It has been a pleasure to host such wonderful and interesting artists over the last four years. Taking part in the Fremont’s First Friday Art Walk has given us an opportunity to utilize our space in different ways – going from office to gallery to community venue.

JA’s first Art Walk featuring the work of Todd Smith

JA has been very fortunate to showcase dozens of local talent ranging from new to well-established artists working in an array of mediums. We acknowledge the immense amount of effort, time and passion that goes in to each show and we thank all those that have been involved. We would like to especially thank all the artists that have dedicated their time and talent to the community and to Melanie Masson who had volunteered hundreds of hours organizing and maintaining the Fremont First Friday Art Walk. Our hope is that as we make our move to First Wednesday you continue to come out and help us support local artist and the Art Walk organizations.

Mary Johnston with one of Wyn Bielaska’s pieces. Photo by Wyn Bielaska

Coincidentally, tonight Melanie will be having her own show at 509 Wine Company entitled “Passage” – a series of black and white landscape photographs in conjunction with Fremont First Friday!

Artists we’ve featured since 2008:
Todd Smith
Will Austin
Amy Huddleston
Marcie Myrick
Cristin Ford
Jo Braun
Graham Fracha
Marty Gordon
Jennifer Nerad
Leah Clark
Joan Wrench
Ron Huden
Steve Ward
Jeffery Winslow
Laura Gunnip
Robin Doggett
Maralyn Crosetto
John Fleming
Steve Costie
Wyn Bielaska
Maria Coryell-Martin
Jonna Bell
Laurie Kain
Charlie Spitzack
Moon Lee
Craig Van Den Bosch
Barbara Robertson
Johanna Melamed
Sally Schuh
Jon Taylor

The program that day:

Oswald Cooper: Attacked by an itch to work with type – Paul Shaw
Roycrofters to Renaissance: The progression of Dard Hunter’s letterforms from arts and crafts to classical – Dr. Cathleen Baker
Ludlow’s Mutt & Jeff: Douglas McMurtrie & R. Hunter Middleton – Paul F. Gehl
Engraving: The curiously shy stepchild in American type genealogy – Nancy Sharon Collins
Print Your Own Language: The role of letterpress in Cherokee language revitalization – Frank Brannon, Jr.
A second life for vintage American typefaces – Panel discussion with Tom Phinney, Steve Matteson, & Richard Kegler

Unfortunately, I can’t talk about all the speakers (although I would love to), but I can sum up some highlights:

Our first speaker: Paul Shaw. He’s done some pretty amazing stuff.  

Although trained as a historian, Paul has spent most of his career as a designer.  His firm Paul Shaw / Letter Design has worked on calligraphy, hand lettering and typographic design for department stores, cosmetic brands, large corporations, universities, ad agencies for nearly thirty years. His work has won awards from the Type Directors Club, AIGA, New York Art Directors Club, Print and Letter Arts Review. From 1992 to 2001 Shaw was a partner with Garrett Boge in the digital typefoundry LetterPerfect.  He also has a few typefaces under his belt – Maybe 18 or so – among them Kolo, Donatello, Bermuda, Old Claude and Stockholm. He has written on letter-related subjects for Print, Eye, Baseline, Letter Arts Review and AIGA Voice. His book, Helvetica and the New York City Subway, sold out in two months!  A trade edition, published in early 2011 by MIT Press, just completed a second printing. I highly recommend you purchase this book before it sells out again.

A sample of Cooper’s handwork.

Paul kicked off the conference by diving into the world of Oswald Cooper (1879–1940), one of the four leading American type designers of the early to mid-twentieth century. Most of us know his name from the über-familiar font—Cooper Black. Paul discussed all of Cooper’s typefaces, including some of his less ubiquitous ones and some that were never completed; he also examined the close connection between them and own lettering.

After Paul Shaw, more inspiring speakers indulged as I listened. Paul Gehl talked about the interesting dynamics at Ludlow between McMurtrie & Hunter Middleton.

