House of Representatives Democratic matriarch Nancy Pelosi; and…

Arrested Development Bluth matriarch Lucille Bluth?

How, how, how did I not notice this earlier?

You’d have to be living under a rock somewhere (or have a life outside of the Internet) if you haven’t heard about the “micro-blogging” platform Tumblr.

“Blackened Salmon” from Selleck Waterfall Sandwich

I think people call it a “micro-blogging” because posts on most people’s tumblelogs are pretty small: a picture or two, and a handful of words. But it doesn’t have to be: I could easily replace this blog with Tumblr & there would be little difference. It’s fully capable of handling short essays.

Apart from its ease of use, what sets Tumblr apart, really, is the community. There’s a fascinating, obsessive energy containing some wonderfully weird things, like “Selleck, Waterfall, Sandwich”, a tumblelog that shows picture combinations of those three things; that, and that only. They can make you see something in a radically different light, like the previously-praised Big Caption or “Space Trek”:

Space Trek, which documents “the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise”.

One of my favourites was “Three Frames”, which took (you guessed it) three frames of various movies, turned them into looped, animated GIFs and presented them to the viewer. Doubtless due to some misguided DMCA takedown, it was briefly offline, but is back! Again, it made you see something in a different way: how much, or little, a movie scene changes in three frames. The same author created Aloha Friday, from someone’s snapshot collection. An interesting chronicle of youth, it feels (to me) like some parallel world of my own early university years in Florida & as such evokes a curious pang of nostalgia, all the more peculiar because these pictures are not from my life.

I’ve seen them dismissively called “single-serving sites”, but I’m not aware of any rule stating that any given website has to be all things to all people. What I am aware of, however, is that browsing tumblelogs has taken up an increasing amount of my viewing. That’s rewarding.

Yes, I’m apparently obsessed.

Singing Django Django lead Vincent Neff; and…

Singing Father Ted priest Father Dougal McGuire?

What is it with Father Dougal & musicians? I kid: Django Django is fantastic. Go watch the video for “Default” and then buy their great album.

But I wouldn’t mind if they did a cover of “My Lovely Horse”.

I certainly hope those famously prickly French secret services have a sense of humour & don’t kill me. I joke! He’s not silly-looking or bug-eyed at all, your President!

To-be-oustered-in-the-near-future French President Nicholas Sarkozy; and…

To-be-oustered-in-the-far-future Klingon Chancellor Gowron?

No really, I mean it. I think they’re the same person:

Really:

I’ve thought this for years, but am only reminded of it when I hear that “Simply Being Loved” song:

Real American musician BT; and…

Fake Irish priest Father Dougal McGuire?

I think I prefer “My Lovely Horse”…

For a series of promotions for the Berlin Philharmonic, art director Björn Ewers created a fantastic series of images playing upon the phrase “Näher an der Klassik” (Closer to the Classics). Each picture is from the inside of a musical instrument (violins, flutes, etc.):

One of a series of spectacular promotions created by Björn Ewers

This idea works on so many levels. These images specifically promote chamber music concerts, which are inherently more intimate (“close”) affairs than pieces from the symphonic repertoire, so this concept just spirals back to itself, constantly reinforcing the message.

I’m not sure if this is macro photography or CGI—frankly I can’t see how you could get a high-quality camera into these instruments without destroying them—but no matter. This is a great idea executed perfectly, altering the views inside these rather small instruments into monumental architecture. I would eagerly place these posters on a wall in my home. I can’t think of higher praise than that.

I was listening to the Sisters of Mercy whilst exercising (far better for the purpose than Death Cab For Cutie) when the following unholy comparison struck me:

Patricia Morrision of Floodland-era Sisters of Mercy; and…

Ruby Wax of 1990s-era British TV?

That’s pretty unnerving. It’s going to take a while to get that out of my mind.

It’s amazing how many of these you see when you sharpen your eyes for them. Usually, they’re too boring to publish—but then you may think that my judgment on what to publish is already liberal enough.

Old-timey crooner Charles Trenet; and…

Old-timey actor Gene Wildman?

I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been rather busy with rather a lot of graphic design. Longtime readers will know that I love book cover & poster design—really, I can’t get enough of it.

Book covers I’ve recently designed. Click for larger view.

Above are two book titles forthcoming from OUP, Lying, Misleading and What is Said & The Pragmatic Maxim. I’m honoured to have designed the covers. The photo for Lying is from iStockphoto, with some significant alteration.

