Z brush

I thought id do a post on one of the 3d tools thats made the biggest impact to the character modeling/design industry in recent years. Pixolgic's Z brush is a digital sculpting software that came out in early 2000. The tools major advantage to traditional subdivision modeling methods. Their propitary method of subdividing lets the user work on a mesh in the millions and move through multiple levels of subdivision with ease. The user is able to move from their base mesh of mere hundreds of polygons to a million and still be able to sculpt directly onto the mesh without decreased performance. The program does this so well that you are able to sculpt skin details onto a character such as scales or pores. The program's other major advantage is the intuitiveness of the program. The tools relate more to traditional sculpting or painting than to computer based hard surface or nurb modeling. The system also allows your to "paint" details onto a mesh using alpha maps that you can make from any 2d program like photoshop. The system pairs very well with other programs like maya or 3dsmax, thereby improving the pipeline and streamlining workflow.

Helvetica

During class we watched the film Helvetica. The film is a full length documentry on typography, design,  and visual culture. The film goes into all of the prolific effects the typeface has had on the world in the past 50 years. The film disects the areas of design, advertising, psychology, and communication. Helvetica interviews numerous respected designers such as Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones to name a few.

Helvetica was created by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Europe in the 1950s was seeing a revival of sans-serif typefaces. The typeface was introduced during a peak in popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared everywhere from logos to fine art. .

Artist profile: Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry is a renowned Architect based out of Los Angles California. His buildings including his own home have become some of the most recognizable structures in architecture and have become massive tourist attractions. Some of his more recognizable works are the Guggenhiem museum in Bilbao Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and Dancing House in Prague. His work is in the style of deconstructionism, a style which goes beyond typical structural definition. There is no concept of form follows function, it is only aesthetics. This is something that is very interesting to me as typically architecture to me is a stagnant field that follows a rigid rule set that leaves aesthetics aside for a more functional grounding. Gehry's methodology takes advantage of the new world tools to realize his visions that would otherwise be impossible or implausible. I really relate to his drafting method as well, i like the way he messily sketches out forms with drawing and crumbled paper and scotch tape.

Jonathan Ive

I had no idea who was responsible for so many of the well designed apple products until we watched "Objectified". Jonathan Ive is senior vice president of industrial design at Apple inc. He is the lead designer of the iMac, powerbook g4, macbook, unibody macbook pro, ipod, iphone, and ipad. All of which are extremely elegant, fully functional designs. All of these products really speak to what design should be about. All of the subtle nuances that he speaks of not only serve to make their products more visually appealing but increase the products lifespan and functionality. Ive designs products not for the sake of them being "designer" so as to increase revenue, but because thats how it should be. Ive has numerous awards and recognitions and has the credit of designing some of the most widely recognizable products int the western world.

obey

I really thought the talk with Shepard Fairey was really intriguing. The ideas of blind consumerism and mass acceptance have always been on my mind and his ways to bring those ideas to the forefront are really strong in my opinion. When he went through the story of how his andre the giant sticker got started i thought it really spoke to a lot of the tendencies of society. The fact that he started a sort of mass awarness from something completely irrelavent, something that started out as a joke, and used that newfound awareness to leverage in his own propaganda is quite inspiring. Its interesting that his campaigns sprouted the same mindless consumerism that he was speaking against. People took interest and wanted to be part of the group even though they could not derive any real meaning from the work. His personal fine arts work is also very strong, and unfortuantly very refreshing. Its somewhat unusual to find someone at such a high skill level so completely devoted to social agendas now.

And now some example works.

Artist profile: marko djurdjevic

After seeing the video on comics i tried to think of a recent artist whose work i really admired. Someone that immediately came to mind is Marko Djurdjevic. Before i get into his background ill link some of his work.

 I came across this artist on the forum conceptart.org while following his finished work thread. I also knew his work from massive black studios. Now for a little back story.

Marko Djurdjević is a german concept artist and illustrator of serbian decent. He currently works for marvel comics and has a large body of work including interior artwork, cover art, character designs, and promotional work. He lives in berlin with his wife Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic. Marko, while working in germany, was convinced by a friend to upload work to conceptart.org, which at the time was a new art community. He was immediatly noticed by the founders of the community jason manley and andrew jones. The two had been in the process of networking to form a comany devoted to producing concept art for game and films. Marko was offered a position as senior concept artist and subsequently became one of the founding memvers of massive black studios.

While working at massive black marko produced several redesigns for prominent marvel characters. After the work was seen by the general public on conceptart.org he was flooded with responses, both good and bad. The work happened to be seen by an editor at marvel comics who offered marko a job producing covers.