Last week, San Jose graffiti artist David Choe graced Denver with his presence for the annual street art convention of the Terminal Kings.  In his time in here, he gave us several public murals that you can find in the art district, specifically off of 13th and Champa.

What brings me to talk about Choe, besides my grandiose excitement that Denver’s art culture is rapidly growing in a tasteful fashion, is the hype surrounding the rumors and anticipation of Facebook’s stock going public and Choe’s relationship with Facebook that will soon bring him to residency in America’s top 1%. 

Choe was asked to provide the art for Facebook’s first headquarters building, adorning the walls with his dirty style of infamous characterizations of gorgeously morphed creatures resembling human figures.  As a payment, Choe took what many would argue to be a risky bet, to be paid in stock options as opposed to simply cash for his art.

Choe, himself, said that he thought Facebook “was ridiculous at first,” which I think part of all of us did at some point or another in the concept of connecting with friends online; however, as a tactile artist, you can see where Choe would think so. His medium is tangible in every facet and ties into the organic world that we live in. Yet, the times are changing and trans-disciplinary connections in networking are crucial to getting your work out there in today’s digital times of the inorganic.  Even if you’re still an artisan, hands on with your craft, promotion across social networks is imperative, even for the old school, technological anarchists.

In response to his expected earnings, Choe stated on Tuesday on his blog, “[H]ave you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!? And then some kind of happy accident happens , and as you’re in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose? am I the only one that has this dream? You never had that dream?”

Whether directly or not, this is proof that social media can pay off.  Facebook’s literal payout to Choe is just the start of his wealth– think about the future reach of his fan base through social networking.

It’ll be interesting to see where he takes all of this, especially his rankings as such a powerful stockholder.  This could be the start of a shift in something really awesome in slowly transforming the demographic of that daunting 1%.  Check out the rest of Choe’s Denver street art and take a look into the artist’s mind in the recent documentary, Dirty Hands. Or, hey, in the spirit of social media, subscribe to his Facebook.

Not to geek out with techie stuff, but this is really awesome.

Yesterday at the studio, a couple of us found ourselves distracted in a conversation about Mashable’s recent blog post on 3D printing– something that actually ties into one of our clients and their work at Render Plus Systems.  This conversation eventually led to open mouths watching videos of 3D printers in action in anticipation for the year 2030.

The Pirate Bay recently opened a new category on their site– called “Physibles”– which consists of files that can be downloaded and materialized through 3D printing.  Last week, TPB finally spoke about their mission on their blog, stating, “Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore.  We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things.  Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere.  But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well! We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects.” How cool is this?

With the rate of evolution for current trends, we’re willing to bet that the cost of printers will lower much sooner than two decades out, and 3D printing will be available to people like you or me. Researchers are predicting that the near future will hold printing of “personal scale applications” like sneakers, home items, or even car parts.  What we were held up by, (held up in amazement and wishing we were still in middle school using these awesome programs.

The above photo is an awesome example of real-world application, where designer Pauline Van Dongen produced her own collection of high fashion footwear made of laser sintered nylon.  Art meets technology, meets time efficiency, meets outsourcing costs.  Think about where this could take us– production costs could be lowered, and hopefully, child labor could be eliminated entirely at some point.  It’s like stem cell research for consumerism.  My only question is how replications of organic objects will happen– how will leather, meat, or produce be reproduced? Just a little food for thought.

“Today’s all-access mediascape has flattened out many areas of expertise, casting shadows of doubt upon the future of journalism, graphic design, book publishing, and other specialized practices.” -Ellen Lupton

In Richard Poynor’s article, “Read All That? You Must Be Kidding Me”, recently published on The Design Observer, he analyzes Cooper-Hewitt curator Ellen Lupton and her articulated essay on today’s design culture, entitled “Reading and Writing,” a featured text in Graphic Design: Now in Production (a current survey on American design culture) that questions the role of written work in relation to visual or graphic design. After much analysis, Poynor arrives at the conclusive statement that though not always read by everyone, long-form writing does still possess a great value in curating visual projects, and it’s absence would be an absolute “impoverishment.”

This article made me curious, as a writer in a sea of designers and a primarily visual, digital culture, and makes me question, again, how much our culture is actually reading, or at that, actually wants to read. We’re given so much awesome, innovative, and interesting content to look at online each day, and our RSS feeders are exploding with new posts each day.  As creatives, with our eyes and minds on creative work 100% of the time, how much time will we devote to reading the entirety of a text when there’s something else we want to read? We’re busy hustling to get our work out there, to be seen and heard for our creative visions. Further, from the perspective of the writer, how do we find readers– advocates– who will dedicate their time to reading something we scribe in long-form text? Is the essay, as Lupton states, a lost cause?

