After Life: a skull exhibition

Sorry for the lack of posting here, but after being in Austin for a week for the How Design Conference (which I'll post more about soon), I returned to put the finishing touches on After Life, an art show based on my Skull-A-Day project, which opens tonight here in Richmond, Virginia at Quirk Gallery. Here are a few photos of the installation of 100+ pieces, including several that have never been shown before...



The show runs through August 22nd, so if you are in the area please do stop by and check it out.

p.s. If you are a gallery owner and would like to bring this show or a show of large scale prints from the project to your space please get in touch.

Linkage: From Social Trading Cards to Social Stock Exchanges

I'm heading to Austin for a week, so hopefully this'll tide you over while I'm away...


The social reality trading card alternative to Pokemon.

Investing in a Social Stock Exchange.

Taxicab curator. Thanks Carlos!

Fallen Princesses (image shown) via

A classic anti-billboard screed from 1960. via

Eco-friendly alternative to motivational office posters (image shown). Thanks Marc!

Duchamp Reloaded (image shown) via

Clever Condoms

The ocean of plastic is on the East Coast as well.

Mini-Golf meets Art in Brooklyn. Thanks Mica!

Bacardi using misogyny to sell alcohol...to women?! via

And for those of you following the story from last week...
busted Barrel Monster artist gets a commision...from the company he stole from. Thanks Carlos!

Save The Date: 24 October - An International Day of Climate Action

350 introduces a day of international climate action: 24 October...

Literal Seed Bombs

Jin-wook Hwang takes the idea of guerrilla gardening's seed bombs to the literal extreme with his proposal for a non-military seed planting bomb.

via

Gaza: This Is Not A Reality Show

Eight human rights organizations in Israel have come together to produce this video to mark the second year of closure of the Gaza Strip...

(English)


(Hebrew)

Got Humans ?

Do you have a lush green planet with a self sustaining ecosystem? Then you need humans! In just a few short years we will destroy it for you. [FYI contains Not Safe For Work language]

via

The Future is Melting

Paul at Naughtyfish Design in Australia shared a lovely poster he recently created...
























You can even see the future melting entirely away in this video he shot during the photo session...

Global Warning from Paul Garbett on Vimeo.

How To Greewash

A helpful cartoon from Lunchbreath...


via

A Drink To Die For

The L'Desh Fresh campaign for bottled water is not what it initially appears to be...



More info from the creators of this campaign for Water Partners can be found HERE.

via

Awards Can't Feed The Hungry

Osocio, the fantastic social marketing blog, (that I very occasionally contribute to) has a new advertising campaign...sort of. Marc, the founder of the site, asked the folks at Steal Our Ideas to suggest a campaign about encouraging social marketers to check their motives. Read more here.

Stay Free!: The Book

Ad Nauseum is a brand new book about consumer culture from my friends at the Stay Free!. It's a collection of new items along with material from their fantastic and sadly defunct Stay Free! Magazine, which was a consistently smart & funny critique of marketing/advertising. Find out more HERE.

Linkage: Art Crimes and Clothing Punishment

The Onion Network is looking for socially conscious design and marketing partners.

Does the gay flag need a makeover?

Getting the word out with mud stencils (image shown).

What to do with reusable bags, when they're used up. Thanks Mim!

A hand-cranked eco-vibrator for the ultimate environmentalist. Thanks Leah!

Would you wear the same dress every day for a year if it was for a good cause? via

Making a barrel monster will get you arrested in North Carolina (image shown) Thanks Carlos!

Who doesn't like free books?

Mad About Blogs

The new book Blogs: Mad About Design from Spain's Maomao Publications features both this site and my Skull-A-Day project. I just got this giant tome in my mail the other day and it looks like it's filled with some great inspiration, I imagine I'll be looking up the URLs within for quite some time. More details can be found HERE.

Suicide Prevention

The sister of a good friend of mine committed suicide this weekend. If you know someone who is in emotional distress, please make sure they know about the Helpline: 1.800.SUICIDE. Also please consider donating to an organization working to prevent suicide and help survivors of it. Two that come highly recommended are SPAN USA and the Kristin Brooks Hope Center.

ALR in Austin

Just a reminder that I will be speaking at this year's How Design Conference in Austin, Texas. The event runs June 24-27 and features over 60 sessions on everything from improving software skills to finding creative inspiration. Tickets are still available for the entire conference, though you can also pay for just individual days and/or sessions.

My session is called "Making A Living As A Socially Conscious Designer" and is on Thursday the 25th at 2pm. Hope to see you there!

Get more info on the conference HERE.

Mass consumption visualized.

Artist Chris Jordan talks about his large scale photographs documenting and visualizing our mass consumer culture...

Chris Jordan at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Squat 2 Own: $0 Down, No Monthly Payments Ever

The parody real estate site Squat 2 Own Realty is actually the product of anarchists in Richmond, Virgina who are commenting on the state of homelessness and the current economy which has left so many livable houses intentionally empty. And hey, with the actual vacant property listings, perhaps a few desperate folks will really give it a try.

Linkage: Cloth bags are bad and corporations are local?

Go figure, the plastic industry says that cloth bags are bad! via

Speculative architecture fiction.(image shown) via

Making newpaper boxes into planters. (image shown) Thanks Carlos!

Free e-book on sustainable printing. via

The growth of the greener lunchroom.

