Josh Freeman – Page 23 – FreeAssociates

Still vicious, still vibrant: The Threepenny Opera

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Mack the Knife.’ ‘Pirate Jenny. We know….”

But maybe you don’t know that Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill changed the course of musical theater. They brought agitprop to Broadway. Suddenly commercially produced singing and dancing could be used for biting social commentary. Suddenly it could actually mean something. It paved the way for Cabaret, Rent, Chicago and Urinetown. And any other musical that aspires to do more than just entertain.

“As seen through the eyes of two 20th century geniuses, The Threepenny Opera is a revolutionary musical theatre masterpiece, first performed in Berlin in 1928. Brecht’s brittle, sardonic tale creates a world of beggars, thieves and prostitutes in the colorful, exotic musical saga of Mack the Knife, Polly Peachum and the gritty underworld of Soho. Weill’s jazzy, inventive score captures the ironic tone of the lyrics. Derived from John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera creates a stunning, cabaret world that, eighty years after its premiere, remains an outrageous and cunning satire of society.”

And now the highly creative and talented Theatre Department at Santa Monica High School is performing it just for us locals. It runs for two weeks, starting February 24. Tickets are at samohitheatre.org.

(And, yes, of course we created the poster.)

200 countries for 200 years in 4 minutes

One of the great uses of graphic design is helping a viewer envision dense and complex information. Take a look at this wonderful clip from BBC-TV. Swedish doctor and health educator Hans Rosling demonstrates how an effective presentation can help a layman clearly understand complicated data that would otherwise be a just a mass of gray tables.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=player_embedded]

You can argue about whether all this health and growth is a good thing for the planet or not (feel free to do that in the comments!) and also whether the scale adequately shows the huge disparity between the lowest and highest income levels (they used a logarithmic scales so it could fit onscreen and still be visible). Nonetheless, I think it’s amazingly impactful…and fun to watch.

Colbert’s Quintessential Art Rant

As far as I’m concerned, Stephen Colbert is a comedy genius. So when I finally managed to watch my TiVo’d pre-holiday episodes of the Colbert Report and heard this hilarious take on two of my pet peeves — politically motivated pandering and self-indulgent fine art analysis — I just had to post it.

I can’t embed the video here, but click the image (or this link) and watch the clip. The part I’m referring to starts about 02:50 into the segment. Man, what writing!

Stephen Colbert slamming Eric Cantor and art criticism in one hilarious combination punch

Luscious colors

“Luscious” is the first of a series of videos from Sappi Paper company. We try very hard not to spec colors this way. Instead, we just tell our printers, “Make it look like it looks on our computer monitors back at the office.” They love that.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTaBD87z7o]

Everything but the squeal

You know the old phrase about pigs, right? Well Christien Meindertsma has taken it upon herself to track exactly what happens in the afterlife of a typical pig. Amazingly, our polluting porcine companions are a phenomenal source of everything from cosmetic ingredients to heart valves to the glue that holds sand to sandpaper. This fascinating TED talk may help you transcend your secret wish that every healthy food item came wrapped in bacon. It already kind of does.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRETz2F-heQ]

And as for “using every part of the pig but the squeal,” well, here are a couple of uses for even that:

Squeal:

Oink:

A very geeky Christmas

As Leo Laporte correctly pointed out, this is not one of those moments where the musicians are using a cell phone just to get a weird sound. This is (mostly) real music, and sounds like it. Pretty cool. Geek out!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DJddb73OOQ&feature=player_embedded]

Negativity: not always a bad thing

We designed this logo for The Arthritis Center at Encino Hospital. Negative space defines the afflicted hand, while positive space creates the healthy one.

I recently discovered a nice post on Irish designer David Airey’s blog, Logo Design Love. It’s a collection of 35 logos that make effective use of negative space.

For you non-designers, negative space is the “empty” space within a design. It can create its own shape and therefore can carry a secondary meaning, add interest and sometimes sneak in a subliminal message that makes all the difference in the effectiveness of a logo.

You know how, when someone says “Don’t think of an elephant,” you immediately think of an elephant? It’s a bit like that. The FedEx logo is a wonderful example. At first, most people don’t notice the right-facing arrow formed by the negative space between the “E” and the “x”. But once you see it, you can’t not see it. And it fuses the logo into your brain. (Interestingly, when it was presented to top management, CEO Fred Smith was the only person in the group to spot the arrow immediately.)

That kind of visual interest adds resonance, which is something we strive for in our own brand identity designs.

How We Decide

Why did I decide to go to Peets this morning instead of Starbucks? Why am I writing this blog post instead of focusing on a client’s project, catching up on invoicing, or checking my email? Why did I decide to open my own firm when I was 24 instead of working for someone else?

All day long, nonstop, our brains are making decisions. Most of those are based on our emotional responses — even the most rational decisions we make after analyzing all the factors and coming to a logical conclusion. That 3-pound bag of neurons and dopamine that lives in our skulls is one hell of a computer. And learning how it works is utterly fascinating.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer (also available in pap erback, of course). It’s an intriguing and engaging collection of anecdotes that make its scientific explanations clear as Pavlov’s bell. Faced with too many choices to process and only milliseconds to do it, how does a quarterback decide where to pass the ball while he’s being attacked by the other team’s linemen? How does a chess grandmaster use less energy than a lightbulb while competing with a computer like IBM’s Big Blue —which has to have coolers attached to it to keep it from bursting into flame? What kinds of decisions do people make whose orbital frontal cortex has been damaged so that their IQ remains the same, but they can no longer feel emotions?

Well-written, funny and insightful, “How We Decide” is, in a way, an owner’s manual for your brain. Somebody on your holiday list would love a copy.

Remaking the globe. Over and over.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgErv6M19yY]

Sometimes I like to post things just because they’re cool.

My associate Amy Crossan found this great little video on how they manufacture globes. Printing an accurate map on a spherical object is a fascinating challenge. I was really intrigued to see how they get the embossed mountains and valleys to exactly line up with the printed image, after it’s all stretched and curved into a perfectly round ball.

Typographic treasure

Back in the ancient pre-Mac days, there was a masterful typographic designer named Herb Lubalin. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He developed a publication for ITC called U&lc which featured some amazing design work and some excellent contributors. I used to love when it would show up in the mail…a big, oversized thing filled with interesting visual ideas and the latest fonts.

Now the fine folks at the Fonts.com blog have scanned the back issues and posted Volume I on the web for your free entertainment and edification. Lucky you. Go take a look.

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