Author: Delphine Hirasuna

Information Graphics

Numbers Are All Relative

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Computers and the Internet have made it possible to crunch data every which way so that we know exactly how much is spent on gift cards, military defense, Medicare and erectile dysfunction. But like so much else on the Internet, it is hard to know what to make of this glut of disparate information. British journalist David McCandless, author of the book “The Visual Miscellaneum” and the blog InformationIsBeautiful.net, is using infographics to help us make sense of it all. His solution to the information overload is to “use our eyes more.” McCandless has managed to use shapes, patterns, colors and space to map information, show relative scale, focus attention on information that is meaningful. Through juxtaposition of colored boxes, viewers can see correlations and connections between numbers that often would not normally be shown on the same spreadsheet. A whole lot of knowledge can be condensed into a very small space, and reviewing it can be effortless, relaxing and fun.


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Animation

2011 Academy Award Nominee

By Delphine Hirasuna |

“Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage” (Madagascar, a Journey Diary) is one of five animated short films nominated for an Academy Award this year. From a purely artistic standpoint this animated short by French filmmaker Bastien Dubois is compelling to view. Colored pencil and watercolor drawings come to life, so that viewers feel like they’ve stepped into the pages of a traveler’s diary. Dubois undoubtedly achieved this using a rotoscoping technique in Adobe After Effects — a process of drawing masks, animating the path and then using the masks to define a matte.

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Illustration

Retro Bitmapped Portraits

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Lately Brooklyn -based illustrator and author Andy Rash, who usually draws in a more traditional style, has come out with a series that is a throwback to the crude bitmapped video game art of the 1980s. Rash calls this style “Iotacons” – iota means an extremely small amount. Full body portraits of politicians and pop stars look like they were constructed out of Lego bricks or mosaic tiles. What fascinating is that even distilled down to a few dozen pixels, these figures are recognizable as individuals and as personalities. We can pick out specific members of the U.S. Senate (below), the Supreme Court justices (above), the Allied-Axis leaders of World War II, the Beatles, and all of the Star Wars characters. It’s all very retro and fun, and it reminds us how far digital technology has come since the days when we only had pixelated images to work with.

Typography

Mahatma Gandhi’s Words in His Own Type

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Leo Burnett India ad agency commemorated the 141st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth (October 2, 2010) by creating an alphabetical font in the Devanagari script in the style of Gandhi’s trademark wireframe eyeglasses. The special typeface was the brainchild of Burnett’s national creative director KV “Pops” Sridhar, who wanted to inspire younger generations with the teachings of Gandhi. The glasses symbolize Gandhi’s vision and his visionary thoughts on truth and nonviolence. Sridhar explains, “The way he saw the world is completely different than the way we do – and hence the glasses, to subtly nudge people into thinking like him again.” Gandhi had originally given the glasses in the 1930s to an Indian army colonel who had asked the great leader for inspiration. Gandhi reportedly gave him his glasses and said, “These gave me the vision to free India.”

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Publishing

Little White Lies – About How a Magazine Is Made

By Delphine Hirasuna |

This is a video about the making of a magazine that is about the making of films. Little White Lies (LWLies) is an independent British film magazine produced by The Church of London creative agency. In 2001, while at university studying graphic design, Danny Miller co-founded Little White Lies as a final degree project. His 17-year-old friend Matthew Bochenski wrote the content. Miller then moved to London to work on a skate and snowboard magazine called Adrenalin, but kept thinking about making Little White Lies for real. Finally in 2005, he produced the first issue and since then LWLies has become a bi-monthly magazine with a print run of about 2,500 copies, distributed in Borders stores in the UK. The design and editorial content of each issue is inspired by a single film – in this case “Black Swan” – and features an illustration of the lead actor on the cover. In 2008, LWLies won “Best Designed Consumer Magazine of the Year” at the Magazine Design & Journalism Awards. What’s great about this “making of” LWLies video is that it covers the focus, teamwork, deadline pressure and ultimate satisfaction of starting from rough sketches to holding the finished product in your hands. Ah joy! Although online has its advantages, there is nothing quite as wonderful as seeing your work reproduced with ink on paper.