ArtCloud

ArtCloud is a free service which aims to bring the benefits of online social networking to artists. You can put your folio online, explore and discover art and artists that interest you, share what you find with friends, add art events to your personal calendar and you can also create interest groups to share information and work.

It is free, browser based and the site is easy to use. You can release your work at what level copyright you choose and provides access to Creative Commons license.

 

Art Demonstrations online

For anyone who is interested in developing their drawing skills pay a visit to ArtDemonstrations.com as the site is a blog in which the author collates together links to tutorials, instructional material and art demonstrations on the web.

 

2008 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

The annual 2008 Adobe Design Achievement Awards are open for submissions. The awards are open to graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists from higher education institutions. The categories included browser based and non browser based design, media designed for mobile devices, animation, motion graphics, and non Browser based design, such as illustration, packaging, photography and print communication.

To enter you must be 18 years old and a full-time student at an accredited institution of higher education and an student ID is required. The rules are on the site. Students can submit entries via the Adobe Design Achievement Awards website. Submissions will be accepted online until May 2, 2008. Information is available on the Adobe Design Achievement Awards site. The winning entries from 2007 are also housed on the site

 

A Book by its Cover

I have recently discovered A Book by its Cover a blog kept by Julia Rothman an illustrator who likes to share and highlight beautiful books. Rothman focuses on all sorts of books. Handmade books, sketchbooks and mass produced all feature but the common theme is that they are exquisitely designed and laid out. The page spreads are just lush.

 

Burmese life

BibliOdyssey has featured digitized images of a book of watercolour sketches of Burmese life recorded by a local artist in 1897. The illustrations are accompanied by a description written by a missionary.

The book is held online at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford titled ‘Watercolour Paintings of Burmese Life’

[Note click ‘Open Item’ to navigate through the book]

 

Websites as graphs

 

Websites as graphs is a fun and interesting visualisation tool. This is a screen shot of the web graph generated by the index page of my other blog inaminuteago . Markup languages like HTML and XML describe documents as hierarchies of tags, in what is called a Document Object Model (DOM). This structure can be visualized as a graph. The graph above visualises the DOM structure of my page. The colours each indicate a different thing such as blue for links (the A tag, red for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags), green for the DIV tag, violet for images (the IMG tag), yellow for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags), orange for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags), black the HTML tag, the root node and gray for all other tags

The graph is a more a toy than a tool as it would be nice if the document name appeared in a tool tip type display when you passed your mouse over a point but its fun. The applet isn’t showing a whole web site, but a single web page. Since the applet was designed by Sala, a conceptual artist living in Zurich, Switzerland perhaps viewing these graphs from a purely practical angle is not the point. If you see code as a thing of beauty you will easily ‘get it’

Here is another graph taken from a page of the same blog. It is a page that provides information about a challenge I am currently running.

This visualisation is of the index page to my site.

Another page on my site is an index to information on how to do needlework stitches in other words a stitch dictionary . This is how it looks.

This visualization is the index page of this blog

As I was playing around with these images I thought about translating them into another medium such as textiles. What strange self portrait they would make. A self portrait in the sense that if you see a website as representing the author then it’s only a step to seeing these visualisations as a form of self representation. Or perhaps re-presentation. It is an idea at least worth teasing out a little.

You can check out other peoples graphs on flickr under the websitesasgraphs .

 

Talwin Morris

Talwin Morris (1865-1911) was the Art Director for the publisher Blackie and Son. The image gallery houses an electronic catalogue of 60 images of designs. Anyone interested in book design and illustration in the Glasgow Style, which was a Scottish expression of Art Nouveau, will find this site of interest. Morris commissioned book designs. A key designer being Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The Book designs of Talwin Morris is a second site that explores the Glasgow style, along side information on bookbinding and a history of the publishing house Blackie and Sons.

 

Advertising and Illustration

The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 is a site that illustrates the rise of a consumer culture presenting over 9,000 images that relate to the early history of advertising in the United States.