Print Magazine’s March issue from 1953 devoted entirely to the Society of Typographic Arts. Middleton was a founder of STA and was a past president from 1945-1946.

Stationer Nancy Sharon Collin talked about the history of engraving. I tried not to get too wrapped up because in my head I kept thinking, “I saw you on Martha Stewart!” Her upcoming book with Princeton Architectural Press, The Complete Engraver, will be out in Sept/Oct 2012. It’ll be released in tandem with two typefaces that she and Monotype created together.

I also met some interesting people. Among them were some type designers, who invited me to join their regular typography gatherings, and a wonderful freelancer that’s working on her postgrad for Type Design at Cooper Union. Thank you Lila for the photos!

After listening to the speakers and surrounding myself with all these interesting folks, I was well inspired and went home with fantasies of how my own unborn typefaces would evolve and take life! So thank you to Juliet Shen at The School of Visual Concepts for putting together this conference and thanks to everyone mentioned above for rekindling my love for type!

Can’t wait until Type Americana 3 in 2014!

-Mia, gal at the front that wears many hats

A couple dozen designer/model teams had been collecting materials all year working to assemble dazzling ensembles for the crowd. What had been a modest crowd of fifty people viewing less than a dozen outfits in the first year grew to a 200 person audience and nearly two dozen entries. My favorites included the skirt made from flattened coffee filters and the ensemble made from bedsprings. The winner of the popular vote came in a beautiful gown made from magazine covers!

Men, women, children and several teens headed for the prom all took part.  In this rural part of the mountain west, trash is becoming fashion!

- Ray

That’s the case for a new interactive infographic on global population density created by Derek Watkins, a graduate student in Geography at the University of Oregon. His map is based on the idea of “population islands,” a kind of abstract geography of human habitation. It has no reference to physical geography or national borders, the only distinction is between population densities; over a certain density per square kilometer and the area is represented in black, under and it’s represented in white.

At the most general level, 5 people/square km, the map roughly reflects continental geography, with Canada and Australia being the only noticeable absences. But as you slide the scale upward toward greater density, more and more of the world drops off the map. What becomes immediately apparent is how phenomenally dense India and China are. Even at 500 people/square km they still have dense swathes of black. I had an idea of how dense India and China were, but no understanding of what that meant.

And that, I think, is the real value of this map: it lets us examine not just density, but relative density. Static population maps, even heat maps, have a tough time conveying the magnitude of difference between populations. One amazing graphic that does the job is this one by Joe Lertola, published in Time Magazine in ’06:

The 3-dimensionality of this image does give us a profound visceral understanding of population densities, in addition to being a beautiful image. But unfortunately no such map exists for the world at large. Watkins’ map, even though it seems dull by comparison, is the first I’ve seen that conveys the way our own population densities are absolutely dwarfed on a global scale.

What I think these different graphics emphasize though, is that data can be effectively represented in all kinds of ways, and that visual appeal isn’t an automatic indicator of success. What matters at the end of the day is conveying information in a way that’s accessible to people, because understanding like that can change the way we view the world.

Sources: FastCo.Design, DerekWatkins.com.

Sources: FastCo.Design, DelayedGratification.

What’s happening is that the strobe light is only illuminating a certain part of the motion. If you think of what you’re looking at as a movie on repeat, a rapid succession of images, what the strobe is doing is blacking out a selection of those frames every time the movie plays. So you’re left with an edited version, one that runs on repeat, but with key frames missing. So in the video above, what you’re seeing is a rapid stream of water droplets, but the strobe is editing the frames to create a new movie for your brain. It’s sort of like realtime video editing.

But this effect can do more than just freeze moving objects in place, it can also reveal frames in a way that reorders them, effectively reversing the direction of motion. That’s what’s happening in the video above, the strobe is selectively revealing the drops as they fall, and since there are so many falling, it’s able to move them in reverse by cutting to a higher drop each time.

