Each year, designers and fans anxiously await the start of the Layer Tennis season. 2009 was no different, as Coudal Partners, a Chicago ad and design agency, kicked off a series of live online design events in which professionals trade designs back and forth in real-time, building on top of their opponent’s work. A third party offers commentary which is often whimsical as well as inspiring and unpredictable. The audience can comment during the actual match as well as vote for a winner afterward, all using Twitter. This current season started on February 3 and was held every Friday ending May 29. We are currently in the playoffs in which you can find our featured designer, Sam Potts facing off against Aaron Draplin this Friday, June 12.
In this second season (of its current incarnation), we wanted to get an idea of the impact Layer Tennis has on the participants and the design community at large. Could we find a pattern in the tools or techniques used? What sort of pressures do they face when the ball in in their court and the clock is ticking? Keep reading for the interview…
If you’re any what of a beat head, you know all about 1992’s Brasilintime, a history-making documentary film by hip-hop photographer B+ linking old-school percussion legends with beatmakers of our time like Madlib and Cut Chemist, shot around Sao Paulo. With his Mochilla partner Eric Coleman—both brought the heralded concert series Timeless to L.A. and along with it Arthur Verocai— they just dropped a trailer for their newest project, Tradition in Transition: A Postcard from Cali. Focused around the making of Quantic’s record of the same name that comes out in July, they shot footage for the film in Colombia’s Cali and Buenaventura, where Quantic lives. The trailer gives a taste into the film’s juxtaposition of these cities’ everyday life and people with the music from this American-born artist. While the first thing most people still associate upon hearing Colombia is drugs and the FARC, check out the trailer for a refresh: It’s a great thing to see the concentration elsewhere for once.
Nike Brazil’s newest campaign idea, entitled “V Project,” tasked nine people from the worlds of fashion, skate and art to create their vision of victory. One of them, artist and skate photographer Flavio Samelo (who’s part of the ever-productive Baglione collective), tapped into the period when he was in a coma for a year and had to learn to walk again after coming out of it. It was an experience that he made tangible through a mix of concrete and photographs (video here). Over the next few weeks, the works will circulate through the windows of various stores that carry Nike in Sao Paulo, including Surface to Air and Maze Skate Shop (which recently underwent a nice renovation that incorporates rails and concrete just like you find at the skate park), and will be put on the website of a new Nike-sponsored magazine called Project Gudi.
From skateboards to toys, the Web 2.0 world of make-on-demand continues to expand for a populace that runs on a mixture of Adderall and instant gratification. Magcloud is just one of the latest in the trend, a print-on-demand service where you upload a PDF and they print you a real, professional paper magazine with saddle-stitched covers. You can order as little as a single issue printed with the Indigo printers developed by HP (MagCloud is an HP Labs project). If you, like me, grew up in the era of zines and got a job at OfficeMax to use the copy machine and long-reach stapler, MagCloud is an interesting endeavor in outsourcing the DIY aesthetic (which makes it more like DIT — Do-It-Themselves). I have to admit I’m kind of excited about it though, and am already brainstorming ways to use the technology. The project is still in the beta phase, but fully usable for those with a major credit card and a US address.
Countless new hip-hop acts are loved for sounding like they came out 15 years ago — turning modern rap into an ironic party favor. Because ingenuity is rare, those looking for quality in boom-bap dig back. That’s what the Hoarsemen are doing. The sensibility of this four man group from New York-by-way-of-New Brunswick, NJ is not a throwback, or a style shift … or an adherence to a style. It starts from scratch.
With their debut album Snacks and Catastrophes out for about a year now, it’s a cure for the common record. But their live shows are what they stake their reputation on. The goal isn’t simply making interesting music, but to create an engaging performance to go with it. I’d always hoped someone would redefine hip-hop in some form without attempting to redefine it at all, and the Hoarsemen have delivered on this wish.
The producer of this outfit, Sonny Ray, lays down beats on an MPC and supplements sample cutting with his own instrumentation. MC Long Division delivers bars in a clean voice and a rhyme style fortified with hidden metaphors. Loosie, a vocalist with an original voice, grinds out dirty hooks contrasting with Long Div’s orderly flow. Cuts from outer space come courtesy of DJ Dialect. Together, it sounds a little bit like this.
