Gems Sty

This research is pretty interesting. Here’s the premise: photos are easier to capture (and in a better quality) and it’s also easier to edit/manipulate. Put the ease-of-maneuver of photos into video shots, and composing them together as if they were originally one to begin with.

Here’s the description from the researchers:

The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene). Efforts are being made to lift this restriction in future work.

Frank Chimero is a talented graphic designer from Missouri, with a particular knack (as far as I see) blending wholesome goodness and bits of humor into nostalgic designs. This post features one of his series ‘Inspirational Design Posters’:

I decided to embark on creating some “inspirational” posters aimed specifically at designers. The topics range from various truisms I’ve discovered about the field in the past few years to snarky tongue-in-cheek comments. I think we designers spend an awful lot of time talking to ourselves, and I consider this my contribution to the monologue.

I quite like how most of his posters are simple and well-proportioned juxtaposition of just a few elements - and there’s no harm having a few of these to inspire you. Some of them:

That’s just 3 out of the 14 he has over at his website (with many other interesting/beautiful works!)

The sign is discreet - not too common for a marque bearing the name of a tourist-attracting business like a hotel. But that’s how this hotel in Florence, Italy roll. A faint spotlight at the top of the wall casts light upon what we usually see as an awkward ensemble of wires and voila - the name of the hotel is spelled out in the shadows on the stucco facade.

Subtle art!

[via hyperexperience]

Trust the Japanese for the weirdest and yet engaging content on their variety show. In this one, they’ve managed to (in my view) put nostalgia and creepiness into one - a variety-show rendition of the famous ‘We are the World’ MTV.

This brought me back to the times of school physics - I remember we were introduced to a bunch of abstract symbols (the icon for each gate type), what each meant (bunch of truth tables), etc. This video shows each of the logic gate in a more physical form though - through domino constructions. Much more interactive isn’t it?

Put together a bunch of these dominoes, and we’re on our way to a Pentium (or something)…

The IDEA Awards 2008 is out - check out which products are deemed this year’s best industrial design, get inspired, get motivated, find your favorites, express your disbelief at a particular product clinching an award…all here over at Business Week.

Each line above was concocted as part of a commercial campaign, and each of them has resonated with us, associated strongly with the brand behind it, and became classic in their own rights. Tagline Guru has a list of the top 100 most influential taglines in history - check it out to see if you agree!

Wow, that’s way cool - demolishing a building from the lowest level first:

How do they do it? First they replace the support pillars at ground level with computer-controlled metal columns. Then, a crew carefully demolishes the entire floor by hand, leaving the structure resting on the mechanical pillars, which then go down slowly until the next floor is at ground level. They replace the support pillars again with the mechanical ones, destroy that floor, and repeat the operation until they get rid of all the floors. This makes it look as if the building is shrinking in front of you, or being swallowed by the street.

According to the company, this method greatly reduces the environmental impact of the demolition, as well as the time. Kajima says that it speeds up the task by 20%, while making it easier to separate materials for recycling, as well as reducing the amount of products released into the air.

I suppose a method like this would also work very well in a congested urbanscape like Tokyo. The marvels of engineering!

[via Gizmodo]

Check out some of these microphotography - (from top: zooplankton as seen in a drop of sea water with a needle head; mouse embryo; zebrafish embryo). They are just a few out of the many great shots as submitted to the Nikon Small World photography competition:

The Nikon International Small World Competition first began in 1974 as a means to recognize and applaud the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. Since then, Small World has become a leading showcase for photomicrographers from the widest array of scientific disciplines.

A photomicrograph is a technical document that can be of great significance to science or industry. But a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition, and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation.

Head over to Nikon Small World~

Matt Willey recently put together a video snapshot of the design and editing (and editing, and editing, and editing…) process for a Royal Academy magazine cover story. Before the final layout is frozen - there is a pretty long and iterative process that designs in general often undergo before it reaches the final glossy look (which is what most laymen may have access to).

This may help in-part for those of you who have clients or others saying “What? You spent a whole day just on this”? type of questions.