WEB: CD Packaging

In terms of handing in my web brief for the design for web part of Design Production (504) I'm thinking I'll hand it in on a CD with the website root folder on it with all the website contents inside. It gives me a chance to present the website in some physical form for module submission.

I want to create a paper case that's different from the bog standard cd sleeve. Some examples I've found of what's possible with CD packaging...

My favourite is the above, with the above 2 pictures. It's simple and functional, with the CD neatly lifting up making pulling it out easy. The net for this will be simple and I'll probably go ahead and produce the net for this making sure it's visually consistent with website and summer research.

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Lecture Notes: Cities & Film

helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk

Cities & Film

The lecture looks at modernism in the city. Urban sociology. The city as a public and private space, the city in postmodernism.  And the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel 

German sociologist. Wrote 'metropolis and mental life' in 1903. Influenced critical theory of Frankfurt school thinkers, people like Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno etc

Presented pioneering analyses of social individuality

Dresden Exhibition

1903.

Simmel asked to lecture on intellectual life in the city but reverses idea and writes about effect of city on individual. 

Herbert Bayer lonely metropolitan 1932. 

Coined the phrase "Form ever follows function:

"Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity"

America built on immigration.

Manhatta 1921. Short documentary film revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. City as subject. 65 shots sequenced in a non-narrative structure.

Modern Times (1936) by Charlie Chaplin.

Wrote directed and starred in. Chaplin plays factory worker on assembly line. Being subjected to stuff like force-fed by a "feeding machine" and an assembly line he can't keep up with anymore. Chaplin snaps and runs around doing chaois. Gets accused of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, becomes a waiter and becomes a pantomime performer to success.

Stock Market crashed in 1929. Mass unemployment, closure of factories. The Louisville Flood 1937.

Russian silent documentary film. Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

No story and no actors. Accompanied by live music.

'Flaneur' - Frenchc masculine noun, meaning 'lounger', 'saunterer', meaning "to stroll" in French. Being a bit of a Flan. Bourgeois.

Charles Baudelaire  - French Poet. Proposes a version of the flan, a person "who walks the city in order to experience it".

Walter Benjamin - The concept of an urban observer as an analytical tool. Similar to Victorian arcades in Leeds. Cafe society, for the bourgeoise of Leeds to sit around and enjoy the city and drink and eat expensive food. Flan about.

Harmonising the environment with the human experience of the city.

Following strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them. Photographing without knowledge. Voyeuristic.

"I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’ Frieze magazine

First game to be shown at Tribecca Film Festival.

Set post-war, noir style of filmmaking referenced.

Blade Runner. 1982. Dystopian future, references Tokyo, neon lights. Comments on the future, commercialism, modernism, mass production and technology with the idea of humanoid replicants walking next to us.

Fredrick jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismVerso, 1991

Eye is overwhelmed by signs. Doesn't know where to look, confusion. Overloaded culture, overload of information and exposure to selling. Consumerism. No sense of tradition, or community. No proper traditional buildings that are inviting.

Destruction of Twin Towers - destruction of the American dream?

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Seinfeld on Facebook - Panopticism

This is actually a scene from the 90s sitcom, Seinfeld regarding the social system of an answering machine, but as the video title suggests, it is uncannily similar to a lot of our user experiences with Facebook. I find the social dynamics of social networking very interesting, and thought it was relevant to post as I covered the relationship between Facebook and Panopticism in a previous post.

It's interesting because we sign up to this sort of social measure, no one forces it upon us but forces around us push us to document our lives and basically open ourselves up as some form of acceptance and confidence gaining exercise.

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Study Task 3: Panopticism

Following on from the lecture and seminar on Panopticism, I'm going to look into Panopticism deeper, particularly in regards to the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan. A modern example of panopticism in my opinion is social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, I'm going to correlate my theory with quotes from the text to hopefually back up my form.

What's interesting about modern social networking is we sign up to this willingly, no one forces us to. This is a contrast to early forms of discipline and surveillanc as mentioned in the text, such as Foucalt discussing the Black Death in the 1600's. We document our lives, pass all of our information, almost as a security measure, a form of social acceptance. This kind of social measure is mentioned by Thomas regarding the black plague, 'the name, age, sex of everyone notwithstanding his conditions;: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call.' [THOMAS, 2000]  Sounds eerily similar to sites such as Facebook, just swap words such as intendants with mutual friends and strangers, and swap town hall with the internet and at a push, the entire world. Again, we sign up to this, this isn't a form of social control forced upon us but we sign up to this for a variety of social reasons.