In studying Lupton’s essay, Poynor (after admitting to only skimming the text at first) relays to us her accusation: “If you are reading this text now (and you started perusing it from the beginning, some three thousand words ago), you are a stalwart slogger indeed. The super sad truth is, this essay is a last-ditch effort at so-called ‘long-form writing.”‘; he goes on to call her bold statement, “an amazing amount of trouble to go to as a curator, editor and writer if you doubt that many people will make the effort to read [your text in its entirety].” Yet, by the end of the article, Poyner calls himself a “slogger”, which I stand to argue that we all are, genre-depending.

Digital design is a field that is beyond cross-disciplinary, and requires an impeccable eye for analysis, as well as a well-studied and well-read mind. To arrive at our our finished projects, we each read an extensive amount about those who inspire us,  their design process, and the about the methods and tools that we need to create our own.

As Lupton comments, the writing surrounding our work– or even our written comments and opinions towards the work of others– may just be a means of deriving pleasure from our experience of a piece of work, or, as she says, a means of “disseminating the self.” However, without language, there wouldn’t be any purpose behind design, as, really, the design industry is one in which we each create work that is expressive of some form of opinion, and how else do we thoroughly finalize and give detail to that opinion other than through written text? Though we often think in images, we still form thoughts and conceptualize those images with what we were built upon– the written word.

The rate at which our culture is evolving is on an exponential incline. With life moving at its current pace, the thought of being absent for a month, even a week for the holidays, is terrifying. We may miss out on being part of a crucial stepping-stone in the future of technology. Trends are hard to predict; however, based on what we’ve seen during the past six months, we’ve compiled a list of what we anticipate to be some of the leading online trends—from social media and content marketing to design—that will keep the peanut gallery talking throughout the next six months. Cheers to the “Year of the Digital Marketer.”

 1. Tablets and Mobile

Let’s face it, people are transitioning from the traditional computer and embracing the mobility of the handheld device. The number of users on tablets in the United States is said to reach 34 million by the end of the 2011, and that doesn’t include the number of users on simply their phones.

Designing for screens, or those spaces set by parameters, is outdated. This is the digital age—we’re now able to create art that lives digitally in 3-D—so as designers we should be designing the content so that it can live everywhere. When you create your website, you want it to be arranged in a fashion that won’t be disrupted when put onto handheld device.  We should all be designing with the notion in mind that design is working each day to better imitate reality, called responsive design. As we migrate away from print culture and towards fully interacting in the digital space, we want to create with the idea of responsive design in mind. That is, creating for fluid and unlimited, multi-dimensional spaces. We need to remember to design the invisible, and deliver a consistent experience for users, no matter what type of device they access our sites from. At Hero, we can’t wait to see what technology brings us in the next year in terms of working past the boundaries of the screen.

2. B2B’s Expansion through Social Media

Until recently, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have dwelled in their own corner of the web and haven’t really been incorporated into the grand scheme of things. Advertising on a network like Facebook has the potential to actually connect with the site’s users when ads are combined with the appropriate content and media. To create a campaign, many platforms that offer advertising allow you to specify the demographic you wish to reach. 2011 appeared to be a year of getting our feet wet with social advertising—we’re expecting 2012 to tighten things up a bit, reduce social clutter, heighten conversion rates for smaller businesses and bring about a more focused understanding of demographics.

3. Social Media’s…What’s Next?

This past year, Facebook introduced user access to sharing with your network the information you read, listen to, or watch via video. Along with implementing the “Subscribe” button that has allowed users to connect to one another in an editorial style of subscription, this extension is essentially the installation of an application, like on your smart phone. Two leading applications within the Facebook network are Spotify and the Washington Post, allowing users to share the music they listen to and the articles they’re reading online. These applications only require sharing approval at first use, so your Spotify playlist is open to your entire friends list after you set it up—Facebook is considering this to be a more hands-free and interactive way to engage online while allowing users to personalize their page and showcase themselves. The top social networks are also heavily promoting brand pages that allow brands to really market themselves as a business. For example, Twitter is allowing companies to feature a promoted tweet that lives at the top of their page. Within the next year, it will be interesting to see how much more public and personal the social media profile becomes.

4. Using Better Content and Diverse Media in Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is all about drawing potential clients to your efforts through content, but what do you do when your efforts go unnoticed? Try a different medium of content production and sharing. Although inbound marketing has a bit of history behind it, it’s still relatively new, meaning that it’s still a trial and error process. Everyone absorbs information and views content differently.

Content marketing and blogging is undoubtedly on the rise for encouraging website traffic. “Aggregator services will play a key role in separating the good from the great content providers.” 2011 proved that creating great content, mixed with diverse media is crucial to gaining and retaining visitors and potential clients. We expect the presence of infographics, videos, and other forms of interactive social media to drastically heighten with 2012 as inbound marketing is more widely accepted.

5. Curatorial Facets

Born as a sister to your phone’s mobile app, the trend of sites like Spotify, Pinterest and Instagram are allowing users to be more specific about their searches and, in turn, personalize and share their results. With your profile on each application, you can create a unique and individual personality for yourself through things that you “like” or “pin” while essentially competing with others to grow an awesome profile within each application’s constraints.  Pinterest has grown to a sizeable platform that designers, retailers and artists can display artwork, fashion and interior designs, recipes, and a lot more, all while linking them back to an original source. We expect, and hope, to see businesses to further adopt these curatorial applications within the next year and start creating profiles that personalize them as a business and allows them to focus on their demographic.

12/22 “I told you so” Update: Pinterest See 4000% Increase.

This video hit my inbox one day after reading Khoi Vinh’s lament about the absence of illustration in online publications, The Sad Story of Illustration on the Web. The two seem to counter balance each other.

The video was created for We Cut Corners, an Irish duo, for the song Pirates Life. It was produced over two months, hand-drawn frame-by-frame, using just markers and paper. That is rarefied territory. Few illustrators, or digital artists, today will ever experience a commercial project requiring such a sustained creative effort. Not for lack of desire or an absence of craft, but because rarely does the market fund it.

I agree with Vinh’s observation, that the drive of digital media leaves no time and no budget for conceptual, commissioned illustration. I also agree with what he sees as the effect of this reality.

It’s unfortunate, because it means as content consumers we’re deprived of a really valuable mode of communication that has been a longstanding partner of some of the best content that publishing has ever produced.

And so, with my cynical acceptance of illustration’s decline and Vihn’s words still ringing in my ears, I watched Kijek and Adamski’s video and felt renewed. The clarity, the playfulness, the humanity reminded me that illustration is going nowhere. It’s alive and thriving. Just not in its old locales. If digital pubs won’t invest the time needed for illustration, then so be it. That ship has sailed. Readers who want that will go elsewhere or give up. Meanwhile, beautiful illustration is thriving in new places, in new media and is bringing a deeply satisfying touch of hand, manos, to our digital world.

Hero doesn’t do video, yet, but we do a lot of illustration. If you want to bring a hand-quality to your next design project, give us a call.

As Quarterly.co put it themselves:

Quarterly Co. is a subscription service that lets you receive awesome things in the mail. You can subscribe to people you find interesting and, once every three months, they will send you a package right to your doorstep. (…) Quarterly is all about the contributors who are choosing new and exciting things to send to you.

We really dig the idea of receiving physical thoughtful gift — for which you pay a subscription fee in advance, of course. In these days, you really get excited when something besides bills and catalogs arrives in the mail. Don’t deny it, when you order online you keep checking the tracking number for updates, we all do. And you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Now imagine you don’t know what it’ll be but it’s something from an artist you picked, that you are interested in his/her thoughts and how will those translate into a quarterly curated piece. That’s quarterly.co, good ideas in your mail.

Innovation is a dangerous goal in advertising. Obviously, the industry has to keep on moving forward, and needless to say is that you can’t show the audience the same stuff all the time because they grow tired of it. You can justify it by saying that it is coherent with your message, but that’s not enough. If you’re going to try to stand out in the clutter that the airwaves are and get possitive feedback, you have to do it right.

Here’s an example of what we believe is unnecessary, this campaign for Kia Picanto. Was it really necessary to spend 1,800 hours painting 900 fingernails for a 30-second stop motion piece?

They can always say that they “outbest anyone at putting a whole lot of effort in getting a bunch of stuff in a small place”. But, having at hand graphic design tools that can do the same work faster… It’s a waste of money and manpower that could be invested in other campaign components.

The campaign has worked pretty well online, you can’t deny that — over 3M views on Youtube — but we would like to take a look at how it has boosted Kia’s sales in Korea.

Delicious and crafty work by director John Kelly for Chipotle Mexican Grill (our local). We’ll file this in the “I Wish We Will Get To Do That One Day” bin. Kelly has recently released a behind the scenes video and stills of the production process. The craft, creativity and innovation of the piece is evident.