Fake Model Photography

from Receding Hairline:

With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they're actually of miniature models.

It doesn't take much to fool the mind of the viewer, but there are a few basic rules you can follow to help convince your audience that they're looking at a railway set rather than the real world; see the section on picking the right photo at the bottom of this page. You'll need a copy of Photoshop CS or later to follow this tutorial.

Sean Starwars

From our friends at Yee Haw Industries:

The UTK Print Club is happy to announce the visit of Outlaw Printmaker Sean Star Wars. Sean Star Wars will be giving an artist lecture as part of the visiting artist series at the University of Tennessee. His lecture will be at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 in room 111 of the Art and Architecture Building on the UT campus.

Sean Star Wars received his M.F.A. in 1999 from Louisiana State University and has taught printmaking at several universities including University of Southern Mississippi, Tulane University and has conducted a relief print workshop at Frogman's Print Workshop in Vermillion, SD. Star Wars has been included in many group exhibitions as well as solo exhibitions and his work is in permanent collections including Amity Art Foundation, Philadelphia Print Center, and New Orleans Museum of Art. He currently lives in Laurel,
Mississippi.

http://seanstarwars.com/

Social Software Montage

LOGO2.0 part I, originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Like a coral reef filled with brilliantly colored tropical fish, this montage shows a mere snapshot fo the number of social web apps in the Web 2.0 aquarium.

Design = Business Catalyst or Financial Drain?

Stretching back in time before the era of the printing press or the pyramids, there has been a war raging within the human race--a war between accountants and designers.

From the FastCompany blog:

No Accounting for Design

Is market share a meaningful measure of design's financial performance? You'd think so, judging by the number of design consultancies that use increases in sales and market share to trumpet the "success" of their redesigns. The Industrial Designers Society of America even uses market share and sales as two important metrics for its prestigious Design & Business Catalyst award, which recognizes "market and financial performance" so as to demonstrate to executives "the value of design."

But while market share might be meaningful to designers, it has far less resonance with CFOs, the ultimate arbiters of design investments. Julie Hertenstein and Marjorie Platt, two Northeastern University accounting professors who've attempted to quantify the contribution that design makes to the bottom line, argue that market share, by itself, doesn't really mean much. "Market share is just that, a share˜it's measured as a percentage," says Hertenstein. "If you can't measure it in dollars, it doesn't show up on the accounting statement." read full post>>