Money. Death. Alexander McQueen. Some suicides. An economy.

This is not a work of art, and that’s entirely the point.

I’m a designer. It’s my job to stay fresh, to keep my creative capabilities from growing tired. I love my role at The Barbarian Group, a company in which our motto is to find the bleeding edge of the internet, and see how far and how successfully we can bring out clients towards it. I am proud of every project that has gone out the door that I have worked on, but there is always room to improve. That’s where bitchin’ times that have nothing to do with a paycheck come in. Sometimes, you need to be able to step away from the task at hand and tap into something that client work cannot supply: a lack of purpose.

New rule: Take some time out of every day to step back and create a quick sketch. Experiment. Rock and roll. Open my mind. Keep it fun. Love every minute of it. It’s never going to be a work of art, but it’s always going to be worth it. Hitting reset on your brain from time to time, no matter what it is you do, can be a pretty good idea.

Interested in seeing more? Follow the rest of my daily sketches  here

Silent is a two minute video created by combining frames from five classic silent films: Metropolis, Faust, Nosferatu, Holy Mountain, and The Dragon Painter and put to the music of Charles Ives’ Hallowe’en. The frames are chosen by custom software that compares data from each of the film’s soundtracks with the data from Ives’ music. The [...]

MoMA has launched this excellent service (that’s a little bit gimmick, but 90% utility) called My Day at MoMA.

Essentially, the site asks you when you plan to visit, and then scans your Facebook profile to determine what the best day to visit would be, and creates an editable itinerary.

Having worked on another major Art Museum site, this addresses a very real and major aspect of what a Museum’s site should do – prepare the person for their visit, and get them excited about it. That might seem obvious, but you would be amazed at just how many Museum sites fail at this.

It’s a nice execution using existing social networks to provide a jumping off point, if not a solution.

Now if they could work on improving modern art.

- David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Not sure about this – neither the qualification that art has to be created without any personal or outside interest in gain, nor the idea that this self- or third-party-interest precludes the ability of something created to also be a gift.

There have been a few mentions of our internal C++ library (codenamed Flint) around the web over the last week or two. Over the years we’ve had opportunities to work on some really interesting installation projects and data visualizations, and along the way we decided it would be a good idea to use some common bootstrapping, so that we can get the art side of things rolling a whole lot faster. That bootstrapping has turned into a somewhat larger scale library that makes it easy to do a whole lot of amazing things that used to take us a good deal of time to get working. It goes all the way from simply creating windows and draw-able contexts, to shaders, VBOs, and the once-feared (for me) Quaternion.

At the moment, Flint is very much in Alpha. We haven’t made any plans to release it to the public, but we also haven’t made any plans to not release it either (apologies for the double negative). We should have more news in the upcoming months, as we add necessary features and fine tune everything. We highly recommend checking out OpenFrameworks and Processing if you’re interested in doing high-end graphics or other interactive projects.

Oh, and if we do decide to release Flint, leave a comment and we’ll try to get you on the beta. Again, we still don’t know what the future holds, so no promises ;).

All this week, I am guest-blogging on the Adobe XD site, Inspire.

I am also cross-posting (slightly-modified) versions to my own site, TobyJoe.com.

Monday and Tuesday focused on a concept I’ve had for a while: the usability problems with mobile technology (like iPhone apps) seems to be building empathy for less-able (physically or otherwise) users among creative types. My hope is that usability will eventually trump novelty in creative portfolios, but I know that desire is pretty naive. Read Mobile Designers and Empathy.

Today I gave a light overview of the move digital artists (like our own Robert Hodgin) from Flash to Processing to C++ frameworks like OpenFrameworks. I also hinted at one of our internal frameworks that should get some attention later in the summer and explained why these frameworks are important to artists. Read Toward the Bare Metal: From Flash to Processing, OpenFrameworks, and Beyond.

I will post links to each article for the rest of the week. They will be as light and short and topical, but I hope they’re interesting.

Ages ago, I went to see the photographer Nikki S. Lee give a lecture about her newest project, The Hispanic Project. For those not familiar with Ms. Lee, she’s an artist who immerses herself into a subculture (whether it be Lesbians, Lindy Hoppers or Punks) and when she feels she’s become completely assimilated into that particular culture, she has photos taken of her with her newfound community. She then quits the scene for her next project.

Artistic criticisms aside, one of the most interesting points of discussion to come up in the follow-up Q&A did not revolve around Ms. Lee’s assumptions about the mutability of identity, but the fact that she chose to label herself a “photographer”. While the end result of her projects were indeed photographic evidence of her participation, she was not behind, but in front of, the lens.

This debate is far from contained or resolved: what, exactly, qualifies one as a photographer? Is it technical skill, like Ansel Adams, or is it simply using the photograph as a medium for the way you see the world (like Terry Richardson, for example)?

Such questions arise with Quell, a new photo series from Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, the creative duo behind Pigeon Projects (editorial disclaimer: Brian is my cousin). Quell is a series of low-resolution, noisy images of people (teenagers, mostly) undergoing a sort of voluntary asphyxiation. But the catch is this – Mr. Cassidy and Ms. Shatzky did not take these photos or witness these events. They are screen-captured stills from videos freely posted to YouTube.

“Within the countless hours of crudely captured and degraded self-documentation, we have selected moments in which violence, grace, eroticism and tenderness converge into solitary and painterly images.”

But the question Quell brings up, along with a beautiful, hollow window into the bored and risky lives of it’s subjects, is this: Is this Photography? Are Mr. Cassidy and Ms. Shatzky, in this role, photographers? Or is this something else, some new breed of artistic curation that simply uses the still image as its conduit?

Perhaps the thing I like most about this new series is that it defies that easy codification, not just in style, but where it fits into an entire history and continuum.