Secret Still

This week I’m gonna shine the spotlight on design exclusively, and to make things easier on you, I’ll only be talking about one designer a day. You might have heard of these designers, and you might not, but they’re work speaks volumes. For example, today’s designer, Paul Torres, has some great logo/identity work as well as a solid web design sampling. You don’t usually find those two disciplines together in one person, and even if you do they are almost never both well done. If you love identity, things like web design tend to atrophy. Torres is definitely the exception to the rule. His work is classy, simple, clever and very well executed. And he takes identity a lot further than most, even straying into packaging design. His site says that he’s looking for full-time employment, which baffles me, because someone should’ve snapped him up by now. But it seems like he could make a killing in the freelance world; a designer who can create your identity and a website to go along with it is worth his/her weight in gold. That’s a fact.

Paul Torres

Thank you, random emails, for turning me on to the works of H. Mathis. I tend to shy away from most forms of performance art (I’m not saying that’s entirely what Mathis does), but Mathis’ projects are so damn entertaining and straight-faced that I can’t help but enjoy them. Take, for instance, his Super Secret Art Interaction. He sends out a call on Craigslist for participants to give him their codename and description, draws them, meets them in disguise to give them their portrait, and goes on his way. That is the limit of their interaction. Then, months later all of the participants are contacted about an art show that features their photo and codename. How can you not want to participate in a Super Secret Art Interaction? And that’s only a small part of his nonsensical arsenal of projects. Regardless of their medium, I’m down for any artist who can make me look at the world differently. Except you, Matthew Barney, you should stop right now.

H. Mathis

Evan Roth is like the Richard Feynman of interaction and street art. Everything he does is open source. Everything he does turns the traditional idea of something on its side. He co-founded the Graffiti Research Lab if that will help you understand how gigantic his innovations are. My favorite part of any of his experiments/projects is that he wants to put them in all of our hands. Open source is the watchword. What makes him like Feynman even more is that he never settles on being great at one thing. His work is constantly moving into different arenas, mediums, ideas, and locations. It’s the process of dreaming up an idea and then making it a reality regardless of whether or not you have the skills to creat it already. People like this are unstoppable forces of change. I’m just glad he’s on our side.

Evan Roth

*Update*

Evan and the GRL project are featured today in an episode of Boing Boing TV that you can watch here. You can also find it in today’s Daily Videos.

I’m pretty sure that the best part about having a kid, better than all the love and milestones and blah blah blah, will be getting to buy and read kids books. I love kids books. Almost as much as I love cake. Kids mean more cake, too. Basically kids are the answer to happiness for me but not in a loving them way, more in a getting what I want way. The internet, in an obvious attempt to stop me from reproducing, has come up with a new site called LookyBook. The site features hundreds of children’s picture books from cover to cover, both new and old, making it easy for parents to decide which books they’d like to get for their child. It comes with all of the usual bells and whistles including a favorites list (bookshelf), sharing, purchasing (Amazon and Barnes & Noble), as well as embedding the flash book on a website (you might have noticed). It’s nice to know that the internet wants to keep me from having kids. I’m warning it though, I’ll replace The Girl’s pills with aspirin if there isn’t a free cake delivery site up and running in the next few months. Consider yourself warned.

LookyBook

A perfect example of why artists that consider themselves philosophers should punch in their own pretentious faces is The Parallels Almanac. It’s interesting to mess with once you get past the ridiculousness of some of the “arguments”. I do like that he quotes sources, and the idea behind the project. This is an interesting creation of scholarly art.

The Parallels Almanac

Read more about the project.