Media, Events, Experiments
Digital Media
Self-Portrait
Aug 17th
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Every few years, I create a self portrait. Many find it to be challenge to create a visual representation of how they actually look without illustrating how they think they look. In 1999, I created a 36″x48″ acrylic portrait on sheet-board, in the style of a three colour propaganda print, using yellow, red and black. The lack of additional elements made the overall work feel incomplete. In 2001, I created a self portrait using oils, but lacked the patience to slowly build layers of paint up to create depth, and the painting ended up feeling plastic and doll-like. It has since been discarded.
2004-2008′s self portraits were primarily photographic, with various exposure and lighting techniques being used to create some sense of originality.
The most recent was produced in Illustrator based on a photograph taken in May 2010, in Yosemite, California. The style is reminiscent of the early 20th century snake oil salesman. I completed the design by using wood-typefaces and an ornamental to accentuate the period.
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Avenir Typeface Genealogical Study
Aug 17th
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Avenir, designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, was created as a more contemporary version of Futura crossed with Univers. This infographic shows the influence ratios the Typeface’s ‘parents’ had on each letter.
Avenir!
A brief and epic history since 1988 – This report is of questionable historical value due to possible and definite inaccuracies.
As Reported by Stuart Ward
Adrian Frutiger was sitting in his soundproof typeface development idea-dome sometime in the mid eighties when he arrived at an interesting conclusion, it was time to make a new typeface for the future.. Although the excesses of the 80s knew no bounds, we cannot be absolutely certain that Frutiger actually owned a typeface development ideadome, or even if the specifications of his idea-dome included soundproofing.
Frutiger and decided that Univers and Helvetica were getting a little long in the teeth after having kicked Clear and Simple Design’s ass for just over three decades, and it was time for a changing of the guard. Apparently some people didn’t get the memo, and continue to mainline Helvetica into their designs like some burnt out modernist minimal junkie.
Before Helvetica and Univers were the only typefaces available in any design studio, 19th century sans-serifs had eclipsed, for several years, the constructivist stylings of Gill Sans and Futura.
Since Frutiger was an Alpenhorn blowing, cheese drilling Switzerlander with a penchant for Late 1920s German typefaces, he logically chose Futura as a source of inspiration for his contemporary masterpiece, and named the creation Avenir, which is French for Future, or je ne sais quoi. Genial! The ‘a’ in Futura was considered to hinder legibility due to it similarity to b, d, p and q, stated Frutiger, so it was replaced with the traditional roman style a.
New evidence has come to light regarding a dark secret to Avenir’s past: A recently discovered phone-tap recording has revealed that Frutiger tried to issue a fatwa against the Futura ‘a‘ because it’s lack of design sense led to a loss of faith. Bau-chika-Bauhaus.
Some interesting points about Avenir:
1. There is no Avenir Italic style, only oblique, created mathematically with precision reaching values close to Godly levels. Using Avenir Oblique fonts instantly upgrades your ability to be contemporary and professionally-fun. (Despite the fact that professionals’ fun in the 80s consisted of lines of cocaine on ladies’ cleavage, rolled up suit sleeves, and crimped hair, Avenir Oblique managed to soar above its 1980s roots; perhaps it’s incubation inside an idea-dome had something to do with it.)
2. After designing Versailles in the early 80s, Frutiger regretted the opulence and excess of the era, just a little, and decided to scrap the serifs for a while, sort of like giving up chocolate covered bacon for lent.
3. The ‘o’ is not a perfect circle.
4. The vertical strokes are thicker than the horizontals. Different strokes for different folks.
5. Avenir looks nothing like handwriting.
6. Avenir comes in varying thicknesses, from 35-95, including 45,55,65 and 85. The meanings of these numbers and what happened to 75 is a mystery.
7. Not content with a typeface which didn’t include condensed fonts, some Japanese guy by the name of Kobayashi worked with Frutiger to create Avenir Next. Since the rise of online type foundries, Typefaces with few fonts in the family are considered low art and campy. Plus, Typefaces with more fonts sell for more money.
8. Because Avenir wasn’t entirely immune to the anything goes lifestyle during it’s conception, the City of Amsterdam has given it a home on its corporate identity. You can take a typeface out of the 80s, but you can take the 80s out of the typeface.
Final Word
What was old is new again, with the surgical expertise of a man who has been ‘shaping our words’ for more than half a century. Avenir, truly towards a brighter future.
TL;DR
Avenir’s font design was inspired by Futura and Univers.
An animated version of the typeface investigation has also been created…
The video shows the primary historical sources of Avenir: Futura and Univers. Each letter in upper and lower case was determined to be on a range somewhere between the inspiring typefaces, and this was indicated with point position as well as colour gradient. The middle section of the animation shows the mix of the Univers ‘Q’ and the Futura ‘Q’ to make an Avenir ‘Q’, which is a clear hybrid of the two when visually represented with its parents.
