It's easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird.
This year has produced a glorious array of movie posters, and although there was plenty to admire in the brash marketing of big budget franchise fare - there was some interesting work around Tron: Ares and Thunderbolts, for example - it's perhaps telling that the most eye-catching creativity can be found promoting lower budget films that don't have recognisable IP to fall back on.
The projects that Brodie takes on are created with a mix of digital and physical - his work shouts that hands are at work. Lady Gaga is stretched and made viscous for the cover of Mayhem, her sixth solo studio album, for which Brodie provided art direction and design, with creative direction from Mel Roy of mtla studio and Todd Tourso of Iconoclast.
At December's event, you can expect talks from Charlotte Mei, a London-based contemporary artist, painter and illustrator who has worked with Sony Music, Hermés, Panasonic and the New York Times, as well as having her work exhibited in London, Hong Kong, Berlin and New York. She'll be talking about the evolution of her work which has gone through considerable changes. We'll also be joined by the creator of A View,
This incredible lineup of creative contributors began as a call-out to friends and colleagues of Aya's amongst her work as a cultural strategist, producer and curator for grassroots initiatives and non-profits, before it snowballed into something with a much wider remit. It was important to the book's editor to have a range of figures to contribute across disciplines. "Many of the book's contributors are Palestinian," she says, "the rest are steadfast allies."
Many laptops offer a simple utility to its user; with nondescript design, understated performance, and generic features. Y'know, 90% of what you see in any given café or hotdesking office. Then you have 'power laptops', bigger, bulkier studio or gaming machines, with a thicker chassis to house a dedicated graphics card and maybe a touch of flair to their external design, to allow their now-impoverished/indebted owner to show off a bit.
Authoritarian governments have always suppressed protest and dissent, but democracies have done so as well. Ironically, we are now witnessing increasing restrictions on the right to protest from governments whose very foundations were built through the kinds of protest they now seek to suppress. Historically social crises reach the mainstream via protest - which can take many forms - this helps society reevaluate and evolve, making it more understanding and tolerant.
For a while now, we've been seeing companies that fired a bunch of their human workers in favor of artificial intelligence move to recoup some of that flesh-and-blood labor. Now, that push has resulted in a new line of gig work: slop fixer-uppers, who get paid to improve AI-generated art, writing, and code - by making it less, well, sloppy.
This week it's the 70th birthday of the Guinness Book of Records, that gloriously bonkers compendium of human achievement that celebrates the people who can stuff the most marshmallows in their mouth, balance the most spoons on their body, and hula hoop underwater for the longest time. It features everything from standard athletic victories to "most high fives in 30 seconds" and "fastest time to make a pasta necklace."
Harriet’s approach to layering hydration is thoughtful, but the persistent redness suggests her skin barrier is under some stress, likely from a combination of environmental changes and dry indoor conditions.
Fans have critiqued the character posters for Ariana Grande's Glinda and Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba, claiming both utilize AI in their creation, leading to disappointment.
The ASUS ProArt P16 provides the necessary specs for intensive creative workflows and goes the extra mile with additional quality of life improvements that were clearly designed with creatives in mind.
These cleverly designed sheets of wrapping paper feature impeccably laminated layers of dough, crisp crusts, and satisfying scoring, embodying the classic recipe phrase, ‘bake until golden brown.’