Blogbook
Istanbul-based graphic designer Tolga Girgin experiments with 3D calligraphy, by using pencil shading and perspective to amazing effect. For more, you can follow his Instagram. Tolga was born in Simav, Kütahya, Turkey in 1981, and not only works as a calligrapher and a graphic designer, but also as an electrical and electronics engineer.
Modern Calligraphy
Calligraphy’s been entering a sort of popular renaissance these past few years, from works like Niels Shoe Meulman’s Calligraffiti gaining prominence to the occasional treats you can find on Monotype’s Seb Lester’s Instagram. Beginner guides are everywhere, but if you have the time and a bit of cash to spend, Melbourne has regular workshops at the Calligraphy Society of Victoria, which runs classes that span the range from beginners to advanced. It meets monthly, and, along with conducting workshops, often also conducts exhibitions and publishes work. It’s a fun, therapeutic visual art hobby that’s easy and cheap to get into: you really only need maybe some special pens, that you can (if you want to) make yourself – or buy for cheap from most art shops. Note however that if you’re leaning to get into classical calligraphy, there are different pens for right and left handed people. You can also learn Chinese calligraphy in workshops around Melbourne.
Thermonuclear Art is a video of the sun in ultra 4k HD, courtesy of NASA:
It’s always shining, always ablaze with light and energy that drive weather, biology and more. In addition to keeping life alive on Earth, the sun also sends out a constant flow of particles called the solar wind, and it occasionally erupts with giant clouds of solar material, called coronal mass ejections, or explosions of X-rays called solar flares. These events can rattle our space environment out to the very edges of our solar system. In space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. In this video, we experience SDO images of the sun in unprecedented detail. Presented in ultra-high definition, the video presents the dance of the ultra-hot material on our life-giving star in extraordinary detail, offering an intimate view of the grand forces of the solar system.
The SDO was the first mission launched as part of NASA’s Living with a Star Program, which aimed to understand not only solar variability but its effects on Earth and Near-Earth space.
We love UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales #NoLostGeneration animated spot! Malak and the Boat is narrated by 7-year-old Malak herself, and was created by UNICEF by 180LA. You can read the rest of Malak’s story here. Via Mashable:
UNICEF says it will release a second film, “Ivine and Pillow,” in March. The “Unfairy Tales” series is part of the humanitarian group’s #NoLostGeneration campaign to mark the 5-year anniversary of Syria’s civil war.
More than 14 million children across Syria and Iraq have been affected by the deadly conflict that has cost the lives of over 250,000 people, according to UNICEF.
It’s Superbowl time! And while many of us in adland don’t watch the game itself, the high-stakes, big budget nature of the ads that get made for Superbowl are often something else. Here are our top 5 favourites this year:
5. Paypal’s New Money
Great Wolf of Wall Street-esque writing in this ad. Great contrast between the old and the new, humanising Paypal’s system.
4. Heinz’s Dachshunds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNN9nL2vppM
Who doesn’t love a field of racing wiener dogs…
3. Hyundai’s Ryanville
Similarly, who doesn’t love a town full of Ryan Reynolds?
2. Toyota’s The Longest Chase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYeM-8hO3hM
Hilarious car chase ad involving a Toyota Prius.
1. Pokémon 50
Pokémon’s Nike-style ad is impressive. Celebrating its upcoming Pokémon Day, the ad’s a great expression of the global phenomenon that the massively popular game has become.
It’s the first day of Chinese New Year today, and it’s now the Year of the Monkey.
Did you know
– It’s a 15 day celebration running over many countries, including places like Mauritius and the Philippines
– If you’re into horoscopes, there’s a prediction for each year of the Chinese zodiac
– Most of the Chinese New Year food/symbols that you see involve word puns
– Melbourne has lots of celebratory events dotted around Victoria
– Good Luck Food to eat – many of them involve word puns and are just plain delicious. In particular, if you can find them, have some sweet mandarins, a staple of the festival in Asia. Or try some yusheng, if you can find a place to have it in.
– Yes there’s a reason why there are 15 days to the celebration: each day means something. For example, the 15th day is the Chinese Valentine’s Day:
Most romantic of the Chinese New Year traditions, single women once wrote contact information on oranges, then threw them into the river. Men would collect the oranges and determine if they would take a chance with contacting a woman based on the sweetness or sourness of the orange!