The cover for Lying was surprisingly difficult. I turned towards Pinocchio rather early on in the process, but found that other covers used the same idea. I switched for a while to very abstract covers: a number of phrases that were deceptive or outright lies, including notorious examples from Clinton & Bush, first as a mosaic of words (too busy) and then as a cloud consisting of these sentences, since the distinctions between lying & leading turn out to become somewhat nebulous upon closer examination. The “cloud” idea was appealing and made the design semi-abstract. However, the word clouds I drew ended up looking like masses of hair, which was kind of disturbing. My wife suggested the cloud could be red, but then it looked like a patch of blood smeared on a white floor. Not exactly what I was looking for! So I returned to Pinocchio, with the notion of altering the image: bending the nose to signify not simply outright lying, but the foggier notion of deception.

At the same time, I’ve been designing posters, often using the same, or similar themes, since the posters are rather intimately related to the books:

Related poster series for the University of Sheffield. Click for larger view.

Recently, a number of the posters I designed for the University of Sheffield, and even some book covers, were collected & are on display in the foyer of Jessop West. It’s probably the closest I’ll get to an exhibition of my work!

Update: I pulled the trigger on the Peirce cover far too soon. It was initially rejected because of the font (Giza) & because of the diagram, the placement of which actually runs contrary to Peirce’s work on how we develop our ideas. Since we were pulling away from the poster (the original inspiration for the design), this gave me further opportunity to change the look.

The Peirce cover, reworked.

I’m pushing for the version on the left, but the client is leaning towards the safer version on the right. Undesign!

A picture from a few weeks ago:

Higger Tor Panorama. Click for larger version.

This was an interesting experiment. Readers many know that I’ve made a lot of virtual reality panoramas over the years. Given the rise of portable devices such as the iPhone & iPad, however, is requiring a re-think of how we present them: browsers on portable devices don’t support any plugins. The examples in the above link require Quicktime, which is just as forbidden as Flash. It looks like the only option is Javascript-based interactivity, which will require some serious testing.

So why is the above picture an experiment? Well, because instead of using all my VR photographic kit, I used an iPhone & Debacle Software’s Pano, which does a really nice job for casual picture creation. You can’t, so far as I can tell, make a complete 360-degree panorama. Perhaps that’s coming, though.

I’m back! Did you miss me? Of course you did!

This Far Side cartoon?

I’m not particularly up on hip hop, but Die Antwoord certainly seem to be doing their own thing. Jesus, though…

There’s a company that provides a useful service for local restaurants who want to cater to students. Their name, however, means that the jokes just write themselves:

Hork…

Some options here:

• No way—do you know where they’ve been?!?
• Thanks, but I’m a vegetarian—from this point onwards.
• This presents the strongest case I’ve ever seen that English needs a vocative case.

Special creepy triplets edition!

Barmy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; and,

Smarmy Euromillions Spokesmodel; and,

Charmy IT Crowd actor Matt Berry?

I must be scraping the bottom of the barrel: finding these images was surprisingly difficult!

It’s hard to concentrate on work these days. The Occupy protests have gathered apace over the past several months and it’s clear that the US, indeed the entire world, seems to be in a febrile state. The past few weeks, however, have provided us with shocking images of police violence on peaceful protestors.

A “measured police response” during the eviction of protestors at Zuccotti Park, New York City.

Fellow protestors come to the aid of an 82-year-old woman by flushing out her eyes with milk to recover from tear gas at an Occupy Seattle protest.

This weekend, police reacted disproportionately to the presence of protestors at UC Davis by pepper-spraying them in the face as they sat, quiet and peaceful, on a sidewalk.

The video of the Davis incident is truly shocking. That police officer theatrically brandishes his can of spray before he attacks children. To me, it’s clear that the offence he’s responding to is not the violation of some petty law, but that he, the embodiment of authority, was defied.

What’s even more impressive is to watch the students keep control, chant “Shame on you” & “You can go” to a bevy of clearly rattled police in riot gear—and the police withdraw. I think the police recognised—belatedly—the gross disproportionality of their response.

These images are shocking enough, but in private correspondence with people my own age, I’ve received quite a few comments along the lines of “Well, they were violating local laws”—as if that’s a reasonable reaction to this brutality. And newspapers like the New York Times don’t focus on the incident, but instead lazily report on how people are reporting the Occupy protests. Here, I see people both twice & half my age acting with remarkable bravery in the face of horrifying abuses of authority—and in the meantime, my own generation has apparently lost its moral compass.