Brooklyn Botanical Garden cherry tree blossoms spring 2010Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
GREAT DESIGN: Gandhi inspired font
♡♡♡....simply genius, read more below
Leo Burnett India ad agency commemorated the 141st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth (October 2, 2010) by creating an alphabetical font in the Devanagari script in the style of Gandhi’s trademark wireframe eyeglasses. The special typeface was the brainchild of Burnett’s national creative director KV “Pops” Sridhar, who wanted to inspire younger generations with the teachings of Gandhi. The glasses symbolize Gandhi’s vision and his visionary thoughts on truth and nonviolence. Sridhar explains, “The way he saw the world is completely different than the way we do – and hence the glasses, to subtly nudge people into thinking like him again.” Gandhi had originally given the glasses in the 1930s to an Indian army colonel who had asked the great leader for inspiration. Gandhi reportedly gave him his glasses and said, “These gave me the vision to free India.”
Burnett staff designers and typographers spent several weeks working on the digital eyeglass font, which they posted on the website. Visitors to the site can download six posters, each featuring one saying of Gandhi, as well as the font as wallpaper or a screensaver. Currently the font is only in Devanagari, but will soon be available in English, Tamil and other major languages. The educational website also made Gandhi’s eyeglasses interactive. By clicking on the glasses, different parts fly off to become part of the font, forming a mantra or a letter of the alphabet. The site also contains a message board so people can specify which Gandhi saying they want on their poster, or make their own Gandhi sayings and proverbs for use in a nameplate or other medium. Leo Burnett India is also promoting the font on Facebook, Twitter and other social network platforms and allowing Facebook users the option of having their profile page transformed entirely into the Gandhiji font. Plans also call for the creation of typeface imprinted merchandise such as postcards, mugs and T-shirts.
http://www.atissuejournal.com/2011/02/08/mahatma-gandhi%E2%80%99s-words-in-his-own-type/#more-5341
STATE OF CRAFT part 2
Collaborative exhibit between Fendi and Design Miami December 2009. Excerpt from NYT magazine below. For three days during Milan’s design week, Spazio Fendi was filled not with models parading down the runway but with young designers cutting, pleating, weaving and generally transforming materials and processes in live demonstrations, in “Craft Punk,” organized by Design Miami. Garden hoses were turned into chairs, ceramic vases were decorated by means of an old-fashioned photographic printing technique, and scraps of leather discarded from Fendi’s factories became tabletops, to name of few of the freewheeling projects on display. http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/on-the-make-craft-punk-in-milan/
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
WHAT TO WEAR: planning for summer
I ♡ duppatta scarf from matta /great travel wrap or sarong/just bought color celeste to match my new necklace of huge old African beads as seen top right corner of image/planning to wear this necklace with everything this summer with stacks of leather and African beads bracelets.www.mattany.com
JAPAN FASHION NOW
great show extended until April 2nd/small and precise exhibits at Fashion Institute Technology/reminded me of Balenciaga spring 2011.
http://www3.fitnyc.edu/museum/Japan_Fashion_Now/introduction.html
How has Japanese fashion evolved in the 20+ years since the ‘fashion revolution’ of the 1980s?
Who are the new Japanese designers?
What is the role of Japanese youth fashion?
Where does Tokyo fit in the hierarchy of fashion’s world cities? Is Japan still the future? Japan continues to be on the cutting edge, maybe even the bleeding edge, of fashion. However, Japanese fashion today embraces not only the cerebral, avant-garde looks associated with the first wave of Japanese design, but also a range of youth-oriented styles.
Indeed, contemporary Japanese fashion remains significant globally precisely because it mixes elements of the avant-garde (pushing the aesthetic envelope at the level of "high" art) with aspects of sub-cultural and street style. Equally significant is the Japanese obsession (not too strong a word) with perfecting classic utilitarian garments, such as jeans, sneakers, and leather jackets.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
JEWELRY: leather cuff with turquoise
unisex leather wrap with turquoise closure/made in NYC/American made leather/turquoise from Nevada mine.www.aurumvitae.com
PLEASE SUPPORT
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/nyregion/01warehouse.html?scp=1&sq=art%20supply&st=cseWelcome to Materials for the Arts
Since 1978, Materials for the Arts has provided thousands of New York City's arts and cultural organizations, public schools and community arts programs with the supplies they need to run and expand their programs. Materials are gathered from companies and individuals that no longer need them and redistributed to the artists and educators that do. In the process, hundreds of tons are removed from the waste stream every year and kept out of landfills, helping to sustain our environment and promote reuse and waste reduction. MFTA helps artists realize their visions, provides students with a richer educational experience and furnishes businesses and individuals with a simple and efficient way to enhance the cultural life of their city.The success of MFTA and its programming would not be possible without the participation of material donors throughout the metropolitan area. If you are interested in donating your unwanted reusable items to MFTA please visit our Donor page or call 718-729-3001 and press 1 for "Materials Donation".
STATE OF CRAFT
While there is never at any one moment a singular, all pervasive and universal narrative being written in design or art, occasionally there emerges a critical mass, a ‘tipping point’ as author Malcom Gladwell calls it, of influential designers and artists, some established and some perhaps little known outside their professional circles, whose work simultaneously addresses similar issues or reflects similar contemporary-culture realities (perhaps aesthetic, or political, or economic, or sociological in nature), embodying certain across-the-board characteristics which cumulatively have the potential to create a social epidemic, like a virus moving through the population.
“MAKE ME.” presents a small but diverse body of work by an otherwise un-related collective of artists and designers, which together celebrate a rough-hewn, virile, reductive, anti-academic, craft-driven, ‘tool-belt and heavy-lifting’ aesthetic, paradoxically realized with such sensitivity and finesse, often embodying subtle, complex theoretical, structural, formal, and compositional aspects, and infused with such poetic narrative as to be necessarily characterized as ‘butch’, a word defined in today’s vernacular as a stereotypical ‘brute-masculine’ approach taken by a stereotypical ‘sensitive-feminine’ personality.
We introduce the term ‘Butch-Craft’ in an effort to articulate a phenomena: that after years of an increasingly accepted yet hard-won broader, more inclusive definition of design, liberated only recently from the once mandatory ‘form follows function’ credo, we are witnessing a kind of backlash. Not a retreat from the now-accepted practice of infusing poetic narrative into functional objects — we still want to engage more fully with our object culture, not simply regard it as a ‘tool for living’. No, rather than a retreat from this positive development, we are seeing the emergence of an alternative means of giving this ‘art content’ form and expression in functional objects. Poetic narrative no longer needs to be dressed in traditional ‘Art’ garb — it no longer needs to ‘pass’ as Art. Gilded bronze, exotic regionalisms, complex and immaculately executed 3-D printed abstract futuristic forms, while still employed as critical elements by certain recognized masters, no longer exclusively define art-in-design. Works, both past and present, that overtly resemble ‘furniture’, executed in wood and iron and steel and stone, are now in fact automatically assumed to contain a narrative, a poetic gesture. Function no longer is presumed to neuter any potential for Art; we accept that addressing a prosaic function doesn’t lead necessarily to a prosaic object.
Through the examples we present in “MAKE ME.”, we acknowledge a tipping point, where art-in-design no longer needs to look like what we recognize as Art; art-in-design no longer needs to wear its art on its sleeve.
Murray Moss
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