"I thought that CD cover looked familiar..."
I was browsing for news on
digg I came across a story about
Times New Roman not being included in the beta for Microsoft Office 2007. I had never seen
fadtastic, the site the article was on. While browsing the site I found another article talking about the cover of Franz Ferdinand's
You Could Have It So Much Better.
But this way of doing it, the whole birth of industrial design education, graphic design, advertising, photomontage and photography as we know it, was done by experiment and put to the test by some great people of the early 20th century, the pioneers of graphic design. Marinetti (The futurists, Italy), Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Their influences are still remarkably visible in todays graphic and webdesign despite the digital age bringing new production techniques.
The cover of You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand (2005) in the style of Russian avant garde was influenced by this 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik by Alexander Rodchenko.
http://fadtastic.net/2006/04/22/the-heroic-years-of-graphic-design/
It occurred to me moments later that it wasn't Rodchenko's portrait that looked so familiar, but the opening for
Attack of The Show.
It's a style I've always wanted to use, but I don't have any real education in art, so trying to employ and styles other than ones I'm already familiar with is rather difficult and the results are somewhat unsatisfactory. From what I've seen on the
WikiPedia entry for Attack of The Show they've changed their logo, and possibly their opening video. I don't actually watch the show more than once every few months, since I still hold a grudge against G4 for eating TechTV.
So this industrial style is something I want to peruse, but I need to get some actual art training (or just read lots of WikiPedia entries) before I can start making good use of it.
Posted by XenoFreq @ 8:58 PM
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Oblivion Panoramic
So I decided to make a panoramic picture of Bethesda Softwork's Oblivion. Now, the world in Oblivion is 16 square miles, so I'm not going to be getting any epic shots of the entire map, but I did find a place that seemed a really nice place to take pictures. I forgot where exactly I took the pictures, but I'll made an edit to this post later when I jump back in the game.
To get the shots looking good I had to bump the graphics settings to a level that my computer had a strong disapproval for (1600x1200, HDR, maximum draw distance on everything, but only medium texture size). The actual image, all said and done, was 23.6" long and about 3.3" tall at 300dpi. With standard printing and the lack of extremely fine detail that you'd find in a real photograph, this can be printed at 150dpi at 47.2" by 6.6", which is truly an epic picture. $25 to have it printed at Kinko's on their large format printers, which is really quite tempting to have done, and possibly framed.
Now I figured this would be a great thing to have done because I could take orders for panoramics in various places of Tamriel (which is where you spend the most time), or Oblivion itself. There's one minor (see: gigantic and fear-inducing) issue with that. I don't actually own any of the copyrights to the pictures I took; Bethesda Softworks does. That also brings up that issue that, if I'm not selling prints that I make, but hanging them on my wall, does that still violate copyright laws?
Anyway, a PDF of the panoramic can be downloaded
here as a 150dpi version*. I would have uploaded the full 300dpi version, but I'd like to keep a low-resolution copy floating around for distrobution and the high-resolution (as well as the PSDs) for proving that I'm the one who made it. I would have put some kind of credit on it, but again I don't actually own the image, so I'd rather not bate myself for Bethesda's attack lawyers**.
Also, I'll be doing a write-up on how I made the panoramic step-by-step later on, and tomorrow I should be sending my faux megazine cover to the RIP station. I'll try and get pictures of the process, but that's not a promise.
*3.2 megabyes, PDF, high JPEG compression, ~24"x3.5", printing enabled.
**I don't believe Bethesda actually
does have attack lawyers, but people need to protect their work, and I don't want to stare down any threat to my wallet or not-imprisionment.
Posted by XenoFreq @ 2:00 PM
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Nerdcore Monthly: Final Digital Version
So
here is my Nerdcore Monthly cover. It's pretty cool, I think. This version is 150dpi, so you can print it if you want, but it won't look amazing. I'll be sending this to the RIP station tomorrow, hopefully, then getting it put on composite film after that. It's going to kick royal amounts of [unprofessional word for butt]. Pictures of said process to come later.
Posted by XenoFreq @ 2:39 PM
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