Posted March 29, 2010 3:50 pm.
Filed under: daily happenings, ffffound!
Tags: ffffound!, House of Air, Monday
Today was definitely not a manic Monday. We’re waiting to get feedback from clients or quotes from printers, so there wasn’t a ton of stuff to do. At least that statement is true for me. I spent most of the day researching about competitions and about projects that we haven’t even begun yet. When the time comes to begin, it will be good for me to have that background knowledge though. After that, I continued working on stickers for House of Air.
In between tasks, I did some visual research by taking advantage of my ffffound account which Ethan, the previous intern, gave me. MINE™ has a tradition of keeping the ffffound invite in the family. Each intern gives their invite to the next intern. Looking at work is important for us as designers to notice trends and because we get ideas by looking at visual things. I’m not saying that looking at other work is the only thing we should look at, because inspiration can come from anywhere. But it’s fun to discover new techniques and store the idea away in your subconscious until it drifts back to the surface when it will work well with one of your own projects. Christopher keeps a kind of physical “ffffound” in the office. In the comp room, we have binders full of examples with good type and interesting formats. By having a frame of reference to work from, we are able to push the boundaries of design and hopefully make new meaning that has yet to be revealed.
Posted May 19, 2009 5:47 pm.
Filed under: ffffound!, first times, inspiration, process
Tags: context, design as art, ffffound!, image sharing, inspiration, online communities
As part of the immersion into the intern program at MINE™ you are granted your very own, highly-coveted, ffffound! account.
During the past school year, I spent countless hours obsessing over the wonderful user empowering image bookmarking site (mostly during classes I will not mention here) and having an account is even more of an enveloping experience. The simple interface and link-based navigation makes it dangerously easy to get lost in the sea of beautiful typographic specimens, architectural photographs, foreign product packaging, modernist design posters, vintage paperback design, dutch industrial design, toy-camera photography, cutting edge illustration and and pretty much anything else you can think of. The number of styles, new artists, and interesting works you can discover on ffffound! is about as extensive as the length of time you’ll find yourself clicking endlessly through it all.
The most surprising aspect of ffffound! is the quality of the imagery – I’m not talking about dpi or color vibrancy – but the taste of the users. Generally I’ve concerned pretty much everything to be of some visual interest or conceptual merit – and I have yet to stumble across a single image of tasteless nudity or anything remotely approaching derogatory (although I have seen some aggression towards Bush, Cheney and Palin which might shed some light on the political leanings of most ffffound! users).
There is something to be said about the experience of sifting through all the images – and the fact that the majority of them are up for viewing without context. Explanations are absent – and they can be judged almost purely on their formal qualities. Two unrelated images juxtaposed side by side start to have a conversation with each-other. A visual relationship which was never intended by the creators and wholly unique to the viewer. I find inspiration in a lot of these serendipitous happenings – a photograph of vintage signage from a candy store in Norway, displayed next to a Donald Judd minimalist sculpture start to poise interesting questions about the rigidity of the structures within art and design. What happens when a road sign is inserted into a gallery space? Or when a Donald Judd sculpture is placed in a playground? And what does that say about the place of graphic design within the larger art world? Does it have a place there? It seems that online galleries like ffffound!, flickr, manystuff and others are bridging the gap between art and design closer and closer by the link.
Here are the past 10 tagged images at the time I last checked:
