Blogless: Blog of Design Less Better.

Posts tagged .

Eve Duhamel

Eve Duhamel is a Canadian illlustrator, painter, and videographer working in Berlin.

An illustration by Eve Duhamel'

I love her use of bright colors and marker as a medium. The texture, combined with the repetition of shapes makes this series of illustrations simple, yet rich.

(This particular piece is my Twitter background, until I can find the time to make a huge version of the DLB guillotine)

Via.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
NickSep 23, 2008
 

Three lessons in ten minutes

"Three lessons in ten minutes: Or, Hypocrisy Now!" is a morality tale in three parts, brought to you by your friends at Design Less Better.

Nothing too revelatory for the BlogLESS regular here, but I thought I'd offer you a little story. This all happened in about ten minutes last Friday, and in those minutes, I found myself mentally reinforcing a few key maxims for web design.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
PaulSep 10, 2008
 

The Art and Flair of Mary Blair

You may not know who Mary Blair is, but chances are you recognize her work. Blair helped develop the memorable style of Disney's Alice in Wonderland and later provided the illustrations for several Golden Books.

Truly one of my favorite illustrators. I really admire Blair's grasp of color.

Her palettes start with these natural, desaturated colors that she layers over with bright, decidedly unreal hues. Everything ends up being so well-balanced on the page. It gives her pieces this great blend of the mundane and the fantastic.

A Mary Blair illustration from Baby's House of some birds in a tree.
I think a lot of illustration today practically assaults the viewer. The linework is slick and often heavy; colors are too-bright against a minimal field. By contrast, Blair's is more contemplative-- there is restraint at work.

Most of all, I dig Blair's forms: that strong, yet fluid, "gestural geometry" I find so appealing in artists like Modigliani and Matisse and in contemporary illustrators like Bruce Timm. (I think it speaks to the architect in me.)

A Mary Blair illustration of a baby with a ball.

Cynics might dismiss her work as "cute", but Mary Blair was ahead of her time. Look at all the work today that is inspired by Disney animation --Pixar, for example. Blair's legacy is a part of that.

A Mary Blair illustration of Alice in Wonderland.

For more examples of Blair's work, check out these collections on Flickr and Drawn!.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
NickSep 3, 2008
 

Colors for Nomadic Experiences

Being mindful of the wide variety of contexts that your website is viewed in provides welcome occasion to practice restraint.

I spent a good part of this morning watching John Berger's 1972 television series Ways of Seeing (nod to Click Opera).

Ways of Seeing follows from a line of thought set forth in Walter Benjamin's canonical 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Summarily, with the advent of art's mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no original, the experience of art is freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the object d'art's "aura" - its ability to produce awe and reverence in a viewer.

Title cards from the 1972 BBBC2 Show, 'Ways of Seeing'
You must hurry to see this incredible show at YouTube while it is still available.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
PaulMay 21, 2008
 
Close this
E-mail It