And the Gold Goes To...

I love this photograph.  As a runner, I know that the first moment of the race is one of the most tense, wondering who will have a good start, who will be in front , what will happen next.  That is the reason I love this photograph, taken by Osamu Hayasaki.  The lighting is really amazing in  how it shows the people from first place to last place, at the time, in lightest to darkest lighting.  The Tokyo 1964 across the bottom, designed by Yusaku Kamekura, seem to point out what the olympics are all about, saying that the competition will all be this tense, always.  This seems to be the way that all designers and photographers for the Olympics have worked since the use of works like this.

"Music" Television

When Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky, and Patti Rogoff created the MTV logo with the idea that a logo did not have to be one set design, with no changes, the world of design could then be changed, and now companies could continually change their identity, while maintaining the same basic design.  

Recently, after the station became solely "MTV," the logo has slightly changed, or "refreshed," with a more rectilinear, wide design:

Really it has not changed much, only a little of the bottom has been trimmed, making it look a little bit more streamlined.  This opens the station to some new design changes like these:

Which make the characters within seem to say "I am MTV" saying what the station has now become.

Once Upon A TIme

This the opening scene to the Nicki Minaj video for "4 life" 

This is the opening scene to the movie Shrek 2 (clearly)

This is the opening scene to Disney's Sleeping Beauty, just one of the many times that they would use this (also in Cinderella, Snow White, and Enchanted)

Similarities? Yes. Coincidences? No way.  These opening books have been used for years in cinema to tell a background story before moving into the movie or music video.  I understand that it looks more sophisticated and all, and it's every little girl's dream to be a princess, but why would the designers set the scene at this particular time period? Because the world at this time was kind of a mess with the tyrant kings and the Plague, I don't get it.  The design may look better, but if dragons are running around, I do not want to live at that time.

Too Loose Lautrec

In the episode of Spongebob Squarepants entitled "Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost," an episode where Spongebob and Patrick accidentally melt a wax sculpture of Squidward, therefor thinking they killed him, there is a scene when Patrick and SpongeBob are carrying Squidward around in servitude to him, with Squidward complaining it is "too hot" or "too wet", they stumble onto an aquatic version of the painting La Troupe de Mlle. Eglantine. Squidward quips that it is "Too loose, Lautrec", a pun on the name of the painting's artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with an accompanying sting.

I think it is hilarious that this was added to this episode, because unless you were in a class like this where you learned about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec once in your life, you may never understand this quick joke.  I know that as a child i never understood the reference, and did not until just this year.  I also love that they added this in for any artists who were watching, for it shows that the people are thinking about all audiences when creating the episode.  

FONTS!

Be careful watching this please, its like watching epilepsy.

Enough fonts in here? I think so.  It seems like there is this movement in music videos to have many words flashing on the screen to explain the emotion of the music, also shown in this video

I kind of like it.  It's different than people dancing around, because it's like the words are doing the dancing this time, which is kind of cool to see since it forces us to think of ourselves, and what we might do in the situation, and the words show just what we may expect to.

Shapely Things

When we read about Guillaume Apoillinare, I was really quite intrigued by his work.  I feel that because the words actually create the shape of what they are explaining, it also gives off the feeling of the object it creates, therefore making the poem make more sense to the reader.  It takes illustration to a different level, where you are not reading the words then looking at the illustration, but looking at both at the same time, having more of an impact.  I like this better, and feel that it was too short lived, and it should be used in books today too.  Maybe I'm just living in the past, but I feel it's a little more interesting to look at a vase of flowers when I read than a brick of words. 

Boats and..

While searching for another picture, I came across this 1929 poster.

It's nothing super special, it just happened to catch my eye at the time, because wile looking throught the book, I cam across multiple boat posters, like this:

which emphasize the great height of the boat.  Now, which you see the ships for cruise lines, the boats are shown from the side, to show how long it is.  I do not know which is better, but I do know that when I went onto one of these ships, I saw the ship from this angle, and feel it is more interesting than what is shown now, so maybe commercials should try a few angles from in front to show the great feat that engineers have made in getting a behemoth like this to float.