Click on the Twitter Gif of laughter

Click the image for the Gif experience of your life.

Twitter is for the birds. 

Here's the latest masterwork in my oeuvre, created and designed for the education-tech class I'm taking at Central Michigan University.

Aside from animating Gifs, I've learned how hard it is to find a service that allows you to upload, embed, and display one's Gifs in any kind of user-friendly way, hence the clickable thumbnail from Photobucket (above), which embeds my Gif at the expense of giving away its hilarious punchline. 

Cheep, cheep.

Mind-mapping Obama's life on Louis Riel Day

When you're a Canadian studying at an American university, how do you celebrate Louis Riel Day?

By mind-mapping Barack Obama's life, of course.

My assignment: 

"Select a person of color who made significant contributions to the culture of the United States. Include appropriate images for the concepts and include the relationship between two concepts when linked. You also need to include links to appropriate pages on the Internet that serve as resources about the person you choose."

I started by downloading Inspiration (available for a free 30-day trial - just click on the link), a cheap mapping software package. Then, I got to work.

Here are the results, in PDF format. Unfortunately, you can't click on the links, listen to the audio, or watch the video, but you get the point.

If you're inspired, someone still needs to do this for Louis Riel. We're waiting!

Barack Obama Background

New Winnipeg Jets logos are just plane plain

Logical. Corporate. Practical. Sober.

Sorry, what was I saying? I dozed off.

As every Winnipegger knows by now, the new Winnipeg Jets logos are a joint venture between True North, the Canadian Armed Forces, the Toronto Maple Leafs, Reebok, Don Cherry, Casey Anthony, Amy Winehouse, Rupert Murdoch, the accounting firm of PriceWaterhouse, a panel of experts, lovers, dreamers, and stakeholders.

All designs have constraints by definition, but ask any advertiser: when you seek agreement from everyone, you end up with something that's for no one.

To me, the new Jets logos are offensive in their inoffensiveness, as corporate and bland as "I'm lovin' it."

Counterargument: "But the city has been waiting for the NHL to return for so long, we shouldn't complain about a logo." As true as True North. There is so much goodwill for this brand's return, most fans seem to be in the "the logo is growing on me" camp (yeah: like a fungus!).

It makes sense, because everyone wants to love the logos as much as they love the team's return.

I remember wanting to love Star Wars: Episode I after a long Star Wars drought, but sooner or later, even I had to admit that Jar Jar is an arsehole. But if Episode I taught me one thing it's that it's better to fall in love with the Force than to use the Force to force yourself to fall in love with the Force. Or something.

A brief summary of my beefs:

1. Where there's a stick, there's a J. 

When the hockey team kept the name, it was a nod to tradition, and the fans loved it.

Why not a similar nod to tradition in the logo?

Yes, the old logo was in need of an upgrade, but I would've still tipped my hat to tradition in terms of one element: the J.

For years, every hockey fan in Winnipeg has stared at that old Jets logo with lust in their hearts, hoping that the team would one day return and be called the Winnipeg Jets. But while they stared at that logo, they made an association: "J" = hockey stick.

So update the logo, but come on - we know the J in Jets is just as much a hockey stick as the last two Ls in Hell.

2. Where's the emotion?

The new logos are fitting in the sense that they remind me of True North itself, which brought our hockey team back by being quiet and corporate and not drawing too much attention to itself. 

But people don't fall in love with "corporate" - even corporations know they can't be corporations, which is how we ended up with the Apple logo (thank you, Beatles), the Nike swoosh, and the Disney mouse, whatever his name is.

So give us something that touches our hearts, not our minds. Yes, the logos make sense intellectually, but they're as emotionally stale as that crusty Danish in your kitchen. And if Lars doesn't leave your kitchen soon, I'd call the cops.

3. Where's the depth?

San Jose knew the shark was just lying there - all dead and flat.

So they made it come to life by getting it to swim off the shirt, all badass 3D-style.

Is our jet allowed to fly anywhere? Or can it only stay grounded on that skin-tight Speedo with the Canadian maple leaf on the crotch?

If you have to make it a jet, make it a badass stealth fighter that drops heat-seeking hockey sticks on your arse before disappearing into the night.

4. We already have a hockey team called the Maple Leafs.

So, make like a tree...and get that maple leaf outta there.

Is there something more Winnipeg-based you could put on that shirt? You can put a Cheese Nip in its place, for all I care: but the maple leaf is taken by the very city Winnipeggers pride themselves on not being.

