Back in Los Angeles, for now and probably forever.

here are a couple of videos, one is from our show at matchless and the other is a music video:
   

this was created in 2002 when i was studying abroad in dessau, germany. it was an attempt to represent how we see things and how we register space and time. the person is brooke, she was the other exchange student from my school. we were sitting in the basement of the bauhaus building, which, i believe, was a cafeteria before, but is now a bar / cafe.

i finally saw helvetica (the documentary) over the weekend. there was a screening at the philoctetes center in the upper east side. it was pretty well produced and i enjoyed it quite thoroughly. afterward, there was a “round table” moderated by steven heller, which turned out to be just a 2 hour show-and-tell session with panelists taking turns showing their work. it was okay.

my top five sans-serifs, in no particular order:
1. univers - my favorite type family in college, quite versatile with its many variants. used on my resume.
2. helvetica - strictly for display use only. and as much as it is used, i still love it… though, i am partial to the neue reworking.
3. news gothic - great for body copy… which means i rarely use it now since i mostly design webpages (stuck with verdana, arial, lucida sans).
4. avenir - became familiar with this typeface at disney. it’s awesome.
5. futura - i used this a lot in college but not so much anymore. the uppercase O is ridiculously round.
honorable mention: century gothic - my favorite face in high school when i discovered it was used for weezer’s logo-type… yeah.

the round table

note to self: do not work on something that cannot be erased / undone, while watching a basketball game.

the highly anticipated (for me) lakers / rockets game was on tonight, and per usual i fired up justin.tv to stream it to my laptop in the comforts of my own bedroom. all is well, game is exciting and close and i’m even being productive by cutting and pasting the previously posted pyramidal piece. that is until the very end of the game when, still close, my rockets fumble big time and with adrenaline and pissed-offness flowing in my system, i trim the piece not realizing that the rule i’m using is covered with acrylic gel medium on the reverse side of it. this gel medium got onto the piece and is not removable. i tried erasing, i tried scratching out with an xacto knife, i tried coloring over with marker and pen… nothing. luckily, it is not directly on the paper cutouts. but still, i must trim it smaller, much smaller, and in my haste, i slip with the knife and cut toward the artwork. ugh. more trimming. so, now finally, instead of having some nice breathing room bordering everything, i have this:

which, isn’t horrible.. but still. it looked much nicer with the added space. and now i feel reluctant to draw on it as i had originally planned to. sigh. perhaps the lesson isn’t to not watch baskeball while working, but to invest in a mat / paper cutter.

this is a little something that will be used in a paper piece sometime soon. it was drawn with simpler forms and fewer pieces in mind as i will attempt to bring complexity in the later stages of the process. we’ll see how that goes.