The 47th Precinct

Corelle dinnerwear and Domino magazine are holding a contest to design the perfect plate! Submit original artwork, pattern or design for plateware and one winner will be selected for Corelle’s next line! Artwork submissions are due (I believe) by mid-August, so get your thinking caps on.

I am thinking of doing a texture series of the real items that would appear on the plate, such as…

which would, of course, only count if I baked the items myself. Good thing there are four pounds of plugra butter in my freezer!

My current commute to visit the nice folks at Modernista! a few days a week has me walking past this at least twice a day. A nice way to not look at the temporary wall of green plywood at 460 Harrison Ave, miniaturized posters of the work sell to benefit ARTcetera (for AIDS Action) at the gallery across the way. Scattered “like garage sale signs on a telephone pole,” the monopoly cards are distributed throughout the South End and downtown (although I’ve only spotted one on a street sign, across the street from Gaslight).

Is it a new fad, or is it a solution for the reference or morgue file clippings that I have scattered all over my work area (and desktop)? Hello, image bookmarking! Hopefully, this will be the answer to my inquiry two years from now about the great info graphic in the Sunday times magazine (right now, my best bet is a combination of del.icio.us and google image search), if enough kids start using it loyally (or kids with good taste).

FFFFOUND! :

We heart it :

Potentially an interesting ideation tool, there are two image bookmarking sites that I’ve been looking at. One, I have access to! One, I am angling for an invite to… offering even cupcakes on newstoday for the coveted access. FFFFOUND.COM (ffffound.com) is the headliner, a limited access site (each member gets three invites) with a sophisticated bookmark technique (who doesn’t love smart toolbar tools), and careful consideration of the fact that you are “collecting” other people’s work/images. We heart it (weheartit.com) is an open access site with clean and simple interface, allowing tagging of images. Both (I believe) offer the standard web 2.0 social aspect of friends, etc.

here’s a sample page from ffffound. the conscious effort to represent these images as “reference” and not one’s own is made clear in the “Quoted from:” title. Randomly generated alternate images are listed below.

Here’s a nice article from Speak Up on the ffffound phenomenon!

Indulging in my ongoing obsession with wildlife-inspired graphics, I recently came across Charles Harper. In a style he called “minimal realism”, Charley Harper looked at nature as a series of shapes, patterns and textures, all amounting to a colorful phantasmagoria that inspires his simplified and controlled compositions.

“There’s some who want to count all the feathers in the wings and then others who never think about counting the feathers,” said Harper. He describes his paintings as “an ecosystem” in which all elements are “interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts.” Sounds like a good goal for creative work in general (although I confess to having a weakness for the “trimmings” every once in a while).

Read more in Dwell, or see his work (thanks to grain edit) The ABC’s, The Giant Golden Book of Biology, or in The Ford Times. Or, Todd Oldham just edited a definitive monograph of Harper’s work, lovingly designed, and list priced to move (sold out on Amazon, in fact!) at $200.

Check out this wonderful piece Chris Ware animated for the This American Life TV show. The way the scene builds in the beginning reminds me of the great TV spot from a few years back featuring March of the Penguins (or March of the Emperors in France). I think I like it so much because it’s so true to the way I build a scene in my head when I hear a story. I guess we all do it.

March of the Penguins:

I remember Chris Ware did another animated piece for the TAL TV show. Are there others?

In celebration of over 333+ posts and over two years of comeraderie, it is time for the next phase of the 47th… To start a magazine! John and I are putting together a project involving: accordion folds, paper cut-outs, secret formulas, and brilliant submissions from YOU! HURRAH! I am including the submissions letter and some funny pictures of my first glimpses of spring below as food for thought on the theme of our first issue, appropriately: AT FIRST

*admittedly, the spring pictures might not be all that funny, but think of pretty pink blossoms bundling down onto the sidewalk, bandaged trees, etc. and your starting in on just one of many ideas that should be a part of the magazine*

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the 47th precinct* is starting a magazine! Appropriately titled 47, the magazine is going to be a 4×7 conglomerate of cultural curiosities, based around a central theme. The theme for our first issue is, fittingly enough, focused on firsts. At First kicks off 47 with an exploration of what is first and foremost, first experiences, first sightings, first descents, first discoveries and whatever else first means to you.

