After leaving my house in Vancouver at 5AM, flying all day to finally check into our hotel in Boston at 6PM, Mark and I were exhausted. Time to check in, take a nap and then find a good meal. Not only did we arrive at a super swank boutique hotel called The Liberty Hotel, but [...]

If I was asked who Stefan Sagmeister was a week ago, I could’ve given a handful of knee-jerk descriptions; he’s a designer, he’s provocative, he’s influential. I could’ve said many things to describe the icon he has become, but I would have failed to mention that he’s human.
“Everybody who is honest is interesting.”
On Friday afternoon, [...]

The drive to improve and succeed has increasingly lead to professionals in all trades to specify down to minute processes in projects. A photoshop artist will focus entirely on fashion retouching, or an interactive designer will draw boxes and arrows all day long. Along with this professional focus, influences and inspiration can also become focused. [...]

As featured on Design Taxi
Macro or Micro?
The new Vancouver International Film Centre seems like the perfect venue for something called VIDFEST, a five day “festival” put on by New Media BC and meant to connect and promote the digital media sector. That said, the location is much smaller than the Granville Island facilities used [...]

London was buzzing for the last two weeks of September. Everywhere you looked, on every street corner there seemed to be something about design. The city was filled with museum exhibits, public art and storefronts with interactive installations. I took in what I could in a week before heading to the south of France for [...]

During the iDesign conference in London I heard Bill Thompson talk about design’s role in the world of technology and he mentioned the locking down of Apple’s newest portable products. I did some reading and found quite a lot under the surface. I was very close to buying an iPod Touch but now I’m reconsidering.
Apple [...]

In the UK, where I’ve been for the past couple of weeks, pay rates for design freelancers are up in many cases, particularly when it comes to digital disciplines, according to DesignWeek’s second annual survey.
Overall, pay increases have been extremely healthy over the last twelve months, with increases of 13% cited, and a further 9% [...]

I was somewhere over Northern California headed south when the fear started to take hold. I remember wondering about what lay ahead thinking something to the effect of ‘what am I doing here?’ As a graphic designer only peripherally interested in animation, 3D rendering, motion capture, or gaming, I was afraid that I might not [...]

This blog was started years ago in part as a repository for our inspirations, yet I think we often drift away from that purpose a bit, so I want to share something that inspired me this weekend: discovering new music.
Obviously music plays a big part in most of our lives. It’s always stated as a [...]

June 4th marked the launch of the new London 2012 Olympic logo and it didn’t take long for the controversy to begin. I’d already fielded a number calls and emails before lunch from friends, designers and even the media. My inbox is filled with emails about the subject from various GDC designers across the country—some [...]

Mark just asked me to take ten minutes and jot down my opinions about what a student (or anyone I guess) should do/include/avoid when putting together and presenting a portfolio. A couple years ago I actually did a post on the topic on this blog.

Since then I have been on the receiving end of hundreds [...]

Well, we did it, again. The Industrial Brand/Legends Memorabilia “PicniCANtics” took top honours in this year’s Canstruction Vancouver for the third, THIRD, year in a row (2005 Award, 2006 Award). For those not in the know, Canstruction is an international design/build competition that benefits local food banks, brings together teams of architects, engineers, graphic artists [...]

The longer I stay in this industry, the more I realize the difference between producing graphically appealing (pretty) solutions and creating strategic communication designs that produce results.
Though I use my training in Graphic Design daily and often find much of what I do professionally to be based on visual language and aesthetics, it is only [...]

Some time last year I began considering about the similarities between branding loyalty and belonging to a church after an interesting conversation with Rick Poyner, the design critic and founder of Eye Magazine, who said
“Religion is now just another lifestyle option fighting for survival with all the other brands in the chaos of the marketplace.”
[...]

I feel a rather humbled and a little bummed out since attending Rimmerfest at SFU downtown on November 25. It was both an inspiration and an honour to be among Canada’s Graphic Design elite to celebrate and honour one of Canada’s living national treasures, the printer, publisher, and one of the few remaining typography and [...]

