BrandArt

Quoted from Drawn. Hand-painted lettering is powerful and eclectic, but also unique and surprising. There’s nothing else quite like a hand-painted sign.

Breakbot – Baby I’m Yours (feat. Irfane) – HD from Ed Banger Records on Vimeo. Quoted/Stolen from: 72dpi

Disney XD – Pair of Kings from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

Two flip-book style animations. Both of these are about a year old but still very cool.

Annual video game sales are now regularly exceed Hollywood box office receipts. Video games are becoming the dominate popular art form of our era, but they are still largely a misunderstood medium. Video games were once played only by children, teens and nerds and there has been very little appreciation by their creators or their users that video games were a truly art. But even as a handful of game designers try to make a true art form out of video games, the convergence between advertising and gameplay will work against them. Video games, whether art or not, are becoming a powerful and diverse force in the media industries.

One of the reasons it’s been hard for video games to gain respect is that video games often communicate their messages through gameplay rather than storytelling. Stories and game play are both crucial to the human experience because they are both mechanisms with which children learn about the world. Storytelling has been at the center of all creative arts for centuries. Literature began with dramatic poetry and storytelling has been an important part of literature, theater, and even painting and photography ever since.

Traditional bias is probably the biggest reason why creatives tend to favor storytelling over game play as a communication technique, but it’s time for creative people to recognize the legitimacy of games (There’s a great post on W/K London’s blog that makes this point for advertising professionals). CP+B was one of the first advertising agencies to recognize the power games had by creating a Burger King game for the XBox. The children who grow up playing the burger king game will probably experience more video games than movies, and will probably view gameplay as a natural and possibly even more effective communication technique than traditional storytelling.

Video games have been incorporating storytelling in some form for many years. Some have been successful, but overall, gameplay is the most effective construction for game design: “the medium is the message.” Under close examination though, the gameplay vs. storytelling divide falls apart. Gameplay is just a non-linear and experiential form of storytelling. The biggest problem standing in the way of the video game’s ascendence into an accepted art form isn’t that gameplay falls short as a technique. It’s that nobody has completely figured it out how to master the video game form–yet. This is one of the central points in Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. He critiques the cultural value and the storytelling aspects of the video games throughout their history and he shows that video games are indeed evolving into an art form, but there is still a long way to go. The writing within video games is still often sub-par. Bissell interviews game industry veterans and most have high expectations for video games, they continue to provide an opportunity to communicate in totally new ways.

But even as the traditional game industry is becoming more influential, the game industry itself is being transformed by the convergence of advertising, social media and games. Social games like Farmville combine online games with marketing and advertising. Farmville is built upon an online business opportunity that is an answer to psychological questions nobody else was asking, who would have thought that people would pay money to show up their friends in an online game? It’s amazing too that people would be willing to complete surveys and sign up for credit cards for points in a video game. Games are becoming a part of reality, a part of everyday life. Jesse Schell explains how he sees the convergence between games and reality and how it will evolve in the future. His talk is a plea to professional game designers to get involved in making these games better. With more than 80 million Farmville players game designers have a stage that is bigger than ever before, now is the time to make art out of video games.

This site is truly amazing. Wonderfl is an online ActionScript compiler with an interface that encourages code-sharing. It’s an online community for ActionScript developers. The game above is as sophisticated as the old arcade game that inspired it and you can peek under the hood at the code that makes it work ( to play us the move;arrow or wasd/shot;ctrl,z,n/slow;shift,x,m). The projects on Wonderfl currently shared range from simulations, experiments to games but there’s no limit to the kinds of Flash apps that could be collaboratively developed on the site.

When a movie is being made, and a landscape, set or location proves too difficult or too expensive to shoot, matte artists create matte paintings to fill the frame. Traditionally artists painted scenes on glass backdrops that extended a live action scene. Today they work in Photoshop, creating digital paintings that often include 3d models. The final art is added to the movie using compositing software like AfterEffects. Matte painters are part comp artist, part fine artist, part designer and sometimes part 3d modeler. They’re close to the creative development process of the film, sometimes creating concept art for the film’s director in the beginning stages and eventually creating finished matte paintings that become part of the special effects. A whole bunch of matte painter’s portfolio sites are in the old Yahoo! directory.

Sometimes art isn’t a tangible object but an experience. Since installation and video art emerged in the 90s, these artists have embraced digital technology. Toby Joe explains how the frameworks for animation are evolving in a cross-posted blog post Toward the Bare Metal: From Flash to Processing, OpenFrameworks, and Beyond, “A lot of people moved from Flash to Processing–a great Java-based framework and IDE–as their interests moved away from wide distribution (via the Flash player) towards lower-level access to the hardware.” OpenFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding. An artist collaborative called Field showcases the video above with some information about their processes. Code has created art, but coding is an art in itself.

Augmented reality technology might one day be ubiquitous. Everybody might walk around wearing heads-up display glasses projecting directions, emails, text messages, various widgets and tags onto their field of vision. Will this technology liberate artists and their audience from billboard advertising or isolate and confine them into their own little worlds? Will augmented reality create a space for free expression or an opportunity for targeted marketing messages? I’m sure this technology could enable advertisers to deliver personalized billboard messages. Maybe we will opt-in to socially augmented reality groups in order to view art or advertising? Let’s hope augmented reality will make cool things possible and make life easier.

Heads-up closed captioning goggles for deaf people?

Heads-up subtitle-style translation goggles for traveling over-seas?

Scott Hansen is an artist/designer with a great blog at ISO50. He recently re-linked readers to a post about his work process.  The project was a print for Obama’s campaign fundraising.  Every artist, illustrator, art director or designer has their own unique process, but all creative disciplines require a meticulous attention to detail.  Real projects require deadlines, comps and approvals that shape the workflow but are outside of our creative control.  I have learned that improving my work requires changing my work process, and it’s helpful to read about how other people approach work.  Hansen’s process works for him, and it’s inspiring.

HDR (high dynamic range) photography is one of the most interesting digital post-processing techniques to emerge in the last few years.  I found tutorials on HDR and experimented with the technique last year (above).  But digital photography has not only created new post-processing techniques, but also changed the way we shoot pictures.  This site explains all the technical details that make our cameras work so we can take better pictures.