The Works of Marco Zamora
Marco Zamora is an American artist who works with dry media and paint. His works are primarily black and white with some colourful details added; I love the style. Check out his website.
Drawings by James Jean
After looking at James Jean’s artwork it is apparent that he’s a talented artist, but what is most intriguing to me are his drawings in Moleskin notebooks.
The level of detail, the scale, imagination and his style of drawing has a certain consistency and a flowing feeling; from a distance the forms take on a more general abstract aesthetic, but looking closely unveils more.
You can see more of his drawings on his website.
Minimalism: Album Covers Recreated
Designer Ty Lettau has recreated some of the most famous and iconic classic album covers and made them his own by using a minimalist style and focusing on the iconography.
You can see his full set on Flickr.
Stephen Fry: What I Wish I’d Known When I Was 18
It isn’t a particularly new video, I watched it a month or two back now, but it is well worth watching and taking note.
Flash is Evil
Surely the fact that I have to tediously force-quit the Flash process so often on my Mac, or that loading a full screen Flash video requires 2 minutes of the spinning wheel of death is an indication of it being an inherently flawed and poor quality product (at least for the Mac)?
How can Adobe have the cheek to complain about its exclusion from the iOS platform or the promotion of better HTML5 alternatives when they refuse to make the Flash experience adequate? What is more astonishing is the fact that there are some Mac users that still jump to the defence of the sluggish dying technology.
It is contradictory for someone to spend money and care so much about quality in buying a Mac and then to defend a product like Flash being used on the platform.
A solution is to remove Flash completely, but since some sites still insist on using the technology, the better option may be to use a Safari extension to disable Flash selectively (whitelisting allowed sites) and use HTML5 video instead (such as on YouTube). This can be done with Broken Box (which I have recommended before).
Sidenote: YouTube offers an experimental native HTML5 version of its video player but it is incompatible with some videos (such as those with annotations or advertisements). Broken Box includes an optional HTML5 video via QuickTime.
Eibatova Karina’s Artwork
Eibatova Karina has produced some intriguing pieces of art using drawing, watercolours and other media. I really love the Mineral watercolour in particular (as pictured above, full version can be seen here) because it is beautiful (cliche, I know – but there is no other fitting word to describe it).
You can see some more of her works on her Flickr account.
EPICWIN
I use Things for productivity (and have sworn by it for quite a while), but this looks really interesting. The video is also very well made.
Check out the EpicWin website for more details.
Hyperrealist Paintings by Hilo Chen
Hilo Chen is a hyperrealist painter, creating extremely detailed work that gives the illusion of the paintings being ‘real’ or appearing to be photographs at first sight.
I can imagine the process of creating these works are both extremely tedious and yet highly satisfying. Check out his paintings on Artnet (NSFW), but be warned he really likes his nudes.
YouTube’s New Mobile Site
YouTube (Google) has released a new tantalising mobile web app version of its website aimed at modern mobile phones.
The old website was geared towards those clunky brick-like phones with the numeric keypads and the obscenely tiny screens. Now, however, phones are generally touch-based portable computers with ‘full internet’ and so a need for a more advanced website was satisfied with the release of this long overdue web app.
What is interesting is that the web application is enhanced for the iPhone(with a prompt telling you to save the site to the home screen). Apple has provided a native YouTube application on its iOS (and previous iPhone OS) since the very beginning and now it looks like YouTube wants to take control. After all, Apple’s native application is lacking many of the newYouTube features and hasn’t adapted to the changes on the site.
I prefer the stability and consistency of a native application, but YouTube’s new mobile site is wonderful.
It should be noted that it is not real HTML5 video at this point, despite what some blogs and news sources claim.
Hidden Posters of Notting Hill Gate Tube Station
A collection of superb London Underground posters from around 1959, discovered this year at Notting Hill Gate Tube Station. These posters are not accessible to the public. You can see them on the Flickr.