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Great short film by the Printing Ink Company showing how ink is made out of raw ingredients such as varnish and powder, with care and craftsmanship. Via Gizmodo:
The video, produced by Toronto-based Vepo Studios, features the facilities of The Printing Ink Company. There, the president and head inkmaker, Peter Welfare, shows us just how they make their incredible printing inks.
The four pigments—Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK)—start out as a simple powder. To get the right consistency, the pigments are combined with a honey-like substance called the “vehicle.” Only after further cooking, milling, mixing, and a thorough testing process can the ink be considered a finalized product.
Watching this video, you can’t help but be moved by the wonder of it all. You want to reach out as the ink gets pulled and kneaded like a soft taffy, or maybe even mix a color of your own creation. Most of all, you can’t help but appreciate the striking elegance of pure color.
The Printing Ink Company is based in Canada, a family owned business that was founded in 1973 by William Welfare. Originally a small company with only three employees in a space of 250 square feet, it has since grown into a 24,500 square feet business with 19 employees.
For our #FlashBackFriday, here’s the Captain of the Starship, Geoffrey Bowll, and his serious hat game, talking psychographics in 2008. From our 2013 post on the topic:
We are different people at different times. When you’re playing soccer with your mates for a 40th birthday at 7am, that’s you being ‘Mr sporty/blokey/modern’. When you’re eating breakfast with said mates and a good-looking woman of 30ish walks into the café, instantly you’re ‘Mr Sophisticated businessman who might be a great boyfriend.’ Depending upon the occasion, you can be any of hundreds of possible people who float around inside your head, and only pop up to the surface when required. How many of us males are James Bond one minute, Brad Pitt the next? The various people you live within will often determine how you react to marketers messages. Why will you buy a certain beer? If you’re with that soccer playing crowd, you’d buy Boags. If you’re drinking with their dads, you might get a VB. It’s often to fit in, often to confirm where you see yourself.
This is a real head-ache for marketers who want to be able to neatly slot punters into easily hit demographics. But humans ain’t like that, and that, in a nutshell, is what makes our career so interesting and so frustrating at the same time.
Psychographics give you more meaningful, powerful brands. They are a move beyond simple, dumb demographics. You segment consumers by lifestyle, attitudes, beliefs, values, personality, buying motives, and pattern of product use. The psychographic characteristics of a market affect not only advertising but also packaging and channels of distribution –anything that is your brand has a definite psychological finger print, whether you want it to or not. Although many decisions are based on assumptions about the psychological make-up of our customers, in OZ it’s very much an under-used marketing discipline.
Amazing photos by 71-year-old Jeffrey Milstein, who managed to get these geometric photographs of NYC and LA by leaning out of a helicopter for his new series, LANY, currently touring in LA and NYC.
For more photos, check out Milstein’s website.
About Jeffrey Milstein
Milstein is a photographer, graphic designer and pilot. Via his profile on Saatchi:
Milstein’s photographs have been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and Europe, and are currently represented in the USA by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles and Benrubi Gallery in NYC; and in Europe by Young Gallery in Brussels and Bau-Xi Gallery in Canada. In 2008 Milstein’s work was presented in a solo show at the Ulrich Museum of Art. In 2012 his work was shown in a solo show at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Noted British photographer and critic, Martin Parr included his photographs in his curated show New Typologies. His photographs have been published in New York Times, LA Times, Harper’s, GQ, European Photography, American Photo, Eyemazing, Die Ziet, Wired, PDN, Esquire, and Condi Naste Portfolio. Abrams published Milstein’s aircraft work as a monograph in 2007, and Monacelli published his extensive body of work from Cuba as a monograph in 2010. Born in Los Angeles, where he frequently returns to shoot at the International Airport, Milstein makes his home in Woodstock, NY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr-8tYfIzsU&feature=youtu.be
Jewelbots is a friendship bracelet that encourages teenage girls to learn coding. Via Wired:
Compared to a gleaming Apple Watch or even an entry-level Fitbit, the Jewelbot hardware is primitive: a semi-translucent plastic flower charm that slides onto a hair tie–like elastic bracelet. The functionality is basic, too. The charms talk to each other over Bluetooth, and using a Jewelbots smartphone app, youngsters can program their charms to vibrate or light up when their friends are nearby. But despite their apparent simplicity, Jewelbots exhibit some truly fresh thinking about wearable technology. And with a little imagination, they hint at devices far more interesting than today’s computer watches.
If you’re looking to buy yourself a set, check out their website. Touting itself as the world’s first programmable friendship bracelet, they cost about $59 (pre-order) to $159 for a three pack. From the company:
Using basic if/then statements, kids begin to learn the fundamentals of computer science while engaging with their friends and expressing themselves. They can create friend-groups and decide how their Jewelbot lights up and vibrates when they are together. Once they get a hang of it, they can use the iOS + Android compatible app to write little mods such as have their Jewelbot light up when they get a new Instagram like. The mod possibilities are endless. And of course – Jewelbots’ basic functions can be used without a phone.
Wow! This beautiful watch by Van Cleef & Arpels is part of their Poetic Astronomy series, and is called the Midnight Planétarium. Containing 396 moving parts, it accurately tracks planetary orbits. In case you ever really needed a visual reminder of your location in our little galaxy.
Via the Daily Mail:
Mercury will make a lap around the watch’s face in just 88 days, Venus will require 224, and Earth of does it in one year. Saturn, which is the farthest planet from the sun in the watch, won’t make it back to its starting position for 29.5 years. A shooting star on the outer edge of the watch face indicates the time.
