apologies to stage
calatrava-esque
hat tips noisia (who made the web app) and D_MAGIK
also, Santiago Calatrava, whose sucky ornamental winged thing will soon be gracing the revamped World Trade Center's "transit hub."
It looks kind of like the design above but with "wings" that are awkwardly asymmetrical and jammed too close to an adjacent building.
7 tips on breaking animated gifs
A friend sent me a link promising "7 tips for designing awesome animated GIFs." The tip-offering design firm has a home page in the obnoxious new style that every dotcom 2.0 startup seems to be using. Instead of a neatly-organized page giving you basic information about the company (who we are, what we do, portfolio), you get a screen-filling explosion of video and graphics that seems more about obfuscating than informing.
Lots of elegantly greyed-out video clips of happy corporate workers with coffee cups next to laptops, conferencing in converted loft spaces with chalkboards. As you scroll down, testimonials from happy customers.
The homepage is optimized for a 1920 pixel wide screen -- when you shrink the width of the window you get the mess above. But it's not much better at the desired width. The designers' philosophy seems to be "entertainment before information," and projecting various class signifiers and logos to show what kinds of clients they expect to have. Ironically the product is some kind of "workflow" thing.
Their GIF tips aren't surprising -- use a pricy video editor, export to Photoshop, then employ various optimization tricks. The tippers brag that they "opted to use GIFs on our home page instead of fancy code-based animations." This is kind of funny because a few years ago some of Paddy Johnson's "tech" commenters were razzing me for suggesting that GIFs were a perfectly adequate alternative to fancy code-based animations.
Anyway, here are the tips on breaking animated GIFs:
1. Choose your targets wisely. Would this look more funny/stupid if broken?
2. Find an online image editor. Start messing around with the settings.
3. Does your broken GIF look too much like "glitch art" or "datamoshing"? Back to the drawing board. Avoid "art" cliches.
4. What is your purpose behind breaking the GIF? Are you making a philosophical point about entropy or is this just for "lulz"?
5. Who is your intended audience? Is it an art audience or a "funny junk" bulletin board? (Related to No. 4 above.)
6. Does the GIF really look broken or just badly made? (Think about that, too.)
7. Always pad listicles out to odd numbers.
Knob Twiddlers (new Bandcamp release)
Am pleased to announce a new Bandcamp release titled Knob Twiddlers.
Some LP notes:
Between Christmas and New Year's I made a cassette tape of tunes using my modular synth's "Quad ADSR" module as an LFO/clock/trigger for various gear. The resulting polyrhythmic or at least slightly eccentrically rhythmic tracks undergird the songs with ADSR in the title (in this and the previous release, Discreet Mutations). Otherwise I am continuing a program of self-bricolage where I take older tunes, chop them up, speed them up, combine them with other songs, or write new passages that serve as bridges and fills among dangling motifs. Am continuing to rely heavily on Native Instruments' Massive synth for ear candy to sweeten up these tracks, but there is also a fair amount of live, analog material plopped in here.
A new Bandcamp front page has thumbnail covers for the 12 releases so far.
Your support in the form of buying the LPs or songs is very encouraging, but all the material can be streamed. Cassettes are available for certain releases; eventually I hope to have the entire catalog available on cassette and probably CD-R as well.
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