Advanced Beauty

Advanced Beauty is a website, an international collaboration, collecting some truly amazing digital artwork, or like they call it: video sound sculptures. They are inspired by synasthesia which is a rare sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours. All of them are absolutely stunning. The sounds and the visuals together make something so beautiful and different to what I have ever seen anywhere before! Magical. 

Jennifer Maestre

Heat Wave

Aurora

Imp

My friend just sent me a link to the portfolio of a sculptor Jennifer Maestre and her work really made me smile. These are incredible! Her work is so fresh, inventive and fun. I love it how she uses something as common as pencils as material to create things that look so exotic. Some of them look beautiful, fragile but dangerous at the same time.  

ambient..

 This is ambient advertising for Feed SA in South Africa and for Pantene's campaign 'really strong hair' advertising an anti-breakage shampoo. I think these are both very effective; who wouldn't feel guilty piling up their groceries on a picture of the hungry child asking for food! Notice there's a man (a doll obviously, but what a great idea!) climbing up the huge braid! 

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) is one of the coolest films I've seen for a while. I think the idea for the film is just so good, it reminds me of The Truman Show but this one is definitely better. Stranger Than Fiction is about an ordinary man, Harold Crick. He is an IRS auditor who one day while brushing his teeth starts to hear a voice in his head narrating his life. Harold's life so far has been quite dull and lonely. He does the same things the same way every day but the narration starts to affect his entire life from his work, to his love-interests and to his death. I won't say anything else, everyone should watch it and see what happens!

This is the first scene of the film. Even after seeing these first few minutes I knew it was going to be brilliant. Harold likes to count a lot of things in his life, for example, brushing his teeth 38 times back and forth and 38 times up and down, he would run 57 steps per block for six blocks to catch the 8.17 bus to work and so on.. the graphics in this scene showing the things he counts etc. are great! They go with the scene and Harold's character so well. 

Emma Thompson is great in it aswell. 

Marimekko's fall collection

Flavia tunic / Becky dress / Meri dress

Karin dress / Kamilla dress

Purnukka Red

Ginkgo Gold

Marimekko (a Finnish textile and clothing design company) has done it again! I would love to wear anything from the fall collection, sadly they're a bit out of my price range right now. The prints with warm autumn colours combined with black, white and grey and large shapes are simply lovely. 

the magic roundabout

More from Cardiff! We drove past a roundabout with these sculptures in the middle and I was hanging out from the car window trying to take a photo. There was an international competition to design sculpture for this important road junction at an entrance to a large residental area and the winner was Pierre Vivant. He designed these five huge geometric shapes constructed with aluminium frames and covered by traffic signs. When we drove past again at night the sculptures looked completely different, the car headlights make the fraffic signs light up and it looked quite beautiful. It's popularly known as 'the magic roundabout'. 

Pierre Vivant also designed this sculpture in London called the Traffic Light Tree. 

Wall-e

I didn't really have a good idea what this film was about until I just saw it and was blown away! I think it's more a film for adults than for children really. It gives a really awful picture of the future where the Earth is so covered with rubbish that people have to leave and are now living on a giant spaceship sitting around doing nothing and getting so fat and lazy they can't move.

It was very interesting to see how they've made a film about robots who don't really speak, just make weird noises, and it worked so well! If Wall-e and the other robots were able to speak properly it would completely have ruined it. My favourite character was the tiny robot on the spaceship who was supposed to keep it clean. It had such a weird and interesting personality, especially when it got completely frustrated trying to clean the place. The filmmakers have been very creative when they have come up with all the different kinds of robots! The whole film is just so cleverly done I thought it definitely deserved a blog entry. 

Here's a clip of Mo the cleaner robot.

A Book of Wonder

This is one of those books you really don't need but it's so nice to have on the shelf! I like the typeface on the glittery cover but it's very hard to read except from a certain angle! A Book of Wonder is a kind of illustrated encyclopedia of collected wonders of the world. People from the UK and around the world wrote things that they think are somehow amazing or wonderful. The book was designed by graphic design studio Kerr Noble and I think they did a fantastic job. I especially like the decorative drop capitals at the start of each section and the almost childlike doodles by James and James. I love how random the things are that people have come up with for the book! 

For example:

  Bunny. When I am on the train on my way to work I know it's going to be a good day if I see a bunny in the field. Holly, recruitment consultant, London. 

Sea Horses. The only species that I know of where the male becomes pregnant. Debbie Roberts, helpdesk administrator, Leicester.

Wine. Glug, glug, glug. Oliver Reynolds, amateur viticulturalist, London.

Cardiff

I went to Cardiff for the weekend and took photos of some of the buildings and places I found interesting. I really liked the combination of old and modern architecture, most of the modern buildings were in Cardiff Bay. 

National Assembly for Wales and a wavy wooden roof. The building design reflects the idea of 'transparency' and it's also a good example of sustainable building design. 

