Matt Wisniewski communicates his love of the ocean, and many other aspects of nature, in his series of beautiful photo manipulations and double exposures. Part of the magic of his work is the way he blurs the line between the digital and physical. However due to the precise composition of each piece, I can’t imagine how he would manage such meticulous works with one-off double exposures. I love the way he creates a symbiotic relationship between model and landscape, the water becoming part of the figure but the figure also extending the ocean. Lastly, his combination of modeled and found photography leads to truly riveting temporal mash-ups.

The nature of the ocean is undeniably minimalist. The ocean is in fact a force of simplification and minimalism. Place any object in the tides and soon it will be smoothed–even later it will be nothing but sand. Swellca.st reproduces this reduction in web form with a delightful site that combines landscape photography and infographic. The sharp design, clear interface and quick response of the site are a true pleasure, not to mention a very useful tool for beach goers…if you’re in Australia.

However not all oceans are resplendent in their green and blue. Some are only mirages where the seemingly endless reveals itself to be a desert. The Salton Sea (not quite an ocean but large nonetheless) was one such false promise. It’s life is a truly interesting parable on boom and bust, the death spasms of which left behind a strange setting you may have seen in some music videos. Yet the following short documentary by Ransom Riggs tells the whole story in an incredibly moving way.

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.

When building a new site for a client, migrating data from an old site or system can be a daunting task. There are several excellent modules such as feeds_import which can help move data that is already online in one form or another via rss/xml and so on. Sometimes there is content which needs to get onto the site that lives off-line or for other reasons isn’t compatible with an existing import module- for that you can write some code to help out.

For one project we had to import a list of users which came from a CSV export from a spreadsheet. We really just needed users in the system to be able to assign them as authors of content. The following code is what we used to read in the CSV file and create the users. Any CCK field can be populated with this, here we are adding First, Middle and Last name fields before submitting.
This script relies on Drush and the Forms API to bootstrap drupal and feed it the form submission.

As with all things Drupal, there are more ways to accomplish a task than there are tasks to accomplish.

Save this code to a file and then run execute it with drush:

Thats it. It should import your users and report at the end.
You’ll need to make sure the data going in is sensible, valid emails, names etc.

A mid-week treat of assorted links. 

But another part of the magic of superheroes is that they just don’t seem to die. I don’t mean the characters themselves but what they stand for. As with Gilgamesh, it’s easy to draw comparisons from many of our favorite modern heroes to their ancient counterparts (Superman and Hercules, Flash and Ares, etc). This fact hints at the underlying truth that these fictional heroes strike at something core to our cultural identity as human beings and it’s artists like Kris Anka who help enable this perpetual cycle of mythology.

I’ve never been a huge capes and cowls fan. Instead I often reach for the more independent or atypical graphic novel. A large part of that is I find the stories, and more so the art, of those classic Marvel/DC series to be somewhat trite. But Anka breathes a fresh modern style into his tributes while maintaining their characters’ essence making me yearn to read…though he doesn’t seem to have done any actual books, just fan art. Yet his animation skills leave little question as to his ability.

Of course part of what makes superheroes so interesting is simply the fact that they are indeed super, or in the words of one German philosopher: über. Über Content seems to understand this power as embodied in their striking website. Fellow Youtube junkies may recognize team member Charlie Todd as founder of Improv Everywhere here in our very own NYC.

Beyond the crisp tight design of the site, Über Content does its umlaut proud with some wonderful hover states and some amazing screen adaptability which, at a glance, looks like a customized Get Skeleton layout (the new hotness around the office). I especially like how the site keeps the team member images at the top in an even grid with filler blue circles when necessary.

Yet for all the truly amazing heroes, there are also the ones that just can’t quite live up to the name. Most heroes overcome this adversity to become truly super, something about great power, great responsibility yadda yadda etc etc. However, as this cute French short shows, sometimes even such happy endings might not be all their cracked up to be.

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.

• Does The Pebble Cause A Ripple In Apple’s Waters?
• Responsive Web Design: What Not To Do.
• Five Responsive Web Pitfalls To Avoid.
• Technology Review’s 10 Emerging Technologies.

And lastly, this is so cool, on Monday May 7, The Empire State Building is shining yellow and orange in honor of James Beard Foundation’s 25th Anniversary. It is also the night of the JBF Awards, which you can see live on the website we developed for them at JamesBeard.org.

A mid-week treat of assorted links. 

What else could rationally explain the malaise and disinterest that slips over us, whether we’re on the subway, in our vehicles, sitting in our offices or in our living rooms? We don’t communicate face-to-face anymore. And the lessening of any primordial desire to do so can only indicate that we despise each other so much, that we’d rather become lost in our small selves than actually be part of society at large.

Thanks to powerful little smartphones that entertain us significantly more than another human ever could, we tragically meander through life shackled to tiny devices that really don’t love us (no matter how many times Siri tells me she does). With our newfound ability to fully check out of society, we no longer have to even acknowledge the poor buffoon sitting next to us on the subway who simply wants to use his vocal chords to connect with a fellow human by uttering some reverberating jibber-jabber through the twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across his larynx.

