Frank Miller: 300 and Sin City

Having watched the 300 film based on Frank Miller's graphic novel for the first time last night, I thought i'd write a quick blog post about some of my opinions, mainly relating to the art style and direction in comparison to Miller's other famous big screen adaption, Sin City.

Though enjoyable in parts, overall I found the film underwhelming. In comparison to Sin City, with its dark, gritty art style and superb direction, it felt almost amateur in comparison. The obviously airbrushed and composited landscapes/skylines just didn't work for me. Clearly they were intended to be stylised rather than realistic, but it broke any immersion in the film I had, and just made me wish it could have been filmed in actual locations, with tweaks to contrast/saturation and tint added in post production, rather than during the creation of the scenes. There seemed to be a vast amount of effects thrown around with little thought or consideration, successfully creating a surreal feel, but without any of the subtlety and finesse of the graphic novel.



In contrast, Sin City didn't constantly over-do the graphic style, yet managed to remain even more faithful, visually, to the graphic novel than 300. Despite being almost entirely black and white it never felt bleak and dull like 300 managed to in certain parts with extensively desaturated colours and dark tones. The fact that colour was so sparingly used in Sin City made it even more effective, and the couple of scenes in 300 which were shot in a very similar art style just felt cheap and thrown in last minute, as a homage.



After sitting through the credits which were created with a more illustrative style, similar to the Casino Royale film intro, what i'd really like to see in future from Miller is a film adaption of a graphic novel shot with an identical (or closely adapted) art style, like Persopolis (shown below). Though he has proven it can be effective to translate illustration into a real-world template in Sin City, 300 seemed like a missed opportunity, and it would be interesting to see whether he could translate his traditional graphic novel format into a full length animated feature film.

Contemporary Abstract Art

Found this guy's stuff via another blog, and it grabbed my attention straight away - I think his style is absolutely incredible. Love the way he has mixed geometric shapes, colour, and forms to create his compositions. His portfolio is lacking in information but presumably his work is a mixture of hand drawn/sketched composition and photoshop/illustrator finishing. With his portrayal of contemporary society and themes, his work is a great example of abstract art being brought into the 21st century.

His 'name' is N1ko and you can see some of his other work on his Behance network profile here.

Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown

Stumbled across this website the other day. It's an interactive music video for Arcade Fire's new single 'We Used to Wait'.

Pretty impressive stuff, and a good demo of new web technologies and what can be done. Built in HTML5, it allows you to tailor the music video specifically for you - you enter your address on the website, and Google Maps uses the data they have for that address during the video, including Street View photos, aerial satellite shots, etc. It's not amazingly well realised, and could definitely be improved in some respects, but it's a pretty unique project, and sets the benchmark of what can be done, so it will be interesting to see what other designers (maybe with higher budgets and more time) can come up with in future.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Icon Design: Ben Barry

I found these nice icon sets by American designer Ben Barry, done whilst he was on an internship for Newhouse Design. They're for American Airlines travel maps, and he's created a great couple of sets of icons representing the landmarks for major tourist cities (shown above are Paris and London, obviously). It's impressive how he has managed to distill such complicated buildings and structures into easily recognisable marks, viewable at small and large scales and in one colour.

His portfolio is definitely worth a look, his work is incredible (both in volume and quality) and he's also only recently graduated! According to his website he's currently working for Facebook's design team, which is unsurprising considering how impressive his stuff is.

designforfun (Ben Barry's Portfolio)

Variations on the Number 4

The different logo designs of the UK Channel 4 Corporation’s major TV channels and +1 or HD equivalents. I’ve always liked these logos. They’re easy to reproduce, work in any lockup, clear and simple, and perfectly suited to each channel’s seperate tone, subject matter, target market, and they work great as a whole series too. Part of the charm of these logos is that I can't see them becoming dated or obsolete any time soon - the fact that Channel 4's main logo has remained largely the same since the channel begun could be seen as proof of this. It's also impressive how convincingly extra elements such as high-definition or +1 indicators have been incorporated into the original designs, as most of the designs were created before such channel variations were widely used. All good logos, particularly for the media industry, need to be flexible and adaptable in this respect. They're designed in-house I think, but I couldn’t find proper confirmation of this. More information about the channels can be found on the Wikipedia page here.

Phil Yamada - Paint on Print

Found these via another design blog, love the idea of using acrylic paint on top of newspaper prints, giving a strange 3 dimensional overlay effect. The graphics that he has overlaid on the pages vary wildly, but each has their own charm and merit. There are 26 unique elements in the series, recreating the alphabet. This is definitely one of the more interesting and well-accomplished uses of typography and lettering I have seen, and a good example of how to think outside the box as a designer.

Pantone Rubix Cube

Pantone Rubix Cube concept, nice design + execution. Designer unknown