Japanese ad for the Nintendo DS. Quite creative, don’t you think? When I was a kid I always felt like I was a puppet in someone’s dollhouse…

+PortaGame

Stretch Daily is yet another “daily creative exercise”. Pretty cool stuff. Saying it the Arabic way, “My tummy is open”, or I want to do something like that too! I think I’m going to do one pertaining to pictures of interesting shoes I see during the day…

Wow, I think I just found the perfect represntation of my art-slash-design philosophy:

“Thwart Design is an honest effort to break the mediocrity of commercial art forms. With no limitations on the design process, one is able to make or say anything, creating a visual discourse. Promoting raw creativuty opposed to refined products. A large focus is based around questioning existing norms of society, to turn things upside down, and to make some noise; we don’t have the answers just an opinion. … Don’t let creativity lie dormant!”

How beautiful is that? I’ve been trying to make my architect professor understand the link between art and design for quite some time(to no avail), I’m going to give him this link now.

Thwart Design probably has the coolest website I’ve seen so far, although as they say, “the paint is still wet”, so a lot of features are yet to be added and a lot of glitches need to be fixed. I love how their main page basically consists of sketches, something that I really relate to. Designers, student designers included, spend an extensive amount of time sketching, so I find the idea of incorporating an important part of the design process into a design website’s main page really cool.

Their actual work, ranging from 2-D design to patterns, is impressively gorgeous. I especially love their apparel line which is very creative, and their 3-D line which has the coolest coasters I’ve ever seen(check out the Post-It coaster, 5th slide). As for their 2-D line, I find their “Urinal Sticker” (3rd slide) irresistible, as they it is an homage to one of my favorite artists, Marcel Du Champ, the father of the Dada movement.

Adding yet more creativity, Thwart have a section called “Design w/o Reach“, which is a DIY catalogue providing cheap alternative designs to owning overpriced modern pieces. My favorite piece is “Canned Light” which uses a Campell Soup can as the shade of an old lamp. I love it! It’s the ultimate Andy Warhol icon, and Warhol is definitely one of my very favorite artists.

Way to go Thwart, I’m totally in love.

When. I. Say. That. The. Left. Side. Of. My. Brain. Doesn’t. Work.

I MEAN IT!

Micah Bauer’s graphic journal is a personal project intended to hone Bauer’s design skills. He has pretty strict rules to abide by though- one composition a day, each day, for 365 days straight. His compositions must remind him of an experience of that day, each must contain typography or be derived from typographic elements, and more. Some of the compositions are really great, and this project is certainly worth looking over.

A similar project is Miskan, a photoblog from Kuwait, where a Lebanese designer called Mark takes a picture a day, everyday, for 1 year. Some of his pictures are really cool, and I love how some of them are depictions of life in the Gulf.

There is also Duane Kieser’s “A Painting a Day” project which I posted about a few months back.

I see a trend emerging. Although I’m the biggest believer that art should never be a routinely task,
I really like this trend and I can see myself trying to work on something similar.

These are pictures of Akram Baker’s performance tonight in Amman. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll still say this, it was fantastic! The combination of amazing guitar playing and Akram’s Eddie-Vedder-style voice was the perfect way to get sucked in by the music. The show was so delightfully intense and the setting was so intimate that I left feeling rather high.
To make things even better, Akram is a charming man. I can’t wait to be able to hear him play again!