On Behance

04Nov09

Behance is a network for creative professionals, of which I had a vague notion, but didn’t look into it, until recently.  My dear Swedish friend Suzi warmly recommended it and I signed in.

I was and still am pleasantly surprised.

There are very few network sites that can offer this level of quality. I dare say that it’s due mostly to a good measure of exclusiveness. You either get a membership through an invitation or you get reviewed by a staff, a method which certainly needs to be sustained. No matter what you say and we all love democracy … but in terms of creativity there is no democracy. You either are talented and skillful or you produce junk, there is no way around it.

This exclusiveness ensures Behance to be alive, is a place where you meet people on your own level and I am positive it also prevents the decaying into the bland, dead network full of self proclaimed want-to-be art directors and web specialist. Last but not least: the profile and showcase frame is clean, fairly designed and can be used as a portfolio, which you will have no shame to show around.

And there you go, this is my Behance profile & portfolio:  http://www.behance.net/MajaBJancic
You are warmly invited to visit!

Filed under: The Must See, Thinking Machine   |  2 Comments
Tags: behance, creative, design, network

Lunki and Sika: The Chosen One

19Oct09

YES, finally! It is about time to post something by my favorite comics, my friends: Lunki and Sika. Their quirky, particular humor just doesn’t stop to amaze me. And make me laugh, of course. This is the most recent movie they made. Enjoy!

Filed under: My friends, Thinking Machine   |  3 Comments
Tags: comic, humor, lunki-sika, movies

Pictograms for London 2012 Olympics

19Oct09

The Olympics pictograms. I’d say the assignment that big and complex needs:
1. A skillful, nifty, experienced and knowledgeable head of one creator with a small team of mouse pushers.
2. Enough development time.
3. The mindful, experienced and respectful client.

In the case of the London 2012 Olympics pictograms I have a hunch none of these conditions were present. The well awaited were released a few days ago and they look like this.

I am terribly sorry but what we see here is a job of such a poor quality, I am at awe. I haven’t seen worse Olympics pictograms. I don’t even dare to compare them with Otl Aicher’s work for Munich 1972 Olympics. Every single Olympics, the Winter Olympic Games included, had better pictograms.

Let’s see for example Sarah Rosenbaum’s for Lillehammer Games in 1994. They are particular ones, highly imaginative and excellent in execution.

Or not to forget the Masasa Katzoumie and Yoshiro Yamashita pictograms for Tokyo Olympics of 1964. It is not the style of the age which makes them excellent, it is the thinking behind them.

I understand that when comes to assignments like this, clients are in plural. I hear that today’s industry gets involved in the pure core of design concept, and I hear: designers are working on a brief and “gets pushed around by the idiot client”. That’s a bunch of rubbish excuses. Agencies pay people to do a job of persuading, and no, no client is an idiot. They don’t know better, they need a specialist to tell them what is the best for them.

It is actually terribly sad. In this release I see a design-project manager team which didn’t work. I see a haste and not much development, no study, no thinking. Drawing is thinking. Design is thinking. Just look: people are formed as if someone was sketch-practicing, they are disproportionate, images are mashed together in a rush, a lot of them unclear, crumpled, with no balance, no refinement. It looks as if someone creating them was utterly confused.

On the London 2012 official blog a Yasmine (no full name given) of London 2012 brand team explains: “The agency had to come up with something that fitted in with our brand identity but at the same time create something new and exciting.” Well, dear Yasmine, I say you certainly succeed to force badly analyzed formal characteristics of London 2012 identity but you certainly didn’t create anything new. Disappointing failures like that can be seen on every home-made leaflet advertising stuff of dubious quality.

At the end I wonder if the clients realize how huge is the cost they’ll pay for this shabby work. I am not talking about numbers although I am sure the amounts here are far from modest. I am talking about being remembered by the worst designed pictograms in the history. Pretty high price, wouldn’t you say?

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Tags: graphic design, design, pictograms, Olympics, London 2012, Otl-Aicher, Sarah-Rosenbaum, Pictograms for London 2012 Olympics, Masasa-Katzoumie, Yoshiro-Yamashita

Sarah’s Toilet

18Oct09

If Sarah Lucas knows she’s been labeled with the mark of “post-feminism”, what she has to say about it? I always wondered what artists say or think when they read or hear the blown-up rubbish the art historians are able to put into print.

Sarah Lucas is a very interesting artist of the Young British Artist movement. And even if recently her work circles around odd ideas of phallus-like forms, there is one piece I am greatly amused by. ‘Nature Abhors A Vacuum’, a toilet covered in cigarettes is a fabulous-witty-tragic mockery of life and I think one of those rare pieces of art which speaks to audience with ease and wit.

Sarah Lucas, Nature Abhors A Vacuum, 1998.

What does Sarah has to say about it? In interview with James Putnam she observes: “I first started smoking when I was nine. And I first started trying to make something out of cigarettes because I like to use relevant kind of materials. I’ve got these cigarettes around so why not use them. There is this obsessive activity of me sticking all these cigarettes on the sculptures, and obsessive activity could be viewed as a form of masturbation. It is a form of sex, it does come from the same sort of drive, and there’s so much satisfaction in it. When you make something completely covered in cigarettes and see it as solid it looks incredibly busy and it’s a bit like sperm or genes under the microscope.” – (Putnam, J. 2000. Interview with Sarah Lucas. London: Sadie Coles HQ.)