Brought to you by National Geographic – here’s 40,000 Years of London’s History, made of paper. Amazing! As National Geographic describes the city:
Peel back the pavement of a grand old city like London and you can find just about anything, from a first-century Roman fresco to a pair of medieval ice skates—even an elephant’s tooth. As one of Europe’s oldest capitals, London has been continuously lived in and built over by a succession of Romans, Saxons, Normans, Tudors, Georgians, Regency rakes, and Victorians, each of whom added to the pile. As a result the modern city sits atop a rich archaeological layer cake that’s as much as 30 feet high.
Created to celebrate London’s Big Dig, workers digging out the foundation for a new 38-storey building came across the ruins of an old Roman building dated to AD 60. Part of what was recovered was a huge fresco at nearly ten feet long and six feet high, one of the biggest and most complete first century frescoes found.
“These excavations have provided us with fascinating snapshots into the lives of Londoners through the ages,” says Don Walker, a human osteologist, or bone specialist, for MOLA. “It makes you realize that we all are just small, passing players in a very long-running story.”
The Barkley Family is back for Subaru, in time for Superbowl. Via adweek:
The first new spot, a :60 titled “Puppy,” is the best of the lot, showing a tired Mr. Barkley driving around at night with one of his pups, trying to get him to sleep. It’s one of those themes that just instantly connects with parents—McDonald’s did a memorable take on it with its wonderful drive-through ad back in 2010. The Subaru spot is great, too, taking its time in slowly building the humor, with some great facial expressions from the doggie driver.
More doggy family ads:
The new ad campaign builds on the “Subaru Loves Pets” initiative, which supports the ASPCA with sponsoring pet adoption programs. Subaru also released a special doggy emoji for Twitter which auto-populate when a tweet features the hashtag #DogApproved. From Alan Bethke, Subaru America’s vice president of marketing:
“Subaru and its customers have a deep connection to pets. Eight out of 10 Subaru owners are pet owners, and our brand continues to support the causes and initiatives that our customers care about. The new ‘Dog Tested. Dog Approved.’ campaign puts the Barkley family in the driver’s seat to help celebrate this shared love.”
#WomenNotObjects is trying to change the advertising industry’s landscape. Via mashable:
On Nov. 18, 2015, ad executive Madonna Badger Googled “objectification of women” as part of a campaign called #WomenNotObjects, turning up years’ worth of sexist ads that hypersexualize and objectify women’s bodies for marketing. In a new video released this month, the campaign spotlights some of these ads, with women sarcastically confronting the images for their harmful depictions.
Created by advertising executive Madonna Badger, who lost her daughters in a house fire, Badger mentioned to the WSJ that she wanted to honour her daughters by improving industry awareness of sexist ads and of using women as props. She acknowledged that she was part of the problem in the past – having been part of the team that created the Calvin Klein ads. Badger has stated that her agency, which counts Avon, Vera Wang and Nordstrom among its clients, has pledged to no longer create ads that objectify women, and will also stop airbrushing women in their ads “to the point of perfection”.
Badger isn’t the only voice in this space. Proctor and Gamble’s highly successful #LikeAGirl campaign drew waves when it launched in 2014, for example. Regardless the #WomenNotObjects campaign has been well-received, and UN Women tweeted about the video in January.
Rapper and activist Prince Ea uploaded ‘Dear Future Generations’ last year for Earth Day, and the video went viral. We’re a bit late to the game, but we love it. You can still donate to his Stand for Trees campaign here, or alternatively, there’s also the Rainforest Trust, an ultra-transparent charity along similar lines.
Prince Ea was inspired to produce the video by the Stand for Trees campaign, an innovative new way for individuals to take real and effective action to protect threatened forests and help mitigate global climate change, all with the press of a button on their smart phones.
“We owe children a better future than the one we’re giving them now,” said Prince Ea, who visited two Stand for Trees project sites developed by Wildlife Works in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This isn’t just about saving trees, it’s about doing what’s right for billions of people around the world affected by climate change, as well as taking back the future of generations who will be affected by the actions we take today.”
Prince Ea, an online sensation, has more more than 1.3 million Facebook followers and YouTube videos with over 12 million views. In this latest video, he apologizes to future generations for the destruction that has been wrought on the world. He is encouraging everyone to stand up and take action now.
More via PRNewsWire.
Did we just find the ninth planet? Above, Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science, and Mike Brown (one of the main reasons Pluto was demoted), the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy, discuss. From Caltech news:
Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun. […]
“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”
Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system.”