We sat in Sonny Ray’s LES apartment — also home base for production of the band’s tracks — over home brewed beer and pizza, where we talked the story out. READ MORE…
We’ve covered a lot of graffiti artist doing a lot of amazing things, but Knitta Please is one for the books (blogs?). Magda Sayeg began the graffiti group three and a half years ago to tag with knits instead of spray paint. Sort of a grandma friendly version of graffiti. For the past three and a half years they’ve been everywhere: Paris, a brick on the great wall of China, New York, El Savador, San Francisco and most recently in Mexico City where the team wrapped a freakin bus! Check out this video from MexicanReporter.com interviewing her as she puts the final stitches in place for a knitting that covered the entire autobus. We can’t help but to think, “stitch your heart out Christo and Jean Claude.” Check out their gallery of travels and projects. They’ve also stocked some T-shirts to bring out your inter Knitta.
We talk a lot about artist on joshspear.com, but when we get to talk with artist its like peaking inside their head full of amazing visions. Sickboy’s Stay Free is full of scary, amazing, funny and just wacky visions. The show is best described as an art playground. He took over a building (not a gallery) and put up paintings but also a sweet factory, weird girls in mask walking around, paintings planted in pots, a house to walk through (check out our exclusive pictures of the opening night for a better idea) and of course his iconic temples. Sickboy’s Stay Free is an entire world and in this interview we walk hand in hand through that world.
The Global Lives Project, a large scale video project that will show a day-in-the-life of 10 people whose diversity represents the world’s population, recently brought a portion of their 240 hours of footage to San Francisco after screenings in Tokyo and the East Village. Creator David Evan Harris has set out to create “an online video library of human life experience” with the help of more than 250 volunteers in eight countries. One of the most challenging things about synching tapings with 10 individuals who demonstrate humanity’s current regional, geographic, age, and religious makeup has been language differences (if you don’t count the effect slow bandwidth has on streaming video in sub-Saharan Africa). Users of the collaborative subtitling platform dotSUB have come to the rescue, and a great Flickr diary and video of subjects in Japan, Brazil, and Africa Malawi are now available online. The project’s team is also working to create citywide installations and a book coordinated with Sao Paulo’s Museum of the Person. For their sake we hope global time differences are an asset when it comes to burning the midnight oil.
Today I’m going to highlight the first ingredient in the four part Veuve Clicquot Recipe that I promised you yesterday: 1 part design. It became clear to me during my time in France that design plays a central role in the Veuve Clicquot brand. Through collaborations with some of the world’s foremost luxury brands and designers, it has been successful in parlaying it’s famous and storied heritage into a modern brand with modern appeal. During that process, it rings true that the history of Veuve Clicquot is never lost in one of their many modern updates — rather, its authenticity has been artfully preserved.
While there are many more examples of how VC has tapped the talents of some of the worlds most astute designers to keep the brand constantly updated and relevant (case in point, it’s collaborations with Christophe Pillet), I’ve chosen to feature four of my favorite projects in this post…
Veuve Clicquot Vertical Limit by Porsche Design (photos above). With a limited production of twelve units and a staggering cost of 120,000 Euros, the Vertical Limit is not your ordinary champagne cooler. Its design aesthetic is unmistakably Porsche Design, with those cool, clean metallic lines and warm back-lit interior. Veuve Clicquot’s contribution inside is even more impressive… a collection of twelve vintages; twelve perfect marriages of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. When one of the lucky owners decides to vacate one of the spots in the Vertical Limit, she can fill the empty spot with another one of her favorite vintages. The year of birth of a given vintage is printed on the end of each individual door on a metallic placard. For lack of a better description, this thing’s “baller.”
Initially, “painstaking†seems like the most appropriate term to describe his hyper-realistic paintings– after all, the detail is above the average human being’s level of artistic devotion. What else would describe the process? Focused? Acute? Zoinks? No matter. When words fail in an introduction, we always have the rest of the interview to suss it out.
