JOYENGINE: cause sharing is cool

Moxie Sozo, the organizers of the 2005 Hurricane Poster Project have teamed up with Josh Higgins, the organizer of the 2007 So-Cal Fire Poster Project to produce the 2010 Haiti Poster Project.  This ambitious project seeks collaborations with artists and designers from around the world to benefit  the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  The goal of the Haiti Poster Project is to raise $1,000,000.00 for Doctors Without Borders.  We’ll be designing and producing posters and doing our best to support this brilliant design community effort.  You can too.

My imagination was captured by this image…it’s dream like quality just got me thinking. Its the shot of Joe Kittenger jumping out of gondola attached to a helium balloon at 102,800 ft. He did it in 1960, and set world records for highest parachute jump, longest free fall (4 min 36 sec), and fastest speed achieved by human being (614 mph). Now, after forty years, someone else is going to attempt to break that record, and by a significant amount.

Red Bull Stratos is the latest attempt by Felix Baumgartner to tempt fate. He’s going to push the limits of the human both physically and mentally. The plan is to break Kittenger’s skydiving record by a long shot, taking it a few notches up in the stratosphere to 120,000+ ft. The BBC is going to document the event. Now most people will brush this off as a marketing stunt, or a death wish on the part of Mr. Baumgartner. I on the other hand view it as a source of inspiration and act of contemporary hero(ione). What he’s going to do symbolizes so much more in my opinion, and it comes at an important moment in time. This feat has the ability to alter our perceptions of reality…

It feels like this effort has the ability to provide a cataclysmic subconscious affect on people out there. There’s never been a better time to make a dream come to life. Maybe its promoting an employee, or quitting your job of 8 years, or maybe just simply going back to school. Whatever it is, a level of commitment must be made.

Now more than ever we need more people taking chances. Kind of tired of the ‘wait and see’ attitude that’s has settled in around us these days. Indecision is paralyzing our ability to do anything. Things, ie, people, need to loosen up already. Felix can’t sit in the gondola forever, he’ll drift into the inhospitable environs of outer space. At some point he’s going to jump. That’s why what he’s going to do matters ultimately. Having the gall to lay something on the line would do all of us some good these days.

People need to stop asking questions like ‘are we there yet’, or ‘is it fixed yet’ and just jump off the balloon already? It’s time to come back down to Earth and deal/make shit happen.You’ll fall for bit, and there’s a chance you may encounter catastrophe, but there’s a higher likelihood you’ll have a parachute to guide your way down…I have a feeling Felix is going to prove humans have the stamina to make the impossible, well possible…

Only when you lose everything, are you free to do anything –Tyler Durden

“Coping with the problems relating to the understanding of design in business, depends a great deal on how well informed, genuinely interested, and experienced a businessman is. Managers responsible for design are chosen, not for their aesthetic judgments, nor for their impeccable taste, but for their administrative skills. Few, if any, understand the intricacies of design, or even the role, beyond the obvious, that design and designers play.

Most see the designer as a set of hands — a supplier — not as a strategic part of a business. Their background is primarily that of marketers, purchasing agents, or advertising specialists, not of connoisseurs of design. It is their uninformed, unfocused preferences or prejudices, their likes or dislikes that too often determine the look of things. Yet, much of the time, they are not even discriminating enough to distinguish between good and bad, between trendy and original, nor can they always recognize talent or specialized skills. In the field of design theirs is the dichotomy of being privileged but not necessarily being qualified — after all, design is not their business.

Bureaucrats largely responsible for the administration of design spend endless hours at meetings allegedly about design, in which miscellaneous subjects are discussed; and in which marketing, production, and administration problems are treated as if they were design problems. Whether or not the participants really understand the nature of the problems, or the implication of design, is questionable. If quality, for example, is the subject for discussion, it is dealt with only as an abstraction, with participants assuming the other person understands what is being discussed, when, in fact, nobody can be sure. Since perception is so intimately a part of taste and design, it is the experienced designer who might possibly point the way to meaningful solutions, and smooth the path for an administrator’s needs.

Even though there are comparatively few experienced and really innovative designers around, there are regrettably, even fewer administrators who are receptive to innovative work.”

Read the complete essay, Originally published in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Volume 10, Number 1, 1992, Confusion and Chaos: The Seduction of Contemporary Graphic Design, here.

OK Go always has awesome videos and guess what, they’re new video is awesome. And a single shot to boot…

Nick Bertke, also known as Pogon or Pogo, creates remixes using only footage and sound taken entirely from one specific movie. Here are a few examples of his work.

Terminator

Up

Harry Potter

Great music from Babe Rainbow out of Vancouver
via Kitsune Noir

We’ve already seen one great publication bit the dust this year (RIP ID), let’s try and avoid another. Giant Robot is trying to raise $60k, which will allow them to publish for another year. They’re offering lots of goodies on their site for certain donation amounts. Click here to contribute.

Interesting read about how to split up the US based on facebook profiles and the patterns that emerge based on connections between places that share friends. I thought Stayathomia (terribly fitting for Minnesota) and the Nomadic West (maybe this explains the lack of locals in the Denver area) were great insights. You can also view the author’s visualization of the most common names, fan pages and friend locations around the world here.