That’s right, you!

We’re looking for contributors for 47, and are thrilled to take all kinds of submissions (the only requirement is some thematic relevance and our ability to convey the idea in 2 dimensions on the printed page). Some ideas to wet your whistle are as follows:

#1: Your first haiku
#2: A drawing of the first finisher of the marathon
#3: A painting of the first half lion, half peacock
#4: The first paragraph to a mystery story
#5: First signs of spring
#6: Impressions of your first __________
#7: What is the first thing you think of when __________
#8: What you saw first

In any case, those are just a few ideas, and we’d be happy to generate some more if that encourages your contribution. 47 is a bit of a work in progress, and we are super excited to know and work with such talented and creative people (if you know anyone that would be interested, please send this note along). Hence, we promise to launch the magazine with fanfare and festivities!

Submissions can be mailed, posted (write for ftp information), or dictated (well…). Let us know if you’d like to participate! Finally, the initial submission deadline will be July 4 (7/4 of course) 2008. HURRAH!

all the very best,
Ann + John

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mail address:
47 c/o pinkcomma
81B Wareham Street
Boston, MA 02118

email address:
info@the47th.com

*Just in case you haven’t heard my chatter about 47 or the 47th: 47 happens to be a lucky number, the 15th prime number, the atomic number of silver, and (perhaps most importantly for our purposes) the quintessential random number. Being the number that occurs with the highest frequency than all other natural numbers, 47 embodies the idea of haphazard discovery yet elegant patterns. In short, order in chaos, which is (very much) the 47th precinct.

a project from a few months ago, featuring the 47th silkscreen station!

aaron and steven at work on a high concept run of shirts for aaron’s band, the libyans. a modified set of 50 shirts in a two color screening process: aaron ripped out the finished sleeve and shirt hems, first white, then coffee dye (mixed with a little rit), then black.

As I am prone to inventing the “time intensive” paper projects (the swing cards for sweet, punching eyelets in a parked car in southie at 7AM; bachelorette collateral, etc.), our wedding invitations were clearly an opportunity to get wildly overzealous in production. Besides, if aiming for about 50 people max, it only meant the labour of 30 or so, right? My better half tempered some of the idea craze by suggesting custom rubber stamps vs. gocco, and here’s what we came up with!

first, the stamps!

then, the library card theme!

I love how library books often come with mismatched strips of paper in the sleeves (well, when they used to come with sleeves), so a we included a few of our own with details. With some, we also included a postcard of the inn we’re directing folks to for the weekend.

This is the prototype of the original idea: a folding extravaganza and likely a printing nightmare. Steven was going to draw the A S letters for the front that would perfectly match up into the folded heart, rather an imposing task!

Finally, we needed a mini-site, and on impulse I bought both annlovessteven and stevenlovesann, since clearly we could use two urls…

*note: stamping adventures were greatly facilitated by rubberstamps.net (who turned around the order in less than a week). I was really impressed by the fidelity of the image (I think, at minimum, we were using trade gothic at about 10 pt?). I also got a quote from a place that signs all of its communications “Happy Stampin’” (recommended by Kelly), but I can’t remember the name right now!

3 of the most interesting music videos I’ve seen this year have come from Justice (the French electronic music duo).

The first one was for D.A.N.C.E., with very cool animated t-shirts

The next was DVNO, an exploration of 80s typography, motion and design

and most recently they released a video for Stress.

In the previous two videos the attraction for me was the great visual execution, Stress, while still a great looking piece, is special for the feelings of stress, anxiety and discomfort it stirs up in the viewer. The video is really an intense and disturbing thing to watch. Enjoy!

At FITC this year I attended a presentation by Patrick Keenan and Alan Smith from The Movement. The presentation was titled “Think Globally, Design Locally” and it was for people who care about design, beauty and functionality but who are also globally aware and want to make a difference.

The presentation as a whole really resonated with me but I wanted to mention one part in particular because Ann has been talking about creative collaboration tools.

The Movement threw a work party. They had a few problems they wanted to solve so they invited people to come have fun and actually do some work. The guests were asked to sign a contract, work in different departments and earn some fake cash to buy beer.

Read more about the work party over at Prototype, The Movement blog.