***

Oh, True North: we wanted logo love, and you gave us the business. We'll get over it. One day.

My favorite 45 cover designs

Q: What's a 45?

A: Only a 45-year-old knows for sure.

Why, it can only be the seven-inch vinyl record: the iTunes single of its day.

From roughly 1950 to 1990, the 45 rpm (revolutions per minute!) record was the format of choice for anyone who only wanted "the hit song" without having to buy an entire album full of mostly bad songs.

Formats may change, but bad albums are forever.

I still remember the first handful of 45s I ever bought: "You Better, You Bet" by the Who, "The Waiting" by Tom Petty, and "The No No Song" by Ringo Starr. I don't recall having even an inkling that everyone's favorite, happy-go-lucky Beatle was singing about rehab.

I only partly bought these 45s for the music; equally important was the 45 cover - a sleeve, actually - which worked to differentiate and market a product that looked exactly the same without the packaging, and express the artistic intent of the musician/music as a visual.

So predominant was this format, just a few years before I entered the Creative Communications program as a student, a standard assignment in graphic-design class was to create a 45 rpm cover for the artist/song of your choice.

Later, the assignment changed to "a cassette tape design for Lloyd Cole and the Commotions," followed by "a CD design for Dire Straits," followed by an intangible, invisible, downloadable file design for...?! D'oh!

The 45 is dead. Long live the 45 sleeve!

1. Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen

2. Pete Townshend - Rough Boys

3. The Beatles - All You Need is Love

4. Elvis Presley - All Shook Up

5. Bob Dylan - I Want You

6. Rolling Stones - Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?

7. The Clash - Pressure Drop

8. Talking Heads - Take Me to the River

9. Sex Pistols - Holidays in the Sun

10. Donovan - Mellow Yellow

Has Into the Music been taking liberties with ladies?

Lady Liberty called. She wants her hat back.

The 10 greatest designs of 2010 (plus two)

1. Mall parking-lot stencil. Right side up: baby parking. Upside down: smoking Mickey Mouse.

2. The glowing, spiky balls of doom and pleasure, Lollapalooza.

3. The Flip Camera packaging that says, "Hug me!"

4. The iPad. I understand that it's beautiful.

5. The Bay's "part with your money here" floor stencil:

6. My friend's Pittsburgh Penguins' wedding ring. He and Crosby have never been happier together.

7. The Sunday dessert buffet at Shaw's Crab House, Chicago.

8. Berns & Black window treatment,  Main Street.

9. Tiffany Lachuta's CreCommedy Night poster

10. Gate Arm is Clos-ouch!, Chicago.

11. Mood-board collages, Advertising majors, Creative Communications

12. My own, personal logo I drew in the Glow Draw app. In case you were wondering: those are bad-ass flames shooting from the top of my initials. And, yes, I'm taking pre-orders for the T-shirts.

The 10 creepiest designs of 2010

1. The cover of George W. Bush and His Family Paper Dolls. Please tell me that it comes with matches.

2. My student's rocket-ship design with a funny chimp in the front window and a creepy chimp in the back window.

3. The lovely couple about to welcome you - or is that burn you for witchcraft? - at the Saskatchewan German Club.

 

4. The ultimate dude with the Ultimate Warrior jacket.

5. The new Devo mask - glasses optional. The energy domes were a long, long time ago.

6. The wiener mascot at Dingo's on Corydon. Get that wiener some pants! No condiments jokes, please. Etc.

7.  My friend's wedding cake. The groom commits suicide as the bride marries her dogs. I assume.

8. The racially charged Side Kicks campaign. "Almost everyone's" creeped out by it.

9. The HMV "read" poster mashup; a nightmarish collage of hellish images and suspenders.

10. The Flaming Lips' concert. Why is the stage looking at me?

My favorite Winnipeg public art - '10

1. The giving tree (intersection of Corydon and Harrow)

2. The poll pole (Osborne Village)

Stick the green sticker on the place you like, stick the red sticker on the place you don't. That's one for Corydon and one for the airport, respectively. 

3. The curious pole (The Children's Museum, The Forks)

When is a pole not just a pole? When someone writes "penis" on it!

4. The evil bike rack (Broadway near Hargrave)

5. The skeletal dog (Club Regent)

Pirates of the Caribbean called - they want their dog back.

