A little insight behind the scenes of August here at SUPERMETRIC— while things are getting more and more sophisticated, there are moments when it feels like sanity is at stake. That’s when a day trip to the beaches of Long Island comes in handy to reset the eye, the mind, and the arms (when there’s surf).

Outside the Art Gallery of NSW,  the two monumental bronze sculptures The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace (1923) that are flanking the museums entrance, have been put in a new, quite absurd context. Titled War and Peace and in Between, the artist has built a perfectly average looking living room and bedroom around the sculptures which visitors can access via two ramps. It’s a stunning experience to grasp the actual scale of an oversize bronze statue from so close. And beyond that it really makes you aware of the divide of public and private in the objects that surround us in our daily urban environments.

The Sydney project marks the latest in the series of Kaldor Public Art Projects, running since 1969 throughout Oz and including the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, and Bill Viola.

Building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights has been Tatzu Nishi’s signature act for over a decade. The artist lives and works in Cologne, and you can see more of his projects at his website.

About two years ago we designed a new website for Dattner Architects. The second part of the job was to help the New York firm put together their second monograph, which took considerably longer but just hit the street and we finally hold it in our hands!

We liked the idea to create two pieces that would showcase the company’s work in the distinct nature of their medium, and at the same time allow them to reference each other through a mutual graphic language. Front and center, book and website refer to the wide range of public and private projects Dattner Atchitects has realized over the years — in lieu of a title, the full list of their their fields of action is stacked in large letters, filling the entire available height and marking the sections projects belong to.

Get “Dattner Architects” from amazon. Funnily enough, at amazon there’s an older design of the cover showing up for the book which they took from the publisher’s catalogue (and which we really really liked because it was a little more mysterious). take a look…

It’s one of those dumb male cliches, that we love to spend hours at Home Depot. For me this is absolutely true, and these french guys here even make an art of it. Makeshift Guerilla art installations, just pure boy’s fun. They go by the name ENCASTRABLE (I’m pretty sure that means something sexual, as most french things — just to ponder a bit more on stereo types…) Click on the images to enlarge or check out their website — it’s fun!

[Via we-make-money-not-art.com ]

I’m going to start a series about inspirations—First off will be the great little book “A Giacometti Portrait” by James Lord. I read it for the first time while I was in Architecture school and I practically inhaled it. This might sound strange but it’s highly entertaining to see one of the greatest artists of the 20th century struggle on a daily basis trying to fulfill his own high expectations. The book is a bit like a Felini movie without the allegories, nakedness and costumes — just the pure suffering of the genius.

From the back cover: James Lord sat for eighteen days, while his friend Alberto Giacometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in it’s various stages. 

Here’s a little excerpt from around the middle (sic!) of the book:

“I’m very tired today,” he said. “I was up till five and then I didn’t sleep very well.”

Once having started to work, he soon said, “I’ve got to destroy everything again.”

“That was to be foreseen,” I said.

“Not to this extend. Look at me! Merde! I’m right back where I was in 1925. It’s absolutely impossible to reproduce on a canvas what I see.

“Of course,” I said. “Which simply brings us back again to the fact that one cannot hope to copy nature.”

“But that’s the only thing worth doing,” he said. “It’s the only thing I’m interested in.” 

Just in time for Spring hitting the streets last weekend, our designs for the second series of “Rockefeller Scientists’ Pioneering Discoveries” posters was installed outside the Rockefeller University’s main gate on York Street and 66th St.

The 12 posters are mounted back to back and break down into two different color gradations looking from the south and from the north. To create a consistent look for the extremely different scientific images in the backgrounds, we applied a monochrome half tone screen raster.

This very coarse dot screen (ca. 3 dpi) creates an effect of transformation for the passerby: the closer one comes the more the composition breaks apart into the primary elements it consists of — a little like looking through a microscope…

For about 4 years I have been going back to the Nike-ID website, debating over and over with myself which model, what materials, what colors to go with (they make you pick the color of two pairs of laces!) and finally what-the-hell to write on the damn thing. I guess I was just never enough of a sneaker head to get custom made shoes all the time, so in order to not waste the one time I would, I simply I never did.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, we voted to drastically cap our advertising budget at SUPERMETRIC. We canceled all TV spots and print ads (world wide) and decided to exclusively invest in viral marketing from now on. And suddenly I knew what I had to do. I knew my mission, and I knew what the title of that mission was — JUST DO IT.

Oh the shallowness of advertising. But at least I got a nice pair of shiny green sneakers out of this…

When Voorsanger Architects approached us to redesign their website we were immediately intrigued by two things:

First of all, their unique architectural language is applied to a great variety of projects with an amazing consistency of style and a subtle instinct for the ‘genius loci’.

Secondly, Voorsanger Architects understand the importance of good photography as a main ingredient to communicate and market their work in the best way possible.

It was clear that the new web site’s most important characteristic would have to be to play up this equation. A full screen image is the base layer for each screen and navigational elements, and text content are added on top of it in semitransparent layers. The main navigation appears and disappears intuitively as the user’s focus shifts between browsing the main menu and exploring the content of a section or project. Each element only comes into play when it is necessary for the immediate logic of a user interaction.

Yup, the world would be a better place without certain things — IE6 is definitely in the top ten of my list, right after war, religion (which maybe counts as one), cigarettes, and girls who like horses. Please support the most important campaign after “yes we can” (note the Shepard-Fairy-ness of the graphics — don’t ask me why they did such a poor job copying him), initiated by .net magazine.  Blog it, link to it, donwload the wordpress warning plug-in for your blog… help to spread the word and let’s finally Bring Down IE6.

Here’s an excerpt from the site:

The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about Microsoft’s lack of development in the browser market. With IE7/8 not available for Windows 2000, IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to ‘force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.

Here’s a little online-app that get’s rid of theose line breaks for you. just paste and process… textfixer

(top and bottom rows): From the 1970 NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual, Unimark Design Consultants, a page indicating directional information, the cover and and typeface instruction using Standard, not Helvetica; (middle) “Donna” illustration of platform signage by Bob Noorda (c.1966, colorized in 2008).

This should be a nice weekend read for a rainy day where you don’t feel like going out to get the paper and have no books or magazines left to read. Or for any other ordinanry day if you really really like reading lengthy stuff on your screen…

UPDATE: here’s the link to the AIGA article