Author Archives: nickromanowski3481

NAVER DESIGN COLLOQUIUM ’18 from cobb on Vimeo.

At my core, I’m a motion designer and as a result of this I absolutely love some good motion design and love it even more if it brings static elements to life while also harmonizing with them. This fun little bechance project I found is for a conference with the theme “challenge to change”. That theme is so wonderfully exemplified by the versatility of those simple circles. They can exist as mere echos of each other, become complex shapes, and even extrude themselves into intricate and animated 3D forms. They make up a toolkit of simple and dynamic elements that can work in a variety of ways. Obviously the make stunning, yet basic animations. But they can also create still graphics and signage or frames that are just as dynamic and interesting to look at. The color changes sued throughout are also extremely appealing and add a whole new layer to each composition. 

http://hello.processing.org/display/#@-LpVqJVlhSjRGeqkTtiG

https://www.designembraced.com

The portfolio site for Anthony Goodwin, or “Design Embraced”, has some very cool animated and interactive elements that truly make it feel alive. Through what I imagine to be some sort of javascript or CSS wizardry, the site features large pink panels that are brought to life in a way that makes them feel as if they are a large piece of fabric. Upon load, the sort of settle or land into place and then the bubble/bulge up as your cursor moves across the screen, almost as if it has a sort depth to it that is pushing against the cloth it sits under. As you scroll, that same “bulge” sensation also exists on large photos/documentations of work. Images almost hit a bump in the road and curve out towards it. The site has a kind of dimensionality to it as a result of these interactive components and it truly makes you feel as they you are taking a journey of sorts or really handling a tangible, dimensional material that exists within your device.

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http://species-in-pieces.com

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“Species in Pieces” is an incredibly interactive end ingeniously developed site by Bryan James. My primary area of interest in the fields of art and design are interactivity and animation and Bryan here has done a wonderful job of blending these two aspects into a code experience that both impresses with its technical aspects, while also using them to aid in the story telling. The site is about species that are endangered, which is where the term pieces comes from in the title. Aesthetically, each animal is rendered in a low-poly 3D model made up of triangles or pieces. Those same pieces are utilized in every animal/shatter or explode to convey transitions or the cause of a species endangerment. Though extremely complex seeming, the site actually very cleverly creates this experience through the use of CSS polygons. Each animal was rendered in 3D and then the coordinates of each vertex on each triangle were entered into the CSS. Transitions between animals or other shapes made up by the polygons are created by animating between the set of coordinates. It is incredibly simple and impressive effect and helps to convey the narrative even more effectively. 

“Sorry to dump on you like this.zip” is a submission to rhizome.org‘s The Download collection/piece. It focuses on various works that involve the act of downloading or utilizing the viewers personal computer as an exhibition space. Paul Soulellis’ submission is quite interesting and also got NSFW. I stumbled upon it simply by searching for internet art, which this very much embodies. The zipped download unzips into a folder of 1,860 seemingly nonsensically named photos of gay porn. Some of them have random file names such as “a color not found in nature.jpg” or “a stack of out of date apparel mags.jpg”. At first glance, everything is both meaningless and rather graphic. If however, the files are sorted by the date of their creation, things begin to make sense. The photos feature modified metadata that has them range from 1999-2015 and when read from oldest to newest begin to tell a story. The names of each image are actually conversational exchanges via a chatting service (based on the fact that things start in ’99, I’d say that it spans a few chat services). Some of the messages refer to other people or characters, but real names are never used. Instead, people are referred to by their usernames on the service they’re interacting on. The piece is this interesting download/upload/download mashup, in which the artist has “downloaded” or collected these conversation snippets that are happened over the web and then embedded them into images so that they can be uploaded and re-downloaded. It crafts this interesting narrative on the internet, online dating/interacting, and how the internet has specifically spawned a sort of net-subculture for the gay community. Gay chat rooms and apps like grindr have fundamentally changed how this once hidden community interacts with one another and the use of pornographic images to convey the messages is definitely in reference to the communities obsession with visuals and nudity on online platforms. It almost mocks the nature of the connections spawned on these services by quite literally associating every exchange with a sexual act or image. 

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/nov/12/the-download/

https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/

I love a good web campaign, and the Captain Marvel one is undeniably one of the most interesting as of late. The film is set in the mid 90’s and in order to promote its release and set the scene, Marvel studios created a promotional website designed and crafted to look as though it came straight out of the 90’s. It aggressively pushes the early web aesthetic through its use of seemingly rigid HTML tables and appearing to lack the stylings of the yet to be created CSS. Those looks, however, are deceiving. As rather than be constructed using only basic HTML, the site references plenty of style sheets and pieces of javascript to achieve its pixelated, in your face 90’s aesthetic. The developers of the site definitely anticipated people inspecting their work and very cleverly hid another promotional piece for the film, the US release date, in the pure HTML for the home page. So that when individuals, including myself, looked out of curiosity they’d have that date thrown in their face.