An issue frequently raised in todays society is the handling of information, what information on the internet do we actually own, there was a huge uproar about the ownership of photos uploaded to Facebook and more recently photo-sharing facility 'Instagram'. Instagram basically own the photos uploaded to Instagram, as according to Facebook UK Policy director, Simon Milner ‘Our services are free to users but they don’t cost us nothing. We have to pay for it and the way we pay for that is advertising and that involves innovative use of the data people provide to us,’. 

This same ownership of data, and ultimate upper-hand once information is handed over stuck out to me from Thomas' text, 'Deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities - is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge, no other practitioner may treat ... no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note.' [THOMAS, 2000]

Looking at the concept of the Panopticon too, the architecture designed for inmates/patients being continuously observed, in an uncomfortable always lit environment, 'By the effect of the backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so manycages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly invisible.' [THOMAS, 2000]. The words which stand out to from this extract is "constantly visible" and the idea of The Gaze. Being watched and objectified, without having the same luxury back. Posts to our walls on facebook, status updates we write, information we share on the internet is constantly visible at all times. We're also not there, to back ourselves up or stop ourselves being objectified, we're behind a screen. We could be asleep in bed while someone on the other side of the world is objectifying us, I feel in this sense it's the same as the Panopticon, with the role of the watchmen being the individual reading our information on Facebook, and us playing the roll of inmate.

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Verbal Acrobatics: Motion posters

Found some cool examples of animated posters which I feel help me to get an idea of what's already out there in terms of posters which at first glance look pretty standard but have an animated layer to them too.

http://www.reviewstl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Ignition_Saw3d.swf

Most of them tend to flash .swf files which I find a bit sluggish, wouldn't a high quality .gif be better and less annoying? I was planning on converting my printable posters into animated .gifs

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Verbal Acrobatics: Visual references

I'm already a big fan of Berlin based studio, Hort - some of their work nearly nails the vision I had for my posters for the print + web musical typography I'm working on. Especially in terms of layout, handwritten aesthetic and colour palettes.

Each poster will be unique to the artists sound, existing visual styles such as album covers and message and tone within the song.

Animated posters too, i intend to animate the elements within the posters and not animate through posters but this is cool too.

This is my favourite, this kind of style works so well for the early 90s, late 80s.

References from elsewhere:

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Japanese culture

Found a pretty useful website which answers a lot of questions about Japan: http://japanexplained.wordpress.com/

Notable points moving forward:

• Facial hair is uncommon and quite frowned upon in Japan, bushy beard is usually a sign of radical politics, if not actually communist party membership
• Blonde gaijin women are seen as exotic and exciting, most Japanese women are naturally brunette
• Japanese adverts are very risk averse, often just with a face ofg a celebrity endorsement and not the product itself.
• No pressure on people to do educational stuff on weekends, Japanese acknowledge hard work during the week and rest on the weekend, lying around watching movies isn't seen as 'lazy' and unproductive.
• Paper bag reusing is apparently common
• Being bright and cheerful is one of the most important personality traits in Japanese culture

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Why is facial hair so rare in Japan?

Some Japanese guys have problems growing a full beard, but it is more a case of image. For example, bushy beards are still usually a sign of radical politics if not actual communist party membership

Why do strangers keep pointing out (some almost angrily) that my bag is open?

Because that is exactly the kind of slackness that pisses that late middle aged guy off about young people and/or foreigners

Why do blonde gaijin women get so much more attention?

If you are going to go for Western women, you are going to be looking for something really different from the Japanese.

Why do so many advertising campaigns have just a celebrity face and not even picture the product?
 Because of the generalist management of Japanese companies the person choosing an advertising campaign-and even the person from Dentsu suggesting it to him- could well know nothing about marketing. The campaigns chosen are therefore those that bring prestige to those people, which is guaranteed by famous faces even if the product flops. This also ties in with being risk averse.

Why do some Japanese advertisements just consist of a picture of a famous person? 

“the majority of my co-workers are here because of some connection they have, or because they are the son or daughter of someone important”
A Senior Account Executive from a “large Japanese advertising company” explains why Japanese advertising is so shit in “Being a Broad in Japan” pg 307. Having a celebrity is considered a low risk and high status advertising campaign, especially if the top staff get to meet the celebrity. Still don’t know how to explain the occassional flashes of brilliance like the Coca Cola Zero ones though…

Why do some people handing out leaflets or tissues in the street avoid giving gaijin any?

