London-based artist Nick Gentry makes great use of discarded 3.5” floppy disks.

His arresting portraits are applied directly onto the obsolete disks, with minimal interventions of paint that reveal the colors, markings, and notes that brand each old cartridge. Certain aspects of the disks are used strategically: metal plates for eyes, colored casings for a jackets and hair, etc.

On his website, the artist describes his inspiration:

Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.

This represents a big shift away from physical, real world objects, driving towards a human existence that is ultimately governed by billions of intangible data files. This release of information from the physical form allows personal data and identities to now be revealed and infinitely shared online. At the same time many of us consider individuality and privacy to be more precious than ever. Will humans be forever compatible with our own technology?

Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art.

I like it a lot. And something about the colors and gritty technology makes me really want to watch Blade Runner…

A couple of fine pieces made by Anni Albers. It’s hard to tell if these were made before or after the textiles they represent — as design tests or as post documentation of the fabric itself.

Either way, so timeless… I don’t know what exactly it is about them.

What exactly makes something timeless? Is it the geometry? The restrained color of something? The fact that it is completely non-referential? Or maybe the reference is so obscure… better yet, more ordinary?

My design for an Earth Day Klean Kanteen bottle contest at GOOD Magazine.

My concept is a consolidation of the international recycling symbol and a diagram of Earth’s ever-present water cycle.
The intent is to reaffirm recycling and reuse of material as natural life processes, ones that have been in place since Earth’s watery beginning.

Everyone needs water… and with the proliferation of easily destructive products like disposable plastic bottles, safe and sustainable drinking containers have become really important.

My design for an Earth Day Klean Kanteen bottle contest at GOOD Magazine.

(bottle photo by mellisaha)

Matt Siber cleverly removes traditional written language from his photographs, allowing a purely graphic city to speak for itself.

From the artist’s statement:

“The Untitled Project” is rooted in an underlying interest in the nature of power. With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language. The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.

The reintroduction of the text takes written language out of the context of its intended viewing environment. The composition of the layouts remain true to the composition of their corresponding photographs in order to draw attention to relative size, location and orientation. The isolation of the text from its original graphic design and accompanying logos, photographs and icons helps to further explore the nature of communication in the urban landscape as a combination of visual and literal signifiers.

If you were in doubt about the power of color in the landscape… here you go.

These extraordinarily sparse graphics, made by Maria Zaikina, all depict basically the exact same scene, and yet manage to convey a huge variety of moods and places… simply by a considered palette of colors.

I was surprised at how moved I was, actually… and I think it is as a collection that they gain the most meaning as a wide survey of the seasons and times of day. This lonely structure is so easily transformed from a calm lakeside retreat, to an abandoned desert factory, to an idyllic barn in green fields, to a tropical beach cabana — all with a few choice swatches from Adobe Illustrator.

It makes me wonder how often we really notice our landscape for its detail, and how often we are just affected by the broad hue combinations in the view. How deeply ingrained is a fiery yellow wooden wall against a deep plum eastern sky at sunset, to signify a calm transition to night? What about a beach, and those three colors which remain unbroken: sand sea and sky?

I love this project, and how much it’s proven to me about the minimal pieces my brain can assemble to feel emotion. Josef Albers would be proud.

For an even better experience of this little house, check out the entire set as a slideshow, set to fast speed.  So nice.

Awesome set of antique radio tuning dials, found at Indiana Radios.

Considering they all did pretty much the same thing, there seems to be a ton of variety in these things. I guess from country to country, or with different radio companies, you had a completely different dial.

From a graphic / typographic standpoint, they just blew me away. Such unconventional type, line, and color choices, but also really ubiquitous at the same time… like you’ve seen them all before somewhere, but also never really seen anything like it.

I also found it interesting because they represent an era of technological transition. As radio took off and people started to navigate the airwaves, the graphic identity of the radio seemed to neglect the state-of-the-art electrical nature of the instrument, and was more akin to the nautical navigation devices of the past. People understood the compass as the main way-finding interface, so I guess it was only natural to relate the radial knobs and dials to that graphic system.

An intriguing idea… that all those ham radio guys were actually mapping sonic space, dialing each other up, triangulating positions through concentric circles, writing down important headings or frequencies. Sounds more and more like the surveys of 15th century cartographers. Even the name Zenith (as in the amateur radio company from Chicago) is a direct reference to a projected line from the earth to the heavens, and has it’s origin in the field of Practical Geodesy - the science of earth measurement in three-dimensional space.

Today it’s just as commonplace for us to have a digital radio dial, since we navigate the world through the same kind of digital space, with electronic coordinates on our GPS.

But yeah, aren’t they cool? And as long as we are making connections about the graphic implications of such symbols, I’ll say that I’m not surprised at all to realize that the circular dials are also very reminiscent of other directional systems: the medicine wheel of the American Indian, or even the Mayan calendar. Alright, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but you have to admit, the colors and lines on some of these things seem to fit the description.

I think contemporary designers can learn a lot from the intuitive usability of analog displays like this. Then again, there’s so much beauty in the computer as well, so…

In 1961 Eduard Imhof was asked to produce an “Atlas of Switzerland”:

This atlas is an attempt to show the country with its variety of nature, population, culture and economy in maps. Supported by numerous Swiss scientists the first edition was finished in 1978 and published by the Federal Office of Topography. Since 1998 the Institute of Cartography of the ETH has been working on a digital edition of the Atlas of Switzerland.

Beautiful stuff.

i love these covers from old jazz LPs.

you can definitely see a lot of the improvisation in the music carrying through to the album art. lots of graphic experimentation going on… and a lot of great inspiration.

the whole jazz movement has always inspired me. not just the music, but the entire visual and spiritual essence of it all. the cool dark rooms where they played, warmly lit by light reflected off of brass instruments through smoky air… the way the musicians spoke to each other, so automatically in tune with each other and their individual roles in the music… and then these covers, the artistic (and tangible) compositions that provided a visual outlet to match the creativity of the music.

thanks to jordan for finding these. they’re just some of what can be found at Birka Jazz, a record shop with an extensive gallery of rare and vintage jazz covers categorized by category, label and country. definitely check it out for examples of great (and mostly forgotten) graphic design.

pretty nice graphic visualizations from Parsons MFA design + tech student Nick Hardeman in New York City:

“These images are generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video “Mo Money Mo Problems” from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death. The initial frame detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame. The output is rendered as a vector image, the curves represent the motion. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, their size determined by the distance from their previous location, the further, the larger. The color of the points are determined by the color of that pixel in that frame. The only imagery added manually is the background color.”

gotta love rule-based generative operations, especially when they produce something that looks as good as this.

i hope he makes an animation of the data that syncs with the actual video…