United Visual Artists

Light installations by United Visual Artists. Freakin' brilliant.

Mary Kate McDevitt

Mary Kate McDevitt is a letterer and illustrator living and working in Portland, OR. Mary Kate graduated from Tyler School of Art in 2007 with a degree in Graphic Design and Illustration. She worked as a designer at a studio in Lancaster, PA for 2 years. In 2010, Mary Kate moved out to Portland, OR to pursue a career as a freelance illustrator and artist, dividing her time between selling art on her etsy shop and hand lettering and illustration for clients.

Stay Young, Go Dancing II

Had quite some (okay, a lot of) free time at work so I spiced this up much more (retro overload!), since I now have some awesome new fonts and brushes. You can still scroll down to have a look at the old one. Head over to Lost Type to have a look at their brilliant collection of such typefaces, their high-quality offerings have become pretty popular among the design community, and without fail they always turn out great.

Empty Memory

This is nothing short of being one of the most sleek and stylish line of thumbdrives! With them being carried around everywhere by almost everyone, it's simply logical that it should look good just like any other accessory one might carry or wear. Empty Memory is a jewellery collection that works as USB memory sticks. Every single piece was cast in high-quality 316 stainless steel, hand-polished by craftsmen and finished with various colours. Each design contains a physical emptiness in its sculptural form, giving the metaphor that you can fill the space with your own memory. It would be nice if the memory component could be detachable and their covers interchangeable, but I guess the whole idea was to make each design unique and personal, like jewellery. Empty Memory is available for sale here.

Miri & Mulu

Before the year ended, it was wrapped up pretty nicely with a holiday with family and friends. A little 5 day trip over to Sarawak, chillin' in Miri and exploring the caves of Mulu. So from now onwards, i think i'll make videos instead of taking tons of photos. I think making this video has helped me get into the habit of flipping out the camera quickly enough when I catch the first glimpse of something interesting, though I did miss getting a longer shot (sigh!) of the airplane flying overhead. Best viewed at a higher resolution on vimeo itself, so head over there!

2012

Cinemagraphs

The highest form of animated GIFs. Created by NY-based visual artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck, dubbed "Cinemagraphs", these images float dreamily somewhere in between a photo and a video. Unlike a photograph it captures more than a fraction of a second by a camera shutter, and unlike a video it only focuses on small, subtle movements. Absolutely delightful.

Stay Young, Go Dancing

Typographic Confessions № 2. Phrase taken from the brilliant song Stay Young, Go Dancing by Death Cab For Cutie, off their latest album Codes & Keys. It's been stuck in my head for weeks now, go give it a listen! They recently made a brilliant video for it as well. Did custom lettering for the word 'A' and 'Symphony'. Wanted to do it for the rest too but it'll be hard to achieve the letterpress feel as initially planned. Looking forward to how this will turn out on print.

Homework #10 & #11

These are actually old assignments from my last semester for Multimedia Production & Projects. The brief for the first one was to create a music video, and with filming actors on a green screen. My group members and i were getting so darn fascinated by all the hologram animations on youtube (and Tron, and Daft Punk), we decided to take a step further and do so as well, instead of just pasting in a background. The filming was done in groups, even though the animation work was to be done individually, i'm glad each of us managed to pull this off.

The second video's the final project for that subject, brief was to animate a local comic book, not as fancy since i had to get it done quick to move on to another subject final. On a side note, i think i should get a vimeo account, youtube's player just doesn't look anywhere near as good.

Charlie Straight ID Tags

via FPO

Absolutely gorgeous. These are some swanky ID tags designed by visualscream for Czech band Charlie Straight. The logo and colours are part of the visual identity which were done by visualscream too a few months ago. Most ID tags are usually mediocre and dull, and even with a good print design they usually come on cheap, unaesthetic material. Visualscream here took an interesting twist, they went for silkscreening on laser-cut acrylic glass plates, which they designed as well. The background colours are printed on the rear side of the plates, and the graphics and names on the front, resulting in an interesting pop out effect. The print becomes way more lively and dynamic, as it looks different based on viewing angles and light conditions. Sigh, why can't our college ID tags look like this?