Documenting product placement (and displacement). (image shown) Thanks Mica!

The new greenwashing: corporations go "local". Thanks Mica!

1,500 bottles = 1 second

Watershed is an installation for the upcoming Figment Art Festival on Governors Island in NYC made out of 1,500 plastic water bottles, representing one second of consumption in the US...

Watershed Assembly at MSLK 5/24/09 from MSLK on Vimeo.

Life, Inc.

Douglass Rushkoff discusses the corporatization of life in America in relation to his new book Life, Inc....

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Green City USA, er, Canada

When you find out Toronto overwhelmingly passed a by-law mandating green roofs on all classes of new buildings, your immediate reaction is to feel sorry for all the future orphans and quadrapalegics and mowing fatalities that will soon follow, but your fears are misplaced.

Toronto's new green roof by-law, which passed in a 36-2 vote, sets up new construction standards requiring green roofs on all classes of new buildings, and 50% green roof covereage on multi-unit residences over six stories, shools, non-profit housing, commercial and industrial buldings. So while homeowners may be wary to wander on their new lawn, commercial spaces are blessed with reclaimed gardens and meeting spaces.

Green roofs require less maintenance than regular roofs, they reduce heating and cooling costs throughout the year, they provide sound-proofing, they help manage storm run-off, and they reclaim an otherwise unused space for aesthetic purposes for homeowners and businesses alike.

“Toronto’s by-law provides a new opportunity to strengthen the emerging practice of integrated green building design,” said, Steven W. Peck, President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. “The by-law breaks new ground on how to structure a mandatory green roof requirement and the construction standard also contains important best practices that may prove to be a model for other cities."

Painfully Funny: Vendor/Client Relations in the Real World

This one pretty much speaks for itself if you're in this business (or a lot of others)...



Thanks Anne!

Instant Police State

The folks at Luzinterruptus created an instant street of police cars with DIY blue lights made with plastic cups. They were temporarily affixed to parked cars in the Malasaña district of Madrid, Spain. The installation was in response to increased police presence in the area, read the entire story (in Spanish and English here).

Good50×70 2009

The shortlisted posters from this year's Good50x70 socially conscious design contest are now online, see them all HERE.

Call for Entries: Cause/Affect

The San Francisco AIGA is once again asking for your best socially conscious design work for their cause/affect competition...

Design Competition Seeks "Do-Gooders"

cause/affect is a biennial graphic design competition which celebrates the work of designers and organizations who set out to positively impact our society. Produced by AIGA San Francisco, this is a competition for do-gooders who do good work. Send in your entries before June 19, 2009.

The details of the competition are simple: all work entered must promote or support social good. All we ask is that it doesn't contribute directly to the profit of a commercial organization. And to qualify, work must have been produced between November 1, 2007 and June 19, 2009.

Winning work will be showcased at the cause/affect awards ceremony in July and displayed at the AIGA SF gallery through the summer. Winning entrants will also be featured on the cause/affect site and a portion of any proceeds from the competition will be donated to a local non-profit organization. For entry forms, and more information, please visit: http://causeaffect.aigasf.org/

The competition generated a tremendous amount of interest during its inaugural year in 2007, and this time out the organizers expect to receive a similarly enthusiastic response. "We were staggered by the global interest the competition stimulated" said Brian Singer, AIGA SF President, "...we received entries from as far afield as Norway, the Netherlands and Singapore. And this year, with excitement about the competition mounting, and the blogosphere clicking into high gear, we're expecting to see do-gooders flooding our offices with another batch of awe-inspiring work."

I [heart] [heart]: Free pro-gay marriage stickers from Credo

Get your free "I support gay marriage" sticker from Credo HERE.

What do Starbucks & Walmart have in common?

An introduction to the Stop Starbucks campaign from Brave New Films...

Linkage: From Green Guitars to Green Weddings

Students help Break The Jam and encourage people to Give Way in DC. (images shown)

Jobs for Change wants to help you work for nonprofits.

Patching cracks with Legos. (image shown) via

The greening of guitars.

The greening of weddings.

Free books for London commuters.

Mapping the NYC advertising takeover. via

Starbucks Twitter campaign hijacked by documentary of their anti-union practices. via

Another Limited Rebellion Origins: Yellow Emperor

Recently I was visiting some friends in NYC and I spotted this book on their shelf. No it's not some racist screed, it's actually a prop I designed for a play, [Eric Overmyer's In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe] that we worked on in college (circa 1993). In fact it is one of the first real pieces of graphic design I'd ever done and it marked the beginning of the shift from my interest in theater design to my career in graphic design. To give you a bit of perspective this was made by typing out the individual pieces in a word processing program belonging to a friend (and not on the Apple IIc that I used throughout college to write papers), enlarging on a copy machine, then literally cutting and pasting the pieces onto actual paper (I know, it was the dark ages! Yes, I know this was how things were done for decades before the computer was invented, but humor me). After that I had an inverse color copy made at a copy shop to get the white text on a black background and then handcolored the yellow with a highlighter marker! Looking at it again after all these years, and considering I'd had no formal graphic design experience or training at that point, I'm happily surprised to see how well the design has held up, even if the cover itself is a bit worse for wear.

Shoes for Surgeries

The Preemptive Love Coalition sells handmade shoes to raise money for heart surgeries for kids in Iraq...