Subway Grate Sculpture

New subway grates in New York City, designed by Rogers Marvel Architects, serve both as public art and to prevent flooding. "As a flood-control device, the structure creates a protective collar, or sleeve, around ventilating grates that are typically set flush to sidewalk level. The idea is not to completely waterproof the platforms and tracks below, but to mitigate a devastating cascade of water, silt, mud and debris." The upside: Manhattan fashionistas won't get their heels stuck in the sidewalk-level crates. The downside: The new sculptures will definitely impede sidewalk traffic flow, taking up a good portion of the sidewalk. The new sculpture also is strangely similar to Andrea Blum's Plateau piece on 40th Street. Plateau "was made of perforated steel, concrete and light which formed interlocking pavilions, tables, and seating to identify locations for private and social interaction. It was envisioned as a three-dimensional puzzle designed to respond to the individual and collective needs of a diverse public" (Andrea Blum's website). Both show interesting solutions to the sculptural issue of form vs. function.

A Goodbye to Yankee Stadium

An interactive feature in the New York Times of Yankee Stadium on it's last night is described as a "panorama composed of a series of photographs taken over a short period of time." Is this the work of Photoshop, stitching the overlapping photos together?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/21/sports/baseball/20080921_YANKEES_PANO2.html?th&emc=th

The home of the Bronx Bombers and 26 world championships that Ruth built that dates back to 1923 held its final game earlier this week. The last game was a celebration of baseball, the renowned stadium, the franchise, and its fans. And what else? A logo, always painted so perfectly on the grass that not even the Pope's feet may touch. An interlocking "NY," according to the Yankees website, was first used on the uniforms of the New York Highlanders in 1909. The design was created in 1877 by Louis B. Tiffany "for a medal to be given by the New York City Police Department to Officer John McDowell, the first NYC policeman shot in the line of duty. Perhaps because one of the club's owners, Bill Devery, was a former NYC police chief, the design was adopted by the Highlanders." When the Yankees move to their new stadium next season, Yankee fans can find comfort both in seeing their same team and the same logo painted fresh on the lawn, even in a vastly different setting. A comparison of the two stadiums: http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/nyy/ballpark/new_stadium_comparison.jsp

Recent Graphic Design Caffeine High

Looks like dinnerware designers are reaching out to designers' late hours and resulting addiction to coffee. Here are pictures of a Helvetica mug and a whole series of Pantone products (mugs, cups and saucers, and even messenger bags). With so many Pantone colors, the choice is a little daunting. What next: Pantone mouse pads? CD cases/flash drives?

Introducing Creative Suite CS4

This morning, I woke up early like other true design fanatics to watch the live launch of Adobe Creative Suite CS4. Adobe featured 1-hour streaming video from 9-10am introducing all the new tricks of the software. Here's a recap of some of the most relevant features in the design applications. If you've gotten into the habit of going far beyond the measurements of your artboard in Illustrator, have no fear--the "pages" aspect of InDesign has now been integrated into Illustrator through multiple artboards. You can create them at multiple sizes and place them wherever you want in your document. They can even overlap, and you can import individual artboards into InDesign books or even save individual artboards for web. There is a new way to paint, called the "Blob Brush" that creates outline-filled objects instead of paths with brushstrokes applied to them. The new outline-filled objects are easy to erase and are a quick-and-easy way to illustrate. Lastly, the appearance palette is now definitely going to be a more frequently used and is finally a more functional palette. You will be able to change all the properties of an object or multiple objects at the same time. In InDesign, you can set specific parameters and then an error window will pop up if you go against them. In Photoshop, you can squish an image with it being aware of the content of the image; for example, it won't squish people but rather the useless pixels of space between people. You can also now use a series of 2D images and stitch them together and create a 3D image from them. You can even place a 2D image into the 3D image. Crazy. It should be interesting to see how long it takes for CS4 to disseminate into the design world. Obviously it's a big investment for studios, but Adobe promises its update will save time and make designers work more efficiently in the future.

See these links for videos with more new features of CS4:
Illustrator: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1554v1699
InDesign: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1689
Photoshop: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1686

Example of Illustrator's artboards:

Set in Ink

As the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics came to a close, all are who took part in and watched from the sidelines committed to keeping the memories of the games with them moving forward and onward. The closing ceremonies reinforced the importance of “remembrance” in the featured “memory tower” to live on after the giant flame was extinguished, on which nearly 400 performers climbed and swayed to the music. After nine months of training, the climbers surely represented unity and teamwork, two values by which the Olympic Games stand. It was incredible to watch as the performers moved together like flowers opening, recreating a whole new flame, and using floating yarn at the end to reveal the logo on the tower—the logo living on in our memories.

But in case the “memory tower” is too metaphoric for you, you can always… get a tattoo, the New York Times describes in this past Sunday’s “Sunday Styles” section. Tourists, athletes, and local residents have sported the Olympic rings in ink in an effort to commemorate their time in Beijing. The action is a surprising one, considering the disreputable past of tattoos in China for centuries. The article mentions how “imperial courts tattooed criminals’ faces before sending tem into exile. By the 1949 revolution, the tattoo was the favored mark of crime syndicates and subsequently condemned by the Communist Party. Today, tattoos remain taboo for many of China’s elder generation, which sneers at the sight of a sun or lotus inked on the back of a trendy neighbor.” Even Phelps sports the rings on his right hip... but he also holds 8 Beijing gold medals of which to be reminded.

Get your knock-off logo here

Want a fake Prada purse? Cheap baseball jerseys? New luggage at a fraction of the price? Well, you can always head to Canal Street in New York City… or better yet… Shanghai. But as the August issue of Print Magazine points out, while you might be able to find such knock-off luxury brands in China, you won’t be able to find any phony merchandise with a particular brand—that of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“We cannot sell that,” explains a vendor of fake Nike and Adidas running socks. “The police say it will destroy the reputation of the Olympics.” And I’m not all too surprised by the response. If a country does not allow a young girl with crooked teeth to sing its anthem, what would make people think it would allow copies of t-shirts with the ancient script logo or its cuddly cartoon characters?

Where can you buy the merchandise? The article writes: For several years, it and the Fuwa have been for sale in their own right as part of a mass merchandising campaign unparalleled in modern Olympics history. There are at least three licensed Olympics merchandise shops within a block of each other on the busiest section of Wangfujing Dajie, Beijing’s pedestrian-only, 700-year-old shopping boulevard. T-shirts, caps, and stuffed versions of the five cuddly Fuwa are available at all of them. Those shoppers interested in higher-end items can visit the Beijing 2008 Olympic Flagship Store, a long, poorly lit space where customers file past cases stuffed with goods, and a giant inflated Fuwa stands guard over $1,000 bejeweled commemorative plates decorated with more of the cutesy creatures. It’s a little ironic that even though the Olympics include and embrace all spectators and athletes, the logo has an air of exclusivity to uphold.

Fun Label Design

This is a cool product that I haven’t really seen anything like it before. Mentioned in September’s InStyle Magazine, Wine That Loves is a wine company that positions itself as a wine company that prides itself on bringing “that seemingly elusive pleasure” of tasting what happens when food and wine are paired right “to your dinner table each and every night.” The wines have titles that range from “Wine That Loves Grilled Steak” to “Wine That Loves Pasta with Tomato Sauce.” It’s an extremely clever way of approaching what many consider a daunting subject – which wine to serve for dinner. The label design is my favorite part. It’s fun, iconic, and there’s a consistency between the different wines’ labels that unifies the brand.