Where neanderthals used to enjoy each others’ company by carelessly uttering nonsense about their meaningless lives and pursuits, now thanks to some noise-cancelling Beats and Vimeo, our private entertainment bliss is endless. Put your head down, tune out and bury yourself in bright, sparkly pixels. Enjoy the blissful ignorance of your surroundings.

I am the magnificent Emperor of the Sidewalk. Don’t mind me, I’ll be that asshole typing a text message while walking headfirst into a monstrous, deadly bear…

Dave Fletcher is the Executive Director at The Mechanism. No humans were ignored or harmed during the creation of this piece, despite the fact it was written on an iPhone during a subway ride. Dave has never texted while walking, running, driving, walking into bears or thinking about Mayans.

David Stephenson relies on the power of patterns to create truly marvelous photography in his projects Vaults and Domes. Classical architecture is obsessed with symmetry, pattern, and texture all of which the eye finds very pleasing. Stephenson manages to create loving odes of our forbears’ passion with a straight-on modern twist. Meanwhile, his other works find beauty in the chaos of nature and organization of modern man.

Of course such intricacy has recently fallen out of fashion in favor of minimalism and simplicity, spearheaded by modern art movements. This aesthetic has now seeped into the commercial sector as well with the design ethos of companies such as Apple. The visual communication agency VOID uses this elegant block and color approach quite wonderfully. The site’s stunning color palette is emphasized by the use of square, grid and linear patterns as well as a nicely animated scroll from section to section which grids out the site even further: patterns within patterns.

Lastly, the inspiration for this inspirational post was the following video. Though short, it absolutely mesmerizes the viewer. An intro video for the TEDxSummit, the dancers from the Icouldneverbeadancer studio performed captivating choreography on colored mats shot through a giant kaleidoscope. The music of Yasmine Hamdan helps create an end result that is truly stunning. Enjoy and stay inspired.

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.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe the operative element is subliminal; not subliminal advertising the way Vance Packard complained about in his conspiracy book The Hidden Persuaders. No, the operative element we’re talking about here is subliminal quality. The very word sublime helps explain my point. “Limen” is Latin for threshold. Below the threshold of awareness. We’re talking about baking quality so far into a thing that people who look at it perceive this quality subconsciously. They know they’re looking at something of quality before they’re even conscious of it because when a thing is made way better than it has to be its quality comes off of it in waves.

What a fantastic concept: subliminal quality.

This extra effort is how all of life’s pursuits are turned into art; yes, even advertising. An old man from Bali once patiently explained to an anthropologist studying his culture: “We have no  ‘art.’ 
 We do everything as well as possible.”

(via heywhipple.com)

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts written by Antonio Ortiz and published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients. This edition of The Thinking Mechanism is cross-posted from the blog SmarterCreativity.com.

The question of course is are video games art? Besides perhaps a handful of indie titles, games exist as products first and foremost. And while company’s like Tim Schaffer’s Double Fine or thatgamecompany continue to push the artistic merits of games, its still a challenge to find an example of something that is both game and art while not being some strange interactive experiment. The crowd at the exhibit further had me questioning if games were art. After all, it’s not often you see such a large and diverse crowd at the Portrait Gallery. And on top of that, the personal reactions we have make them like no other form of “art” out there. When I saw the Mona Lisa, my first thought wasn’t “Oh! I remember looking at this painting every day after school as a kid!” yet I heard such sentiments throughout my time at the exhibit.

What is unquestionable however is the number of artists now involved in the games industry. Yoji Shinkawa’s art has been an inspiration to me since I first played Metal Gear Solid on my cousin’s PC at a young age. His art combines the beauty of Japanese prints and ink wash with an undeniably modern, near electric, flavor.

Sadly Shinkawa seems to have next to no web presence so I have no comprehensive portfolio to send you to. However from the gallery above, extracted from the series’ art books, you can see his outstanding talent. Part of what makes his works so attractive to the eye is how personal an experience they appear to be. Their smoky nature creates an illusion of impermanence; if we look away for even a second, the image may no longer be there, like a mirage in the mist.

There exists an extremely strong relationship between video game and web design being the two most important and interactive mediums of our age, possibly our history. The only difference being that the former is a vector for entertainment while the latter is one for information. However both together helped establish the interactive metaphors we now all take for granted: menus, buttons, navigation, etc. The two mediums continue to inform one another’s evolution even as they begin to merge via the gamification of everything web (see “badges”) and the networking of everything game (see “massively multiplayer online games”).

While some sites embrace this relationship in a direct, semi-ironic way, others simply exceed at ingraining the joyful nature of games in their very fabric. The site for SpellTower, an interesting iOS game which just saw a huge swell in sales thanks to an intelligent social marketing push, is a fun romp through minimalist web design at its best.

I love the sites simple long form layout and bright colors. The fun animations that play out as you scroll as well as the news banner give the otherwise static page a sense of life and connectedness.

Of course the medium most affected by video games is video itself. And while there are plenty of amazing cinematics done for every major video game release, these are really just animations set in their respective game’s universe and have little to do with games itself beyond said shared setting. However 8BITS is a short animation that succeeds in celebrating the complete history of  gaming while putting a twist on the classic damsel-in-distress scenario so many games rely on. 1UP.

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.