Love this cover.
ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection Hit Soon, See Final Box Art – PlayStation Blog: This should be the outside cover instead of the inside.
I love the cover design for this UK Tarkovsky box set.
"
In our interview with Jenova, he talked about the original inspiration for Flower:
When we made Flower, it was initially designed from experience. I grew up in Shanghai, which is a huge metropolitan city. We didn’t have that much green. I had never seen a rolling grass hill. When I came to California and I was driving on I-5 from L.A. to San Francisco, I saw all these farms, endless green, the windmills. It really gave me a sense of nature and I wanted to capture it. It’s like a person that has never seen the ocean going to the beach for the first time.
I wanted to capture that, so I took a photo, but the photo only captured a very small field of view. It’s totally different from what I remembered. What I remembered was 360 degrees of nature, endless, so I took a panoramic video. It tells the scale, but it still doesn’t tell this feeling of being surrounded by nature. Then, there’s the wind. There’s the smell. Everything there was necessary to recapture that strong experience I had.
That’s when I realized I’m a game designer. With a game, I could do that. I could let the player fly through the grass as if their face was next to it. They can push away the grass, they can [almost] smell it by interacting at close distance, but also they could fly up and seen the scale of the whole field. Games have so much freedom that I can capture everything I want to capture. The other thing is the sense of endlessness, the sense of freedom. You can go anywhere you want.
—
The Smithsonian is putting on a exhibition in 2012 entitled “The Art History of Games.” thatgamecompany’s “flower” will be one of the featured titles. This quote came from an email promoting the exhibition.
(Can you tell I’m infatuated with this company and its games?)
Beautiful piece of work.
Manifold Clock by Studio Ve. Thanks to Type Desk for the link.
Fusion Ads is running a fantastic holiday bundle sale that includes: ExpressionEngine, Versions, Font Case, Billings, Draw It, ExpanDrive, Kaleidoscope, TextExpander, Postmark, Pictos, Gedy’s Social Icons, Keynote Kung-Fu, and Learning EE2. All that for $79. If you design on the web, it’s a stupid-great deal.
grain edit · Q & A with Jason Munn of the Small Stakes. Love his work.
"Okuda expressed frustration that so many other devices had been designed for the technology and not the user. By way of example, he described how easily his parents would typically give up after trying out some new technology. “Yet, you hand them something simple—relatively simple—like an iPad, and the learning curve is very short and the payoff is almost immediate,” he said."
— How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad… 23 years ago - If only every technology company would just focus on this essential truth, the world would truly be a better place.
All About the PlayStation 1’s Design:
That explains how the controller got its look, but not how the buttons got their rather unique names. “That was also pretty tough,” Goto revealed. “Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward. I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively. People thought those colors were mixed up, and I had to reinforce to management that that’s what I wanted.”
Hardware design is one area where Sony has always been the one to take a stand and make something iconic. The Playstation is a prime example.
"
Five years ago I began work on my first documentary, Helvetica, which looked at the worlds of typography and graphic design, and their impact on our visual environment. After Helvetica was released in 2007, I had the idea for a second film, Objectified, which focused on industrial design and product design, and our relationship with the manufactured objects that surround us. While working on Objectified, I realized I wanted to make a third film that would also examine how design affects our lives, and began thinking of the films as a “design trilogy” of sorts.
The third documentary in this trilogy is about the design of cities. Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.
"— Urbanized - Looking forward to it. Helvetica and Objectified were both fantastic (though I wish Objectified had been more focused).
grain edit · KHUAN + KTRON for Weekend Knack Magazine - Love this one, but the whole set is great.
Also: I miss Italia.
"Make your work beautiful. Make it simple. Make it clear. Put it out there. Cast off the illusion that you can control the results. People respond by comparing to things they already know, so prepare for criticism. Ignore most of it. Listen to the bits that resonate. Understand that the more original your work is, the less others will be able to help you."
— Possibilities — Before & After | Design Talk - Wise words from John McWade at Before & After. Must read.