Inspired by planetariums, the movement of the watch was created for Van Cleef & Arpels’ by Dutch watchmaker Christiaan van der Klaauw. The discs are made of aventurine, and each planet is a semiprecious stone.
Mercury is serpentine, Saturn is sugilite, Venus is chloromelanite, Earth is turquoise, Mars is red jasper and Jupiter is blue agate. A rotating rose gold outer rim lets the wearer choose a special day on which the Earth will move under the star engraved in the sapphire crystal.With all those gemstones, and 396 working parts, it comes with a hefty price tag of £185,800. A version with diamond decorations costs £247,700. The watches are available on request from the company.
Ouch! That’s a bit of an investment for a cool watch.
New York has announced plans to invest $32 million into building a new animal terminal in JFK Airport. So far, from the renders, it looks like it’s going to have more perks than the human part of the airport… Via TIME:
The 172,165 square-foot facility, dubbed the ARK, will include “a state-of-the-art veterinary hospital, animal daycare services and more efficient ways to transport animals worldwide, including exotic species,” the Port Authority said in a public statement. Artists’ renderings suggest that animal passengers may enjoy more amenities than their human counterparts, including a lap pool and private rooms. The cattle gates, on the other hand, may look familiar.
“While most of our airport passengers walk on two legs, this new center will serve the important travel needs of our four-legged and winged friends,” said Port Authority executive director Pat Foye.
More specifications are available on the ARK’s website:
The Ark is under construction at Building 78 at JFK, with 14.4 acres of surrounding ground area including large cargo aircraft ramp parking and land use for animal handling. It will be divided into three complementary sections: the air cargo facility, a central administrative and veterinary clinic building, and the animal handling center with pet boarding facility, veterinary clinic and diagnostic laboratory, animal import and export center, and livestock export handling system.
Alien life aficionados hoping for a First Contact situation in their lifetimes can now feel a bit more assured. Thanks to a Russian billionaire, there’s been a huge investment into the field, called ‘Breakthrough Listen’, focused on figuring out whether we’re the only intelligent life in the universe.
Now the hunt for alien life is getting reinvigorated, thanks to a huge investment from Silicon Valley’s Yuri Milner. The Russian billionaire has been supporting research in physics, mathematics and the life sciences through the Breakthrough Prize, which is the largest scientific award in the world, and now he’s investing $100 million to complete the most extensive search for life beyond Earth to date. The project, called Breakthrough Listen, is endorsed by physicist Stephen Hawking and led by SETI pioneer Frank Drake as well as other top-notch scientists.
“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth,” said Hawking in a press conference. “So, in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life… We are alive, we are intelligent, we must know.”
Check out Breakthrough Listen‘s website for more information, including an open letter signed by Yuri Milner, Hawking, and other luminaries like chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen.
…there was Letraset. In celebration of 25 years of Photoshop, Lynda released a video of Sean Adams, showing us how to mock up a layout using traditional tools:
If you liked that video, there are other great 25th anniversary videos out there, including this CreativeLive video of Photoshop experts, trying their hand at using Photoshop 1.0:
We are very grateful that Photoshop can now undo more than once.
For more tributes, check out Lynda. More about the program:
Adobe Photoshop, the industry-standard image editor and home of the PSD document format, started life back in the late eighties when PhD student Thomas Knoll was working on his thesis – a work detailing the processing of digital images. This work evolved and in 1987 Thomas proceeded to develop an image-processing program for his Mac.
This application was created to work with greyscale images, and over a short period of time Thomas developed it further, adding new digital editing processes. It didn’t take long before his brother John Knoll was intrigued by the program, dubbed Display.
John, who was working at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, suggested to his brother that they turned Display into a more feature-rich fully-fledged image editing program. From here the two worked together, combining Thomas’ engineering background with the design experience of his brother.
By 1988 the program had changed dramatically, with a whole host of new features and some name changes, first to ImagePro, then to Photoshop. The Knolls decided to give the project another six months, complete a beta and attempt to sell it commercially with the help of the big guns in Silicon Valley.
Nick Offerman’s been on a roll. In his entertaining new PSA for kids, Nick Offerman shows people around his ‘pizza farm’:
The ad is a parody, aimed at getting Congress to approve the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, produced by the American Heart Association and comedy website Funny or Die. According to TIME:
The TV star’s spurious claims are supposed to mock the special interest groups pushing to repeal school lunch regulations promoted by First Lady Michelle Obama that require serving more fruits and vegetables and whole-grain-rich products as Congress considers whether to reauthorize them when they expire in September.
The Act looks to benefit low-income children, ensuring that they can participate in child nutrition programs, including:
Expanding the Afterschool Meal Program to all 50 states;
Supporting improvements to direct certification for school meals and other strategies to reduce red tape in helping children obtain school meals;
Allowing state WIC agencies the option to certify children for up to one year;
Mandating WIC electronic benefit transfer (EBT) implementation nationwide by October 1, 2020;
Improving area eligibility rules so more family child care homes can use the CACFP program;
Enhancing the nutritional quality of food served in school-based and preschool settings; and
Making “competitive foods” offered or sold in schools more nutritious.
One of those few celebrities guaranteed to go viral, Nick’s had some amazing vids under his belt, including this hilarious Superbowl NASCAR ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi68a0LsLDA
… and his Movember how-to video with Made Man:
Looking forward to more!