6. The Jetsons Walkway (Convention Centre to City Place)

7. The Bailey's stained-glass window

8. The Cable in Joint sidewalk flare (all around town)

9. Art you can see through (Hotel Fort Garry walkway)

10. The Bubbler of Princess St. (or is that the princess of Bubbler St.?)

The 10 best album cover designs

You've seen the rest, now here's the best:

1. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

This is the album cover that got me into music. I remember finding it in my dad's record collection as a kid and being blown away.

"What the hell is going on here?! The album says it's by "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," but what are the Beatles doing here with Fred Astaire, Lenny Bruce, Tony Curtis, Bob Dylan, W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, and Dylan Thomas?" I wondered.

The cover was created by Robert Fraser and designers Peter Blake and Jann Haworth and the folks on the cover are the thinkers and figures influential to The Beatles - including the teenybopper versions of themselves,  the old-school equivalent of #ff-ing your own Twitter account on a Friday. I know of what I speak...

Although none of these people (Beatles aside) actually sing on the record, the cover is evocative of the music inside - the first concept album in rock with the best cover. Of course, the Beatles were first and best with everything they touched; trend-setters who proved that the supposed "trends" had staying power.

For their other classic album covers, see Abbey Road, Revolver, the White Album, and With the Beatles. The whole story behind this cover is here, and well worth the read.


2. The Velvet Underground and Nico

If you can't come up with a decent album cover yoursef, getting Andy Warhol to do it ain't a bad strategy.

The cover of VU's debut album featured a classic piece of Warhol art: a yellow banana and the artist's signature instead of the band's name; and you could peel away the banana skin to reveal a flesh-colored "banana" in the same shape. Dirty!


3. The Clash - London Calling

The best punk album of all time with the best cover: a photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass at the Palladium, New York, Sept. 21, 1979. My 12th birthday!

The cover was designed by Ray Lowry around a photograph by Pennie Smith. Q Magazine quotes Lowry claiming "plagiarinspiration." Great word!

Proving the adage that intelligence borrows and genius steals, the typography is lifted right off of Elvis Presley's 1956 album cover (another great album, by the way).

Smith's photo of Simonon (paying tribute to the Who's Pete Townshend) almost didn't make it. She thought it was too out of focus. Q quotes her: "I ducked. He was closer than it looks."


4. Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks

Jamie Reid's iconic ransom note and newspaper-clipping style screams "terrorism," but the pink and yellow background screams "pop." Exactly right!


5. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

Mental illness has never looked so classy!

Designed by George Hardie with input from the band, the Dark Side of the Moon's cover supposedly represents the band's stage show, the album's psychedelic lyrics, and the band's request for smart simplicity.

Other classic Floyd album covers: Atom Heart Mother, Animals, and Wish You Were Here. The Wall? I dunno...


6. Ramones

The police lineup from hell: Johnny, Tommy, Joey, and Dee Dee, as photographed by Roberta Bayley for Punk magazine.

Described alternatively as "dumb defiance" and the "ultimate punk statement," this album cover preceded the Ramones wherever they toured, to the point that many of the band's fans believed they were in a street gang and were afraid to meet or speak with them.

My favorite part: despite the tough-guy stances, Tommy is on his tippy toes to look taller and Joey is hunched over to look shorter.


7. The Who - Sell Out

Like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, the Who mastered the art of making their cover art match the music - hence some pretty great covers for Quadrophenia, Tommy, Who Are You, and - this classic - The Who Sell Out.

The band's album concept, as illustrated on the cover, included joke ads between songs, or "selling out" in the parlance of the times - back in the old days, the simpler times before Pete Townshend sold the entire Who catalogue for use as CSI theme songs. Sigh.


8. X - Los Angeles

An X on fire - or is that a burning cross knocked over on its side? - reflecting the band's gritty take on sex, love, and life in LA and, in the album's title track, the girl who leaves it behind for all the wrong reasons.


9.  New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies

Classical art meets the floppy disk: this cover features a reproduction Henri Fantin-Latour's "A Basket of Roses" and, in the top-right corner, a color-based "alphabet" designed by Peter Saville for the band, mimicking a floppy disk, which Saville had just seen for the first time.

According to Wikipedia:

"It is said that the owner of the painting (The National Heritage Trust) first refused Factory Records access to it. Tony Wilson, the head of the label, then called them up to ask who actually owned the painting and was (told) that the Trust belonged to the people of Britain. Wilson then famously replied, "Well, the people of Britain now want it."

10. Monty Python - Another Monty Python Record

Take that, Beethoven!