The last example of this mind-blowing effect that I want to show is this video of an airplane propellor. In real life, the propellor would look like a normal, spinning blade, mostly in that all you’d see is a blur. But because cameras record video at a particular frame rate, it can create a stroboscopic effect when it happens to sync up with the motion of an object in just the right way. In this video, the result is a completely bizarre deconstruction of the propellor blade.

Stroboscopic effects can be accidental or intentional, but either way they present a fascinating shift in our perception of time, space, and motion. Hopefully we’ll see more art and performance pieces incorporating this awesome illusion in the future!

1. Apartment Therapy’s Small Cool Contest – Some awesome designs for small apartments; lots of DIY fabrication and experimentation. “For the 8th year, we invite you to wow us with photos of your wonderfully compact home and insider tips for living well in under 1000 square feet. Join us today – send in an entry, start choosing your favorites and support your picks by sharing them with your friends.”

2. Smart Computing Islands on Everyday Surfaces – The UW’s Interaction Design program has teamed up with Intel Labs to create interactive digital displays that project onto ordinary things like countertops and desks. The smart technology can recognize objects placed on the surface, like ingredients, and provide a menu that offers suggested recipes, shopping lists, and more. Pretty amazing stuff.

3. Repainted Greek Sculptures – In case you missed it, apparently ancient Greek statues weren’t the white, idealized forms we see today. Instead they were painted with bright colors and complicated patterns, to the point where they can seem gaudy or kitsch compared to what we’re used to. As bizarre as it seems, archeologists are convinced that this was the aesthetic of ancient temples and plazas. It makes us rethink a staple of Western history and culture, but I think it also humanizes the ancient Greeks and makes them more relatable.

4. Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern – The London art gallery Tate Modern is currently featuring an exhibit on the work and life of influential Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Kusama’s work is fantastic, mind-bending, and often somewhat dizzying. Using patterns and lights, she manipulates space and perspective in original and disorienting ways. At 84 and mentally unstable as a result of her life and work, she lives voluntarily at a mental institution in Tokyo, but works during the day at her studio across the street. She is a truly fascinating and talented artist.

5. Map of Global Forest Heights – Using LIDAR, a satellite-based laser technology that bounces light off the earth and measures its return time, scientists are now able to map the heights of forests around the world. This is hugely important, because it lets us understand where the oldest and largest trees are, allowing more targeted conservation efforts and more nuanced understandings of forest carbon sequestration.

We’ve all seen those crude maps of ocean currents that use giant arrows to explain the directions of deep flows like the gulf stream. Those are useful, in a big picture sense, but they’re also deceptive because they tend to give us a much oversimplified idea of what ocean currents are actually like. On the surface of the ocean, where people spend most of their time, the currents aren’t simple at all. Instead they form a wild system of spiraling complexity that seems unintelligible to…well, almost everyone. The problem is that water is a medium that’s hard to track, and changing wind and tidal patterns can disrupt patterns all the time.

But somehow, the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio has produced a stunning video that maps the flow of surface currents in every ocean around the world, from 2005 to 2007. I don’t know how they do it, but the effect is aesthetically incredible. Mark Wilson, writing for FastCo.Design, compared this oceanic infographic to Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and the visual similarities are surprising. NASA states that the goal of the project was “to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.” In that, I think they’ve succeeded beyond measure.

But we’re not done there. By amazing coincidence, this week I also came across a live visualization of wind patterns across the United States. Using surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Hint.fm have put together this map that they call a “personal art project.” This one can’t be embedded, so you should definitely click through to see this amazing, moving infographic. Note: be sure to take advantage of the zoom feature to see wind patterns closer to home.

Sometimes images have the power to convey information more simply and concisely than any amount of explanation could. These two projects are examples of this idea, that the right presentation of data can cut through the haze of information overload to instantly convey understanding. One of the intentions the designers of the wind map have, is to emphasize the volume of wind in the US, as a way of advocating for the development of sustainable wind power. But it doesn’t have to be explicit, they don’t need an essay to explain their point. Instead, by presenting us with a beautiful visual example, they’re able to nudge people in the right direction.

Sources: FastCo.Design, Hint.fm.