BLACK PINE just released a new book which is not only lovingly hand made but is exceptionally beautiful in its simplicity. Great as a daily journal and small enough for traveling or taking photo-notes.
Order yours here.
My girlfriend hand makes really nice, super simple/minimal books under the name BLACK PINE. She just launched her online shop with a blank journal that is available in two different colors – a great gift idea for the holidays (or for yourself).
Happy 40th birthday to Sesame Street!
To celebrate, I give you one of my favorite moments (next to maybe this, of course): Geometry of Circles, a clip from a 1979 episode that includes music composed by Philip Glass!
If only shows for kids were still this great…
Jeffrey Ladd, author of 5B4, got in touch to inform me of a new publishing company he has started called Errata Editions. Working with publisher Valerie Sonnenthal and editorial director Ed Grazda, Jeffrey is giving creative direction to the project. Errata’s first releases, four books from a series called Books on Books, help get “the content of rare and out of print photobooks into the hands of new generations of photographers,” as Jeffrey wrote to me in the e-mail. Those titles are “currently ‘on press’ in China,” according to his blog post, which offers further explanation of the project:
The Books on Books series is an on-going publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible once again to photobook enthusiasts. Each in this series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or prohibitively expensive for most of us to experience. These are not facsimiles but complete studies of those original masterpieces. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series will span the breadth of practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study into the creation and meanings of these great works of art.
The current titles include:
Photographe de Paris by Eugene Atget
American Photographs by Walker Evans
Fait by Sophie Ristelhueber
In Flagrante by Chris Killip
This looks to be a very promising project. I’m curious to hear what readers think of the idea. But, in any event, I’m looking forward to seeing what else Jeffrey and the team do with Errata.
Find out more and view sample pages from the current titles on the website.
I was chatting with Michael Bühler-Rose (who, if you haven’t noticed, is currently holding down the fort for Laurel) and we got to talking about this installation piece posted on VVORK. “You just can’t look away,” Michael said. Seeing Mai Hofstad Gunnes‘ piece made me think of the work of French photographer George Rousse. Which reminded me… Georges Rousse’s work is pretty incredible.
Russelheim, 2003
© Georges Rousse
© Georges Rousse
A nice description of his process, via Wikipedia:
Rousse’s work, from the 1990s to today, generally appears at first glance to be photos of desolate or abandoned spaces (buildings, rooms, parking garages or streetscapes) often on their way to the wrecking ball, on which the artist has superimposed precise geometrical shapes or squiggly graffiti.
However, this is an intended illusion: what Rousse does is to paint these designs onto the abandoned spaces before taking the photo, correcting for such things as the slope of floors or the interruption of beams, so that the painted designs come together to produce the illusion of a simple, flat design floating on the surface of the photo.
A few more examples:
Réel, 2003
© Georges Rousse
Köln, 2002
© Georges Rousse
Dravert, 2007
© Georges Rousse
© Georges Rousse
Take a look at more of his photographs here (in a film about his work), here, here and here. I also highly recommend picking up Contacts (Vol. 3) to hear him talk about his work. And if you’re into Rousse, you’ll probably like Felice Varini.
Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.
For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):
Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:
Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.
HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.
Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):
Curious what the colors mean?
blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Here’s Google (google.com):
Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.
Head to the site and try it for yourself!
Early color wheel, 1708
© C.B. (presumably Claude Boutet)
Pulling from Sarah Lowengard’s text, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the COLOURlovers blog put together a great article on the history of the color wheel. The article looks at the progression of color organization systems and how the wheel came to be, featuring a some great color organization examples along the way.
Read it here.
A little while back, I posted about an online archive of jazz LPs. I was thrilled to come across a similar collection of classical record sleeves. Love it.
Check out Vintage Vanguard‘s great online archive of record sleeves for albums by various jazz musicians. Nice use of color, image placement and typography in some of these LPs.
In case you were wondering, “ジャズレコード館” translates from Japanese to English as “Jazz Record Mansion.”
cover and p. 1 of About 2 Squares, 1922
© El Lissitzky
In one of my classes today we spent a little while looking at and discussing this beautiful children’s book by Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect (seriously!) El Lissitzky, titled About 2 Squares.
In the images above, the page on the left (the cover) translates from Russian to English as “About 2 [Squares]” and the page on the right translates as “To all, for all Children.” Lissitzky produced and sold about 3,000 copies of it in 1922 – quite a lot at that time.
The MIT Press released a great letterpress reproduction with English translations printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian in 1991 – now out of print. From their website:
El Lissitzky’s first supremacist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky’s “scientific romance,” an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.
It’s really worth seeing if you can find it. Lissitzky’s vision of design and typography was brilliant for his time and he was making work that was both visually innovative and socially/politically relevant.
See more pages from About 2 Squares (with text in Russian) here.
