Obama Plays It Cool

Not an impressive performance from Fred Armisen (as usual), but the design and animation (tributes to Reid Miles / Blue Note / Saul Bass) are fantastic. The color saturation is a nice touch.

I could have done without the sub-Shatner singsong, though.

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Birth of a nation

Via Boingboing, another interesting new project from the chaps at Penguin UK — easily the most classy and innovative big-money publisher that I know of, full of great designs (Fairey on Orwell! Why did no one think of this earlier!?) and new ideas (sometimes combining both at once).

It’s We Tell Stories, a project in which “six authors are telling six stories in ways that are completely original to the web.” To formalist readers like me, this stuff is like candy. Unfortunately, the latest story — “Hard Times” by Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton — is not nearly as impressive as it could be. Mason’s layout seems pretty clearly derivative of Chris Ware, which would be fine except that it’s a dozen times more confusing than anything Ware’s ever done. At least once per page I found myself uncertain whether I was supposed to go down or across, and sometimes I finished the page still uncertain.

More fundamentally, there are much more interesting ways of presenting statistics visually. Especially if you’re trying to be all formalist and groundbreaking. H5’s video for “Remind Me” by Röyksopp remains my favorite piece of infographics-gone-wild. Imagine if all those graphs in the video actually meant something.

“Hard Times” still has some compelling things to say, as in the screen shot above. 86 percent?!

Whoops

I’ve been rather negligent lately with this blog. Sorry about that. Good things are theoretically afoot.

For example!

Oni Press, another rad Portland comic publisher, has been fairly quiet for the last six months or so, but in my last visit to New Favorite Comic Shop in Portland Floating World Comics I discovered that they’d been quietly mustering a clusterbomb of badass new releases which hit me all at once. One single visit garnered me Multiple Warhedz by Brandon Graham (King City), Last Call by Vasilis (ΒΑΣΙΛΗΣ!) Lolos (Pirates of Coney Island), and Black Metal by Rick Spears and Chuck BB. I’ve got a review of that last one percolating (with musical accompaniment!), so hopefully it’ll appear tomorrow.

In the meantime, I just wanted to throw out the idea of how nice it is to see these books coming out and really kicking ass with their cover design. The colors and composition on these are all really strong in different ways, and in ways that I think have been generally lacking from comics for quite a while. They’re clean and edgy and compelling and personal and professional all at once. Nice work, boys.