A brilliant TED Talk from 2004 with Stefan Sagmeister sharing how good design can make all the difference…



Watch another Stefan Sagmeister TED Talk from 2008 HERE

I’ve set up a new tumblr feed, where I’ll be posting all sorts of art, design and typography related links, photos, youtube clips and anything else that I can think of to do my part to bring the interwebs to it’s knees…Subscribe and enjoy.

I think things really are starting to gel in my class: Photoshop – The Art of Compositing. This week, we continued looking at layer masks and I introduced the concept of adjustment layers.  It’s great to see when someone “gets it” and then just goes off in their own direction, building on what you’ve just shown them. For those of you who were there…keep going…and don’t forget to name your layers!  Here are some of the links from last night’s discussion:

CJ Burton (site takes a while to load) – http://www.cjburton.com/
Zena Holloway - http://www.zenaholloway.com/zena.html
Tomasz Opasinski - http://www.tomasz-opasinski.com/
Wacom tablets – http://www.wacom.com/index2.php

The two gallery events I mentioned were:

Remarkable: Places + Faces
Landscapes and Portraits by Jim McHugh (http://www.jimmchugh.com/)
Now through April 30th
Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90069
Gallery B208 / Blue Building
Hours: Tuesday – Friday, noon-4pm

Shibui: Six Japanese Photographers, 1920s to 2000
4-23-06 through 6-20-09
Stephen Cohen Gallery (http://www.stephencohengallery.com/)
7358 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. 90036
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am-6pm
Tel, 323.937.5525, Fax, 323.937.5523

Thank you all for coming each week…see you next Thursday.

Bioshock, one of my favorite games ever, is getting the sequel treatment and it’s looking pretty fantastic so far. Later this year, 2K Games will take us back into Rapture, the undersea utopia that should have been, but wasn’t. Details are sketchy, but Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams picks up approximately 10 years after the events of Bioshock. This time around, you’ll play a Big Daddy as you wander the undersea Metropolis searching for Little Sisters to save (or harvest). Though you’ll play as a Big Daddy, you won’t be the same lumbering hulk you became (spoiler!) in the first game. This time around, there’s an arsenal of new weapons and plasmids at your disposal to take down those nasty splicers. That additional firepower will come in handy too, when you face off against a Big Sister, essentially a faster, more nimble (and potentially more lethal) version of yourself. I don’t really want to know too much more until I can actually sit down and play it later this year.

First teaser trailer is HERE