Five Great Visual Arts Blogs, Part 2

Several weeks after the previous post on Five Great Visual Arts Blogs, we’re well overdue for another five, so here goes: 

Grain Edit- suggested by reader/friend Rachel, Grain Edit is after my own heart. Seamlessly combining classic vintage mid-20th Century found design objects (from matchbooks to movie posters) with new designers in the same classic styles, Grain Edit has a well-defined aesthetic that is, in my humble opinion, exactly what the world should look like.

 LP Cover Lover - ah, the art of the album cover. The great ones are almost as great as the bad ones. You’ll find thousands of both (mostly the bad ones) at LP Cover Lover. The collection of Christian LPs featuring beehive hairdos could make a huge web site all on its own. But there is so much more. This is what makes the internet great.

 Type Theory - if you’re a typography nut, you’ve come to the right place. And if you know you love Helvetica but haven’t dug much deeper, prepare for a master course. Type Theory concentrates on contemporary work, but throws in some vintage goodies for us retro fiends as well. And as the name indicates, Type Theory gets deep into the reasons why it all works.

 Things Magazine - this fine blog is connected with the occasional print magazine of the same name, which is apparently “about objects and their meanings”, and it’s worth reading. But they really got me with their excellent collection of paperback book covers, especially the Pelican Project. 

Typo Gabor - OK, I’m going out on a limb here, since this collection of ”Galeries Pédagogiques de Design & Typo” is completely in French. But following the links reveals some excellent galleries of contemporary work, homages to great designers and typographers, and enough design inspiration to keep me coming back, whether I can read it or not.

Enjoy these five, and please feel free to suggest your favorites.

Five Great Visual Arts Blogs

An artist friend was asking me where she could find some good blogs to add to her feed reader, so I thought I’d start rounding a few up here every so often.

One of my favorite things in the blog world has been the explosion of great sites concerned with visual arts, design and photography. Some expose the readers to new artists they might never might have found. Others gather discovered items that would otherwise be rotting away somewhere, never to be seen again. And a few add in great analysis of what we’re seeing.

I recommend you check these out if you enjoy having your eyes and brain stimulated. I’ll link to particular posts that I think are outstanding, or are good examples of what the sites are about. If you like one, go to their main pages for more.

And with that, a small supermarket sampling of some great visual arts blogs:

 BAGnewsNotes- great photography analysis from Michael Shaw and company. Also, shockingly for a blog, thoughtful comments from the readers. There’s a lot being communicated in a “news” photo that we might not consciously perceive, and these people can pick apart an AP wire photo like no one else. 

 ISO50 Blog – The Blog of Scott Hansen - aside from showing his own work, Hansen shares inspiration from everywhere. This particular post on audio cassette inserts is stunning. His tastes are wide-ranging, but more than likely you’ll find something that makes your jaw drop.

 Movie Title Screens - not a blog as such, but an immense collection of movie title screens (starting in 1901!) that will keep you exploring for hours. Some are art, some are commerce, but many straddle the two (and isn’t that where the fun is)?

 Design Observer - plenty of writing on design aimed at those working in the field, but also loads of tasty images for the rest of us. It’s also a slick, magazine-style site which bears repeated viewing. Also loads of links and resources, so it acts as a great jumping-off point.

 Waxin’ & Milkin’: A Visual Mixtape - Mark Malazarte is obsessed images, and he posts lots of them on his Tumblr blog. Sometimes it’s hard to know why, because there’s no commentary (a promo shot of Ray Parker Jr.?), but that’s actually part of the fun. His random image link is guaranteed to turn up something that will get you thinking, confuse you, or both.

Enjoy these five, there will be more to come. Please feel free to let me know your favorites.

Monday Mashup

Every week a handful of posts catch my attention, so I thought I’d start collecting a few of them for you. Here are a few that stood out this week:

“Well, Sorta, Bob…” by John Battelle demonstrates old-media short-sightedness at its silliest. And yes, today AOL is “old media”. Someday this quote will be pulled out of the dusty archives and laughed at, much like the record executive who rejected the Beatles because “guitar groups were on the way out”:

Speaking at a business school, former AOL honcho Bob Pittman said:

“Television is still America’s hobby. … I don’t think there’s a chance that the Internet is going to replace television,” he said. “It’s not going away, it’s still the most persuasive of all media. 

“Internet video is usually about three minutes long and is either wildly entertaining or wildly informative, but it’s not doing the same thing as television.” 

Well, no. The Internet won’t kill video. It’ll just eat it entirely, assimilate it, and turn it into a function of the web. Once television becomes an application of the web, it’ll be much, much better. I for one can’t wait.

“Google Launches Tools to Test for Bandwidth Throttling” by Josh Catone”. Debate all you want about whether Google lives up to its credo “Don’t be Evil”. At the very least, they’re flexing their considerable muscle to stand up to the ISPs, which for the most part ARE evil:

[...] M-Lab will offers tools that allow users to determine what is causing network slowdowns, if their connection is being throttled by their ISP, and allow researchers to access and share that information.

In other words, this is Google’s latest salvo in their campaign for network neutrality.

[...]Measurement Lab is launching with three tools that “help users attempt to diagnose common problems that might impair their broadband speed, as well as determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled by their ISPs.”

[...]Google’s announcement of M-Lab comes as net neutrality is in the news again today, thanks to an announcement from Cox Communications — American’s third largest cable provider — that it plans to begin testing a new method of “congestion management” in February that would throttle network traffic based on perceived time-sensitivity.

Speaking of the controversial subject of Google’s evilness, Noisy Channel’s Daniel Tunkelang reports on “Is Google Evil? The Great Debate”. Yes, someone actually had a real live debate. Daniel summarizes the debate into bullet points (read the original post for detail and analysis):

Those arguing in favor of the motion, i.e., that Google does violate its “don’t be evil” motto, made what amount to four points:

• Google’s China policy is evil
• Google is evil by its own standard
• Google does evil by monopolistic abuse of market power
• Google is guilty of hubris

Those arguing against the motion made these five points:

• Google’s China policy virally spreads democracy
• Google is not like other greedy corporations
• Much of the evil attributed to Google is more correctly attributed to governments
• Google is no more evil than the internet as a whole
• If Google is evil, then humanity is evil

And speaking of evil, the free flow of information is still illegal in in the world’s most populous country, as demonstrated in “Obama Faces Chinese Censorship” by Apurba Sen:

Barack Obama’s campaign & election has been followed by a large section of Chinese internet population & his immense popularity among Chinese has emerged out in various surveys. However many were disappointed, if not downright annoyed when his inauguration speech faced Chinese censorship for his references to communism & dissent.

AP Reports: The Chinese translation of the speech, credited to the Web site of the official English-language newspaper China Daily, was missing the word “communism” in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed entirely.

The censored version was carried by Xinhua, the official news agency, and posted on popular online portals like Sina and Sohu. Another portal, Netease, used a version without the paragraph mentioning communism, but retaining the part about dissent.

So what’s getting your attention?