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Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.
Labels: corporations, documentary, video
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. 
Labels: design, poster, sociallyconsious
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."
Labels: competition, design, sociallyconsious
Labels: campaign, documentary, starbucks, union, video
Students help Break The Jam and encourage people to Give Way in DC. (images shown)
Labels: advertising, art, education, environment, guitar, jobs, lego, links, maps, starbucks, twitter, urban, wedding
Labels: fundraising, health, iraq, kids, shoes
Labels: corporations, documentary, food
Labels: fail, graphicdesign, nonprofit, website
Labels: advertising, art, cancer, food, gardening, grants, insulation, links, organic, slums, tourism, urban, war, women
Artseen is the annual fundraiser art auction for the New York Foundation for the Arts. The die-cut cover of the invitation showed a snippet of a painting by one of their art fellows, Omar Chacon, which was revealed in full when the front was lifted.
Share is the youth component to the Fair Share campaign for tax reform created by the Health Care Education Project, which is a part of the health care union 1199SEIU. These 5 graphics, one for each borough in New York City, were used on T-shirts and signs used in rallies, and contain elements specific to the areas they reference.
John The Revelator, Cantaloupe Record's latest release by modern composer Phil Kline, is a dark work with religious overtones of the fire and brimstone kind. Using classic etchings by Doré made perfect sense, but rather than focusing on the central characters we focused on the backgrounds and margins. The entire package was printed in metallic silver and black.
Stellina is the exclusive North American distributor of the highly prized handmade Alan cyclocross bicycles. As part of our ongoing rebranding of the company and its products we created this new logo/custom typeface, which will be applied to all of their materials in the coming year.Labels: alr, design, sociallyconsious
I've been working with Target Margin Theater for nearly 10 years to create modern twists on vintage ephemera that represent their style of updating classic plays. In this case a series of innovative pieces from the first half of the 20th century are being promoted by a poster inspired by the expressionist art of classic science fiction movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. These shows are currently running at Brooklyn's The Chocolate Factory.
Epic Theatre Ensemble, known for their politically minded theater, presents the world premier production of A More Perfect Union. Broadway graphic design of the 50's/60's was the inspiration for this "serious comedy" about the supreme court. The show is currently running Off-Broadway in NYC.
New Georges produced the new play Angela's Mixtape as part of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. While all of the posters we create for New Georges feature a similar background and illustration aesthetic, the central image is always rooted in the details of the play, in this case it was inevitable that a cassette tape be involved.
American Hwangap is a "new American comedy about a big Korean birthday" produced by The Play Company with Ma-Yi Theater Company. The photo, which gives a hint at the off-beat story, was created using props collected from a local thrift store, Asian market, and grocery store. The show is currently running in NYC.
Society6 makes the grant-making process easy and accessible to all individuals, non-profit organizations and corporations who want to support the future of the arts. “When we started to look at the existing support infrastructure for artists and other creative people, we realized that it was particularly bureaucratic, exclusive and wasn’t designed for scale. We’ve re-imagined the entire process in the form of a meritocracy, where a greater number of artists can receive unrestricted grant assistance based solely on the merit of their work as determined by their peers”, said co-founder, Lucas Tirigall-Caste.The first $100 grant is already up for grabs. Find out more HERE.
Society6 micro-grants are currently available in two forms, money or opportunities. Opportunity grants provide a nice recession-friendly alternative for cash-constrained supporters to offer assistance through free products (e.g. supplies), free services (e.g. studio time) and other distinctive opportunities that money just can’t buy (e.g. feature in a magazine) .
Society6 inverts traditional art curating methods by allowing the community to promote the most provocative work as visualized on the 'The Charts'. Rooted in collaboration, its 'Studios' are the core of Society6. Individuals (e.g. artists or curators) and groups (e.g. design collectives or bands) can have one or many Studios. Studios let artists showcase their original work, or broaden their creative discipline by finding someone from across the globe to collaborate with. Society6 pushes the physical limitations of creativity inviting everyone who is inspired by the artistic process, as much as the end-result, to contribute to the cultural commentary. “We thought we’d enable the narrative behind the work, so that the otherwise passive relationship between the artist and supporter is participatory and active. We wanted people to feel like they were sitting in the studio next to their favorite artist”, said Wills.
Labels: art, crowdsource, grant, money, web2.0
Labels: graffiti, NYC, NYU, socialjustice, stencil
Labels: design, event, networking, Richmond, sociallyconsious, virginia
Labels: art, climatechange, germany, installation
Scott Heiferman creator of MeetUp.com (which he described as a community organizing tool) talked about the future shifting from D.I.Y (Do It Yourself) to D.I.O. (Do It Ourselves). He said we need to turn more to each other and "make the hand that feeds us"!
Joan Sullivan, principal/founder of Bronx Academy of Letters, brought two of her students who were able to escape from their difficult lives in the South Bronx and get into good college thanks to her school.
Artist Zina Saunders said that metaphorical potholes in your road were a good thing since they forced you to take detours and give you a new perspective. I was particularly enamoured with her Overlooked New York portrait project.
Fred Kent, founder of Project for Public Spaces talked about the need for "authentic destinations" and creating community based on a "placemaking approach" rather than a top down design approach. Having public seating is often the key!
Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger, showed a picture of a giant tomato with green lightning on it crushing an airplane as a mnemonic for his talk about reducing carbon footprints by tons (rather than pounds). The key: eat less meat, fly more efficiently, use green power.
Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, spoke just before me, so I don't have notes on her talk, but I do remember it being very informative and interesting!
Magician Jamy Ian Swiss talked about the importance of empathy in magic, explaining that it's actually the key to connecting with an audience, regardless of your profession.
Robin Nagle, the anthropologist-in-residence for the New York City sanitation department, gave an eye-opning talk about waste (NYC is always only 3 days away from a serious trash breakdown) and left us with the admonishon to say "thank you" the next time we see a sanitation person.
Filmmaker Risa Morimoto, shared a snippet of her incredible documentary Wings of Defeat, telling the true story of the WWII Kamikaze pilots (who were not actually volunteers as most people assume).
Design Author Steven Heller said, "Adolf Hitler was a logo" as part of his talk about fascist branding.
Musician Bruce Molsky, played several lovely & catchy folk tunes on his fiddles.
Author Bill Gurstelle talked about the importance of the "art of living dangerously." He said, "the only way to get better at risk-taking is to take risks" and left us with an image of a sea creature that lacking danger ends up eating its own brain as it grows up!
Barry Scheck, co-founder of The Innocence Project, said that eyewitness misidentification was the greatest cause of wrongful convictions. His organization helped exonerate Jerry Miller, who also spoke, after he spent 24 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.
And professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, talked about the need for "virtue" in business. He defined this "practical wisdom" as "moral will" combined with "practical skill". And he decried rules, saying that we won't become skilled by following them. He also said there shoud be no more courses on ethics, that the only way to learn them was by living them.
Labels: conference, Gel, inspiration, NYC, talks
Labels: advertising, art, children, corporations, design, disaster, fema, green, humor, Japan, zoo
