interested in selling you advertising space on my left pinky toenail for a mere $38, and will wear sandals all day Saturday to display it. Just as many people will see your ad, they will be just as impressed, and you will save a dollar.

I predict abject failure for this project, but such a statement presupposes that Mr. Augusto actually believes it will work. Perhaps he is simply doing what he can to draw attention to his other project, a half-baked predictions market.

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Motion Pictures

Leonardo Bonanni's three-dimensional nuclear bomb zootrope

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Sidetrack Technologies' subway tunnel advertising

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Inside-Out Bears By Kent Rogowski

Photographer Kent Rogowski turned teddy bears inside out and restuffed them for a great photo series. The book will be published in May.

Photograph copyright Kent Rogowski 2007.

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Unrecycling

Unrecycling
Originally uploaded by littlewing_78.

I saw a post highlighting 'unrecycling' on Boing Boing and started poking around Flickr. Apparently these cans are popular subjects of photographs for American tourists in China.

An interesting symbol. I like the idea of treating recycling as the primary result of consumption and the alternative as somehow derivative or aberrant. My only concern is that "un" paired with "re" is linguistically troubling, but "uncycling" looks a lot like "unicycling," and that's just asking for trouble. There has to be something better than "un."

Decycling? Excycling? Landfilling?

Imitation for Education

Recreating an artwork's composition is one way of "looking" intensively at it. I love what instructor Glenn Zucman is getting his Art Appreciation students to do at California State University-Long Beach. These photos crack me up.

Jacques Louise David, The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis

Diego Rivera, Flower Day

These photos are alive with thought and meaning but are totally hilarious at the same time. I had friends in college who sketched on index cards to use as flash cards for art history tests. This method seems so much better, because it looks like so much more fun.

Glenn, will you please make your students recreate one of the photos below?

One of my favorite people. Kind of hard to reproduce though, what with the hierarchical scale. The Photoshopping jobs are pretty rough, so scratch that one.

Hmmm. Better. I'm now reminded of a Sesame Street coloring book which put the show's characters in all of these famous paintings. I think Grover was Washington. Or was it Bert?

Okay, this is my real request. I'm sure you're covering Botticelli, this is a very important painting, and it also happens to be one of my favorite paintings of all time! That grace. That tension! It's like a dance, but also like a marionette dancing, with the angel pulling her into that angle like she has a little string. Beautiful. I'd like to see the kids in Long Beach pull it off.