Nike teams up with Dutch record label Appletree Records and a sneaker store in Amsterdam to bring us a triad of dope. In a brand new incarnation of the Pop-Up Store, the big brand features interpretations of some of their sneakerhead staples, including the Airmax, Dunks and of course, the almighty Air Force One. While the limited edition gear — including an incarnation of AW77 hoodie — can only be seen at a handful of stores in Europe (including project partner 290 Square Meters), anyone not in the vicinity can get a taste via the AW77 Loopwheeler inspired music project Peche Noire, comprised of Beau Love, Louis Bordeaux, Sotu the Traveller and engineer Elio Debets; fellas from Amsterdam’s Appletree Records. Check out the video.
If we ever wanted to create a nursery with an “Animals Our Children Will Never See” motif, this Global Warming rug by the Mexican design team at NEL (and available at Spanish retailer Nanimarquina) would certainly tie that room together. Maybe you can’t see it, but they surely intended this to be a BigLebowski environmental metaphor: you see, the carbon-spewing corporations, those are the “carpet pissers.” Society is like the Dude, who just wanted his rug back. And Al Gore? We’d like him to be Walter, but see him as more of a Donny.
We've talked about the lomography; the ultra low-tech return to photography, but the great thing about lomography is the community of users. People come together and make amazingly creative projects with these little plastic cameras. The Staple Design group has proven to be the pinnacle in the collective with their latest project.
Following the guidelines of Chakra, Staple Design sent out a mission statement of color codes to the lomography community and commissioned a few stand out photographers. After collecting thousands of images, the Reed Space is hosting an exhibition and the launch of the book “Colorsplash Chakra†for the photographs from the project. But it doesn't stop there, they’re also releasing a special Chakra Edition Colorsplash Camera. To kick it all off, there is a party tonight at the Reed Space. If you are in New York send an email RVSP to lomo [at] stapledesign.com — and hurry, space is limited. We would not recommend bringing your fancy digital SLR to document the event, instead try a pinhole camera; it'll get you street cred.
Anyone in the industries of marketing, graphic design, advertising, film-making, journalism, publishing, and way more knows that the indispensability of Getty Images ranks right up there with Apple and oxygen. It’s a one-stop place to shop for a mind-bogglingly huge array of images, footage, and music and is relied upon by creative types worldwide.
Now, Getty Images has tapped even further into the mindset of right-brained creative types with Moodstream, a kick-ass new brainstorming search tool. It's amazingly intuitive user interface starts with a presets wheel where you start the foundation of your search by choosing feelings that stabilize, simplify, intensify, refresh, excite, or inspire. Then you fine-tune from there– make the mood happier or sadder, turn the images nostalgic or contemporary, go for a vibe that's warmer or cooler, and much more. As you adjust the settings, the site plays different tracks from its music library to match what you've chosen, and each time you refresh your settings you're taken down a completely new road of imagery, sound, and video footage.
As you gather materials that ‘work,’ you can collect them together into individual Moodboards that you can save online– ideal for working on multiple projects at once or, if something's not working, forgetting about it for a while before coming back to attack it again. Though with a creativity boosting tool like this at your fingertips, inspiration probably won't be much of a problem.
The international women’s fashion retailer Topshop has tapped the legacy of famed fashion photog Helmut Newton to recreate the camera for which Newton became known in the 70’s. The Newton Machine is basically Newton’s self-timed camera with a mirror next to it and a strobe light connected to the “magic box.” The model adjusts the timer based on what she want’s to do in her pose– all at once she can be the photographer, stylist, and subject. The site tells us the story of Newton, explains this instant project, and most important– serves as a constantly updated place for candid photos of Topshop customers doing god-knows-what in front of that magic little box. Whether animalistic, expecting, or jumping for joy (see photos above, from left), it looks like folks are having fun with this one.
If you’re any what of a beat head, you know all about 1992’s Brasilintime, a history-making documentary film by hip-hop photographer B+ linking old-school percussion legends with beatmakers of our time like Madlib and Cut Chemist, shot around Sao Paulo. With his 
Nike Brazil’s newest campaign idea, entitled “V Project,” tasked nine people from the worlds of fashion, skate and art to create their vision of victory. One of them, artist and skate photographer 
Anyone in the industries of marketing, graphic design, advertising, film-making, journalism, publishing, and way more knows that the indispensability of 