Snowboard Design
Aug 17th
Mid Summer snowboard design: ‘Lock and Load’.
The top of the board features a ‘bordello cowboy’ motif with decorative dueling pistols, organic flourishes, and decorative wings.
The bottom of the board has a rifle silhouette in gold, so when a rider has dismounted and is carrying their board it appears upon first glance that they are carrying a gold gun.
I wished to celebrate the gunslinger outlaw feeling which snowboarders sometimes exude. Although a part of mainstream culture, they are somehow perceived to be on the fringes of morality and order.
As an added bonus to the snowboard design I posted earlier this summer, I created a very short video animation of the content of the design.
This very short practice video features 3D layers imported from the illustrator file, animated and viewed with a moving camera.
Glitch video experiment: datamoshing + poledance.
Jul 10th
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I used some footage from my friend Lu’s poledance show last year in Tokyo to experiment with datamoshing. I did it the hard way, by encoding each segment with only a first i-frame (keyframe), and then proceeded to remove them too with a different piece of software. I learned about some technicalities of encoding with h264 and avi file formats, which may end up being useful some time in the future.
The way video is compressed for some web formats, there can be graphical errors when skipping through the timeline, due to the infrequency of key frames, or video frames which consist of complete graphical image information. The subsequent (inbetween) frames contain information related to the movements and changes of graphical information. To put it as simply as possible, there is a picture followed by information about how to move specific part of the picture, another picture, and then more movement information. When the graphic image frames are discarded, the inbetween frames continue to move and change inaccurate information, leading to an interesting result.
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All the software for osx can be found (for free too) at: http://www.court13.com/datamoshkit.zip
Thanks to the datamosher tutorial vids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYytVzbPky8 Apparently there’s an easy way, an now that I ‘understand the principle, I’ll try it in AfterEffects.
Blacklist Tokyo + TLC exclusive concert invitation
Jul 2nd
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Just a quick text animation from the video commercial for Blacklist Tokyo’s exclusive event featuring TLC. (Yes, that band you thought was gone forever.) Wish I could be at the event, but it didn’t work out that way. The total commercial is 30 seconds long, but I’ve decided only to show the first few seconds.
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Viterum logo design process report.
Jul 2nd
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I developed a logo and wordmark for a Tokyo based eco-consulting company last year. I created a design process report based on the workflow, read the Case Study PDF file, if you’re interested in seeing how this logo came to be.
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Shinagawa, Tokyo, 2007 品川、東京
Jun 24th
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A digitally manipulated image of the crowds of commuters in Shinagawa station was recently retrieved from my digital archives, readjusted and submitted to a photographic competition. Whether or not it wins, I still like the photo.
Japan is arguably the world’s most technologically driven society. Common assumptions of society in Japan are that salarymen are all the similar in thought and mind, yet this is not the case. My photograph depicts a man resisting the surge and heading upstream, possibly to forge ahead and conquer unknown goals. A part of a greater whole, yet as individual as anyone on earth.
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Dream Sequences
Jun 22nd
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It’s the end of term one at Vancouver Film School, and a short video project has been completed, titled Dream Sequences.
The subject matter is dreams and reality.
Here’s a little background story:
I was traveling in China a few years ago seeing some of the sights off the main tourist routes. My path merged with a wonderful lady from Australia, and we journeyed together for several days. We had interesting discussions about the sites we visited, and had non-stop laughter and emotional connection throughout our time together… and then I woke up. The entire experience was a dream. Does the fact that this chance encounter in Asia was not ‘real’ in this world make the experience any less valid? The lessons learned from the dream are the same as they would be if it were real. I wonder if one day, I’ll meet the lady, perhaps somewhere else in the world, and she’ll have a shared memory of the dream? Would we recognize each other?
The subject matter of the film asks questions about the relative meaning of being awake versus the meaning of being in a dream state. At what point are we fully awake? What are the intermediary states? Wikipedia might have factual answers, but at this moment, I prefer the questions.
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Returning to study for one year is turning out to be a positive experience, not only for technical skill development, but also for the open opportunities to produce more theoretically and conceptually based design and art work.
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SLS AMG Event Proposal Content
May 31st
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I was approached by a client about producing content for an event for the Japan release of the new Mercedes Benz SLS AMG supercar. There were three components to the proposal which required visual media content produced by Hfour.
First was an animation for the release of the car which wouldn’t actually show the car, presented on a screen above the car immediately prior to its unveiling. The tunnel theme which has been a dominant trend in the global advertising campaign was also to be included. Making an automotive theme without showing images or video of the car proved to be a creative challenge which was met with motion lines tracing key elements and shapes.
Second was a LED tunnel at the entrance of the event space. The plan was to use large LED panels built into a tunnel shape, and to create an atmospheric tunnel experience with more references to the natural elements than a vehicle.
Third was a large scale video mapping project on the surface of the Kaigakan, the National Picture Museum in Tokyo, featuring photographs from early 20th Century Japan.
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