I don't know what this building was, it wasn't even finished yet but this wall is kind of interesting..

FITZHAMON EMBANKMENT: this artwork represents a range of popular spices including mustard seed, coriander, saffron, nutmeg, cardamom and ginger. It was created by artists from Cardiff and Riverside residents as a part of a publis art project. Until we read what the artwork was about we thought they were of tomatoes, peas and pepper...

Cardiff Castle, there was a beautiful park behind it!

The Millenium Arts Centre in Cardiff Bay. It was constructed with slate, wood, steel and other materials traditionally used in Wales. On the front of the building in large Celtic lettering there is an inscription:  "CREU GWIR GWYDR O FFWRNAIS AWEN" and another in English: "IN THESE STONES HORIZONS SING". The letters are over 2m tall and they are windows for those inside the building. It looks a lot better when it's dark.

construct

amour 2007

mothership 2007

Construct is a series of images of places that exist only in the imagination of photographer/graphic designer Laura Kicey! She collected together pieces of different buildings over three years and blended them together creating these very surreal places. They look so much fun and so warm and friendly. I would love to live in one of these buildings, when they look like this on the outside there must be something very interesting inside...

Laura Kicey has a photoblog 'seen but not heard' which is also worth a look!

Mauri Kunnas

Mauri Kunnas' books are very well known in Finland and I'm not surprised! He does mostly children's books and I still enjoy reading them, probably because of the humour and his illustrations which are amazing! There are so many details in most of the illustrations that you can look at them for ages and always find a small character in a corner somewhere that you hadn't noticed before. Most of the characters are dogs but there is also for example a sleepwalking goat called Mr Hakkarainen who never really has a role in the stories but you can always spot him sleepwalking in the most random places!
More about Mauri Kunnas : www.maurikunnas.net

Air de Paris

This enormous helium balloon 'Air de Paris' by Aerophile was designed to show the people of Paris the levels of pollution in the city air. When the balloon is glowing red the air is highly polluted, orange for polluted, yellow for moderate and green for clean air ! You can see it from 20 km away! It's an interesting concept but I wonder how it works during daytime? 

Natural Fashion

These photographs are from Hans Silvester's book 'Natural Fashion, Tribal Decoration fron Africa'. Hans Silvester photographed members of two African tribes, Surma and Mursi from East Africa's Omo Valley. Instead of crafts or architecture these people express their artistic sense by using their own bodies as canvases and decorate themselves using flowers, leaves and branches or anything else they can find. This is so inventive! Not only have they created fashion for themselves but they've also painted their faces to complete the look. Designers everywhere in the world (especially fashion designers) could learn a lot from these tribes! And creating these looks like a lot of fun too!

"Inspired by the wild trees, exotic flowers and lush vegetation of the area bordering Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, these tribal people have created looks that put the most outlandish creations of Western catwalk couturiers to shame.

Here, a leaf or root is transformed into an accessory. Instead of a scarf, a necklace of banana leaves is draped around a neck. In place of a hat, a tuft of grass is jauntily positioned.

A garland of flowers, a veil of seed-pods, buffalo horn, a crown of melons, feathers, stems and storks - Mother Nature has provided a fully stocked wardrobe.

Like a dressing-up chest brimming over with costumes and make-up (paint created with pigments from powdered stone), the natural environment is the source for this glorious jungle pantomime."

Tenhola

wallpainting for Pispala modern art center, Tampere

'Freoni World'

I don't know what this was for but I love it how many different faces you can find in this drawing, I can't stop looking at it now..

Tenhola is a website of two artists, Teemu Raudaskoski and Antti Jussila.. there's not a lot of information on the artists on their Tenhola website but there is a lot of interesting, kind of strange art, illustrations, photos and some music clips and other recordings. They have done a lot of wallpaintings for different spaces; galleries, pubs and a nursery. The wallpaintings are amazing, I love their abstract style.

BonBon Kakku

BonBon Kakku (kakku = Finnish for cake, how cute is that name..) is an internet store where you can design your own fabrics. All the fabrics people have designed are published on the website and everyone can vote for them. If your design gets enough votes it will also be sold on the website! I've posted my favourite ones here. It's interesting to look through the designs because they are not by professional designers!

Kokoro & Moi

Graphic identity for the play The Last Beauty of the Day at the Helsinki City Theatre

Graphic identity for nightclub Bläk

illustration for NORD magazine, a semiannual German cultural magazine on Nordic culture

After seeing some really good adverts designed by Kokoro & Moi (a design consultancy in Helsinki) I wanted to check out what else they have done and there is a lot of interesting work on their website!+ the website is cool too. I especially like the logo designs. 

huge, enormous Decathlon

This is a print ad campaign for sports store Decathlon by Young & Rubicam advertising it as 'The biggest sports store ever.' It's a simple idea and I think they've come up with quite a clever way of saying it's a huge store where you can find any sport equipment you need. I especially like the ones with just the big letters, simple and effective.