What do I think?
Her fabulous toilet actually speaks in two ways. Not just that: it speaks to two absolutely opposite audiences: smokers and smoker-haters. To the first it says: “I give a shit if I smoke.”, to the others it says: “Cigarettes are shit, they (or the smokers) belong where the shit belongs.”
Simply brilliant!

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Tags: art, Nature Abhors A Vacuum, Sarah-Lucas

A quotes pick

17Oct09

“I’ve come close to working with a couple of agencies for very big brands, but either the money isn’t there or the agency just has a stupid idea that I’m not interested in working on. Like they want type with a bunch of bullshit curlicues coming off it. Yawn. Go away.” Marian Bantjes

“Art has been lost in a labyrinth of theory. If this sounds anti-intellectual, let me clarify. There is no good work of art that cannot be described in intelligible English, however long it might take, however much patience is required. And yet this book (Art Since 1900) begins with four theoretical essays explaining the post-structuralist concepts the authors believe we need before we can meaningfully discuss a single work of art. It is the supreme expression of an art culture that sneers at ‘empiricism’ as a dirty word.” Jonathan Jones

“Stop acting dead!” Bruce Sterling

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein

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Tags: quotes

That’s what the friends do.

16Oct09

Social networks can get pretty boring, especially Twitter tends to go that way recently. The reason? First: people’s style of twitting a.k.a. publishing are starting to become robotic. Second: when someone follows you (when someone follows you or you follow him it’s kind of similar of being friends on Facebook) it is not by curiosity or by personal want of getting to know you. No, the following is mostly automated or led by one sole purpose; advertising whatever it is to advertise for: a new show, a shopping website, or tits and ass, you just have to pick and get a stream of vomiting.

I guess I am lucky. When I was joining into Twitter, it was about 9 months ago, it seemed fresher. More alive. And yes, I am lucky, on Twitter I meet a few interesting people. And some of them I really like and consider them friends.

One of them is Suzi. When I opened my portfolio website back-office today, I was shocked by the jump of number of visitors. Where did they come from? There is a source.
That’s what the friends do. Thank you, Suzi.

Filed under: My friends   |  1 Comment
Tags: Made by Suzi, Twitter

There is a way!

06Oct09

If you are looking for ways to get a few extra bucks (or euros) and you do publish a blog, there is a way.
It always is. :P

And if you are looking for a reasonably priced and even free online advertising, it can also be done!

I was browsing around looking for that GREAT, CHEAP advertising for my T-shirt store (more about it later) and found Project Wonderful. At the beginning, maybe an hour camping on the site, was quite baffled and totally mesmerized by the method of bidding. But since the page has so refreshingly systematical and user-friendly design (design is thinking, let’s not forget that), I caught on quite fast. For my stupid blond head.

“Project Wonderful reinvents online advertising.” That’s how they say. You open an account, create an add, many different formats can be uploaded, and then you bid on a certain ad space on the certain internet site. You bid at the cost you can afford, it can also be a total of 0 $, as long as you bid for a very short time. And if you get lucky, you outbid your fellow bidders and have your own free advertising.

Which I assume is not a very common phenomena.

“Project Wonderful makes advertising awesome.” That’s how they claim. Although this very minute my online advertising looks moderately cool, I am having them on trial period. Let’s give them 10 days.

Till then!

Info and body you can find on: https://www.projectwonderful.com/

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Tags: online-advertising, project wonderful

Retrovision II.

05Oct09

He never really received the attention he deserved – perhaps because his character and practice made him difficult to pigeonhole – and so it seemed important to provide an opportunity to reflect on the sheer depth and quality of his ideas. ( … ) Like Samuel Beckett or Bruce Nauman, his use of repetition, and the loop, becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of life itself: we are born, we wake up, we go to sleep and inevitably we die.
Times Online, Tom Trevor, director of Arnolfini

You do know how it is when something, the second you see it, just sits in your mind forever. I was browsing the other day through some old stuff I managed to accumulate through years, paper stuff that is. And I hit a treasure. An old color printer print. Imprinted in my mind.

It is this image.

It is Angus Fairhurst’s print titled “Pieta”.
Angus Fairhurst is fabulous and maybe the most gifted artist of  Young British Artists generation. As we speak, there is an exhibition ‘Art in a Material World’ opened last Thursday in Tate Modern, where the most acclaimed works of the YBA movement are presented. And in the meantime, when Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America” is censored again and banned from that same exhibition, I am wondering what is going on now with Angus. What is he doing?

Leafing through internet I found out he is not around anymore. He died last spring. Allegedly he drove off  just after the celebrating dinner party of the opening of his solo exhibition, wandered into the woods and hanged himself.

Richard Prince steels a photograph, which is of pedophile and pornographic nature, blows it up and gets attention. When the art world is busy with that ephemera, the real talent wanders into the woods.

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Tags: Angus-Fairhurst, art, Art in a Material World, Spiritual America, Tate-Modern, YBA