The drive to improve and succeed has increasingly lead to professionals in all trades to specify down to minute processes in projects. A photoshop artist will focus entirely on fashion retouching, or an interactive designer will draw boxes and arrows all day long. Along with this professional focus, influences and inspiration can also become focused. Personally I spend the majority of my time in the interactive field and my natural reaction is to draw influences from other interactive work, read interactive books, check my RSS feeds for the latest tips and tricks and go to events and lectures on interactive topics. While a healthy dose of this is natural and absolutely required, I have been trying to spend increasing amounts of my time lately drawing influences and inspiration from fields further removed from my daily workload.

With this in mind, I’ve been enjoying events put on my ACM Siggraph Vancouver recently. Siggraph Vancouver is the local chapter of the Special Interest Group of Computer Graphics of the Association of Computer Graphics. My first experience with them was a lecture on the development of Turok, developed by Vancouver-based Propaganda Games. The presentation featured 7 of the department leads from Propaganda talking about their experiences, processes and challenges in the different stages of game production. Hearing the talks on developing the game play for the different levels, I was surprised as to the
depth of similarities between developing a brand for a client and branding a foreign alien planet. The systems are very similar but the implementations and executions are obviously rather different.

The next event featured Michael Rubin and Dr. Alvy Smith to talk to a sold out theater at the Vancity Theatre on April 16th. Ruben was on a book tour promoting his new book, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution and Siggraph had brought Dr. Alvy Smith (formally of Pixar, Lucasfilm and others) to round out the presentation. Like virtually every other kid growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I’ve been a huge fan of Star Wars but have never been aware of any of the stories behind the film.

Rubin opened up the evening with a one hour presentation about the history and importance of Lucasfilm. What overwhelmed me was the amount of information in his talk. Each small topic could have been an entire presentation. He’d throw out stories that ended with “…and what’s how we invented digital audio. So after that we had to….” and you’d be left with a spinning head trying to comprehend how this ranch in the middle of the California dessert was responsible for reshaping many of the film techniques that had previously been accepted as standard. Rubin finely balanced the fine line of giving a compelling lecture that engages the audience, but still left everyone wanting to buy his book.

At the break Rubin was inundated with requests for book signings consequently the break lasted a bit too long. Near the end of the break the buzz was forming for Dr. Alvy Smith to speak. Smith’s presentation seemed to engage the majority of the audience, presumably those already familiar with the Lucasfilm story and it’s major players, but for someone who wasn’t as familiar with the story, the presentation was simply recounting stories from the good ol’ days. Names like Ross Perot and Steve Jobs were interweaved with the history of Lucasfilm, Pixar and much of the cinematographic digital revolution that started in the early 80’s. Ultimately, after 90 minutes, I had to leave early to wander into Yaletown for some late night eats.

The little boy in me has to say that hearing first hand stories from Star Wars and Star Trek was freakkin cool! Beyond the boyish appeal these stories had, I was left with a few lasting impression. Lucasfilm was born in opposition to the old boys club in Hollywood in the 70’s. The studio environment of the previous 50 years had created a tight group of studio executives that we not willing to give young filmmakers (Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola as outlined in Droidmaker) a chance to make movies. Yet as the history post-Lucasfilm was told, it appeared as if there was a new old boys club. All the spinoffs from Lucasfilm and it’s devisions lead to Pixar (which had heavy involvement from Steve Jobs). In a post-Star Wars Hollywood environment, the same names kept on coming up again and again linked with many studios and important films. It’s not necessarily the bad thing that it was in the early 70’s as the proliferation of technology has opened up the independent film genera, but it’s still a few controlling a lot.

Much of legacy of George Lucas has been in the technological advancements that he made. Not being a cinophile, nor having taken any notes, I can’t remember any of the countless examples told by Rubin with enough detail to recount now, but these advancements were born out of necessity and ingenuity. Lucas wanted digital audio, but it didn’t exist, so they made it. The story tells so simply but countless man hours and frustration were sunk into these projects but also that necessity fueled invention.

Siggraph continues to bring in a solid list of events and coming up to celebrate their 5 year anniversary is Visual Futurist: The Art & Life of Syd Mead on May 14th. The presentation will feature a talk by Mead and then a screening of the uncut version of Blade-runner. Our friends over at Siggraph have had tickets on sale for a while and they should be sold out soon!

Posted by Steve Mynett on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 7:57 am | Filed under Articles | RSS 2.0 feed | leave a response | trackback |