Happy cyber Monday. In honor of a weekend full of gluttony in both food and consumerism enjoy this strange sketch of a guy enjoying web deals, his ideas of material wealth being shot down by the realities of money.
Painting is hard as evidenced by the quick coloring above. That shabby piece of work took me an hour or so just to add some hue and it looks pretty miserable though still better than a drab black and white sketch I feel. That’s why I have the utmost respect for hyper-realistic painters like Jeremy Geddes. My greatest difficulty to this day is color since I’ve worked so long with just paper and pencil (if you want to be an artist/designer start working in color ASAP!). I feel like I have a fairly strong intuition with color but doing things right still takes me awhile and regardless its nothing close to what Geddes, and others like him, manage. The way the subtlety of his color both pushes and maintains the sense of realism in each piece is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Add to that the surreal subjects of his work, a genre my dreamy brain can’t get enough of, and I could stare at his work all day. I hope it’s exhibited somewhere nearby. I can only imagine that in person the detail of these works is even more impressive and immersive (though their size remains a mystery).
Online people keep upping the ante and I’m beginning to gain back the wonderment I lost when I learned how all this stuff works under the hood and the curtain was drawn back. Sites like this one for Long Street in Zurich blow my mind. I love novel uses for played out navigation methods like scrolling and the guys who designed this site for Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen over at Hinderling Volkart in Switzerland seem to know what their doing. One look at their demoreel/portfolio makes me both envious and inspired. This site is a work of art with its buttery smooth scrolling and Google Maps-like movement down the street which syncs nicely with floating annotations and the accompanying navigation anchors on the right hand side. On the downside the audio can be a bit annoying but its subtle and mutable. Also its kind of a bummer that clicking any link inside an circular red annotation takes you to another page shattering the sense of space but this leads to a nice accidental effect when you backup to the homepage and you quickly scroll/stroll down the street. They may have done this for performance reasons so I can’t fault them for not making the 360 view, interviews and more appear in this one window.
This site is so inspiring I’ve already though of a multitude of spin offs; imagine if instead of a real street one were to use a fabricated one modeled and rendered in a 3D program. In fact, why need it be a street at all. This type of navigation could allow us to travel down, around, through or across all sorts of inconceivable spaces…or lack thereof! All the more power to the developers for doing everything without Flash. I need to tear this one apart and find out how it ticks.
Long Street got me thinking of a short stop-motion animation I saw over the break that also amazes and inspires by rethinking old ideas and technologies. The animation “Address is Approximate” by the Theory (aka Tom Jenkins) is marvelous. Using the actual Google Maps and some clever manipulation of everyday office items, we accompany an isolated toy as he dreams of traveling West towards sun and sea. A moving score rounds off this touching piece.
I hope you all had a marvelous Thanksgiving break filled with food, family and friends. Better get on that holiday shopping though. I think I’ll be getting myself a Kindle of Christmahanakwanzika this year.
The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.
I was in Orlando to perform my song and dance about mobile technology – a presentation that was several months in the making. The trouble with speaking about a volatile subject like mobile technology is that by the time you’ve completed any draft of the presentation, some tablet or phone maker has dropped another law suit on another tablet or phone maker, rendering research not only suspect, but shifting the point of your presentation in an entirely different direction. 
But that trek was exactly the challenge I took upon myself a few hours after arrival. This area wasn’t made for a New Yorker – used to subways, non-animatronic oversized rodents, and proper cross-walks between sprawling highways. After walking about a mile to the nearest drug store (as seen in the above map) in a suit jacket (wardrobe FAIL), I discovered that the 6 lane highway that I needed to cross, had no cross-walks. A daunting highway flaw in my opinion, and once I realized that the majority of actual travel in the town that Mickey built, is done in air conditioned ozone depleting vehicles – my Frogger skills kicked in and I lept across the highway in a heart pounding and perspiration-inducing trot faster than you could say, “
The next morning, attendees of the PRSA International Conference were treated to the double play of CNN’s Soledad O’Brien’s tales of news storytelling and Dr. Peter Diamandis’ musings about space travel and prizes. Other bloggers surely have covered both Keynotes ad nauseum, so I won’t bore you with my personal opinions on either of their presentations other than they were both delivered with professionalism and wit. Not many people know that The Mechanism designed two versions of The X Prize online – leading right up to Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne prize-winning flight on October 4, 2004. It was good to spend a few choice moments reminiscing with the good Doctor after his talk, and one of the reasons I wanted to be at the conference this year.