With a dedication to a crap job rarely seen outside Japan, they are giving them only to the specific people the advertising is aimed at.

Why is Japanese deodorant to ineffective for Westerners?

The classic explanation is that the Japanese do not sweat or smell as much, and the second might be true in some cases. More importantly, the Japanese equivalents of P&G (Kaoo etc.) obviously have some kind of monopolistic hold on the drugstore market because this is one of the few sectors where Japanese companies produce such rubbish products that not even people in most other Asian countries will buy them.

Why are the Japanese quite happy to say “I slept” or “I cleaned my room” as an answer to “How was your weekend?”

For one thing, unlike the UK for example there is no social pressure to do anything useful and educational in your free time. If you want to read kids’ manga or watch 5 hours of variety shows, nobody much minds. Actually, though, they might have done something more interesting but are hiding it in order to avoid speaking in English or not to attract unwelcome attention or envy. One more factor is that saying these things emphasizes the fact that they have been working hard all week- not something that the Japanese try to hide.

Why do Japanese films so often have quiet scenes interspersed with action (e.g. Beat Takeshi movies)?

As Japanese conversations often take place sitting on tatami, there is naturally a lack of moving around, waving arms etc. The Japanese also accept more silence in a normal conversation than most Europeans (excluding Finns)

Why do the Japanese, especially girls, stare at foreigners?

As a foreigner, you are outside the system and so people feel free in a way they wouldn’t usually (and being out of the loop, you are free too). Also, staring at guys is not seen as a come on as someone who is interested would act coy and avoid eye contact. In Japan, you can tell when a guy in the office fancies you when they never address you directly during work drinks. Staring at foreign girls could be due to a general obsession with appearance and fashion- although less often, you will see Japanese women staring at other Japanese women who stand out in some way (tall, glamorous, odd etc.).

Why do some Japanese girls do the “dinosaur walk” with shopping bags on the inside of their elbows rather than in their hands?

The bags would touch the ground otherwise??

Why are the Japanese so into ”kawaii” (cute)?
As long as it is socially acceptable, there is no reason why having a picture of a kitten should not make you feel warm inside. Being around cute stuff makes you feel good. And anything that makes you feel good can be addictive. It should also be noted that “kawaii” is also used by some people with such a wide range of meanings it could even be translated just as ‘good’ rather than ‘cute’.

Fish and chips, pie and chips, haggis and chips, chips and chips

Most of the non-chain pubs do half-decent British food. I’ve heard very good things about the Sunday roast at the Tavern in Yokohama (great pub, but be careful where you sit when the Marines are in). My personal favourites, though, are the haggis pizza and Raj Chicken at the Warrior Celt in Ueno, a pub with real character and real characters. Also very good happy hour, with Spitfire on tap (but have a feeling they don’t get through the barrels as quickly as they should as the beer is variable- stick to Guinness or one of the many bottled beers if you need to achieve anything the next day).

Why do department stores have art exhibitions?

Part of Westernizing, which department stores were at the forefront of?

Why do the Japanese reuse their brand goods paper carrier bags?

It’s an Asian thing, but not sure why.

Why do some middle aged guys still wear white fluffy socks and slip on shoes long after the 80′s are over?

The slip on shoes do have a practical purpose, seeing as you have to take them off several times a day at home, in Japanese style bars etc, but the main reason could be that the Japanese, Chinese and Indian factories that were making these products for the European market in the 80′s are now flooding the Japanese market with very cheap ones now that it has died a death in the UK etc. (they are also east to spot in India and Korea).

Why do most Japanese women dye their hair? 
Although it might have started off as wanting to be different, nowadays if an OL doesn’t dye her hair her female colleagues will ask her why not. If they reply that their boyfriend prefers it that way most people could quickly guess that he is foreign.Dyed hair is considered akarui- bright, cheerful- also one of the most important personality traits in Japan.

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D&AD: Western Posters over in Japan

I've been checking out stuff taken from the Western world, in terms of products/movies etc and see how they translate and appeal to a Japanese audience. It's interesting to see how the layout changes and the balance of Japanese/English changes, sometimes some English elements still remain even though the audience is Japanese. It's good to know this as I'm doing the same for Ted Baker, moving from a Western and predominantly British audience to Japanese.


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