So, for all our Twitter followers, this is slightly older news by a week or so, but we wanted to share it on the blog as well.
The ‘Create Your Own Environment’ poster that we posted about a number of months back has been traveling around the world lately as we wanted to share it with as many people, blogs, organizations, etc., that we value and respect, as possible.
Some of the people we’ve sent it to have loved it so much that we’ve gotten some shout outs about it online in a few places. To say we were pretty ecstatic about that and the fact that so many people like the piece, would be an understatement.
Not only do we want to say thanks to all the blogs who talked about the print (again, Thanks Everybody!), we want to encourage everyone that reads our blog to make sure they go check out these sites.
We know you’ll find something inspiring and something that you like about each of them. So don’t wait any longer, go see what they had to say about our poster and posterquake.com and stick around for a bit to check a few of their sites out. Tell them the crew over at HQ says hey.
So the issue of cloning has been a hot debate ever since the world’s most famous sheep, Dolly, hit the news media back in 1996 as the first mammal to be cloned.
Ever since then, people have been trying to clone everything. Heck, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the topic so much so that many of us had to sit through horribly unfunny movies about cloning.
Well, fast-forward to 2010, and cloning has met design in a rather unique way, courtesy of a young man named Philipp Stolenmayer. What has Philipp done that is so great you want to know? Well, he cloned himself through the design of a life sized papercraft model.
Yes, I know it’s not a true ‘clone,’ but there is no doubt that it is quite awesome. Philipp outlines the steps to his project here if you are interested in giving it a go.
If that seems a bit ambitious for your first papercraft project, let us know. We might have something for you to practice with. We’ve been kind of obsessed with papercraft lately. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you might know what we’re talking about…
The kind folks over at Ponoko.com recently featured HyperQuake’s own “Create Your Own Environment” poster when they posted a feature on their blog entitled “Put the X-acto Away”.
Tes One — laser cut paper
The post features 39 posters from 20 different designers for your viewing pleasure. It’s definitely very cool to see how others are using laser cutting techniques to bring their poster designs to life. Weather the canvas is cardboard, ceramic, wood, standard poster paper, wood and even stainless steel (yep, stainless steel!), laser cutting is helping bring designs to life in some refreshing and inspiring ways.
We’re honored that the crew at Ponoko saw our poster and included us in the feature. Thanks again Kristen!
Make sure you go over to check out their post and take a look at some of the other designers work. And if you aren’t familiar with Ponoko.com and what the site is all about, let’s just say if you are interested in ‘making’ something, the site might come in handy.
Every time I see amazing photos of or collateral for a hotel, it’s invariably one of the Ace Hotels, with locations in Portland, Seattle, New York and Palm Springs.
Ace Portland
Ace Palm Springs
Imagine you are staying at your really cool designer/musician friend with really great interior design taste’s apartment. That is the Ace Hotel, which somehow manages to appear both impossibly cool AND approachable at the same time.
The Official Mfg. Co in Portland, Oregon created some of the most beautiful things for the PDX location, and Ace NYC is filled with murals and original art (I know because I did one). The Ace’s own blog is as inspiring as any design blog, and the rooms are surprisingly not outrageously priced. Highly recommended.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
- from “Leisure,” by W.H. Davies
Yesterday’s Play Me, I’m Yours post has inspired me to share my very favorite article with you. It is about an experiment to test people’s capacity for beauty, and it won a Pulitzer prize. It’s a long read…takes me about a half hour, but I highly recommend it if you have the time.
Essentially, The Washington Post wondered what would happen if you placed a world-famous musician playing renowned classical works into the context of DC’s morning subway rush hour. The musician was Joshua Bell and the location was L’Enfant Plaza in the DC Metro. Here are a few excerpts:
In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
…the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.
The song that Calvin Myint [a passerby who did not notice Bell] was listening to [on his iPod] was “Just Like Heaven,” by the British rock band The Cure. It’s a terrific song, actually…It’s about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of your eyes.
…John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
But not everyone was so distracted.
Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.
“Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”
“It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Furukawa says. “Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters!”
I wonder how different the situation would have been had they also asked Bell to play the evening rush, where people are theoretically less pressed for time and more receptive to breaking their routine to watch a street musician.
But as is probably not unexpected, the subject matter of Fairey’s pieces have been pretty seriously divisive here in the middle Midwest. Some responses have been positive and thoughtful:
“Many people, when they saw [the Silverton mural] and we talked about what it meant, thought it was beautiful,” Wade said. “We talked about how depicting disturbing images is not the same as condoning them.” Source
Fairey’s Silverton mural, pre-paintover
Other responses have been with outrage and paint. Both the Pike Street and Madisonville murals have now been covered over with white paint. Amusingly, while the Pike Street removal was carried out by the owners of the building the mural is on, the Madisonville mural was NOT authorized to be painted over, and the incident is being referred to as vandalism against the mural. So, wait…is Shepard a vandal, or are the people painting over his work the vandals?
“I think adults will see [the Pike Street mural] as a commentary on war, but kids will see it as a school kid carrying a big rifle,” [one local resident] said. “On the other hand, I think its removal is a travesty. It’s an awful commentary on the lack of tolerance in our society.” Source
Apparently everyone’s favorite stenciling Brit has been busy on the West Coast in recent weeks in promotion of his new film, Exit Through The Gift Shop.
“I’m thinking of quitting the art world. I want to do something a bit more creative.” Check out TONY’s interview with Banksy here.
Stenciling conjures up images of floral and fruit patterns in my head.
I think I can safely attribute this to the type of old-schools stenciling I believe I’ve seen my grandma do in the past. Not that stenciling of that sort is bad, it just isn’t necessarily my cup of tea.
Well, I stumbled onto a Tweet out in the Twitterverse the other day that shows that stenciling is more than just a bunch of pastel flowers or pretty images of fruit.
Old-School Stenciling
This tweet I stumbled upon was about Sten and Lex; Italian street artists that utilize an approach to stenciling called ‘hole school.’ Apparently, they cut a huge stencil, basically paste it on a poster (it appears the canvas they use is primarily wood as far as I can tell), paint over the whole thing in black and then peel everything away leaving behind a negative image. Through the removal of the stencil, scraps are left behind as the stencil is destroyed. From there, the scraps are actually left on and are allowed to become part of the art. The resulting stencils are just awesome.
Sten & Lex Stencil
If you want to see how the whole process goes down, check out the quick video below. And if you find yourself in Brooklyn in the fall, you might want to look up their showing at Brooklynite Gallery.
