March 8, 2011
Saul Bass (1920 – 1996) was an American graphic designer and filmmaker, best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences. During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. His most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm for Preminger’s ‘The Man with the Golden Arm,’ the text racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the UN building in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest,’ and the disjointed text that races together and apart in ‘Psycho’ (1960).
Saul Bass designed the sixth AT&T Bell System logo. He also designed AT&T’s ‘globe’ logo after the breakup of the Bell System. Bass also designed Continental Airlines’ 1968 ‘jetstream’ logo which became the most recognized airline industry logo of the 1970s, and several other major corporate logos.
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March 8, 2011
Alex Ross (b. 1970) is an American comic book artist. He is praised for his realistic, human depictions of classic comic book characters. Since the 1990s he has done work for Marvel Comics and DC Comics (e.g. Marvels and Kingdom Come, respectively), as well as being involved in creating independent works featuring superheroes (e.g. Astro City and Project Superpowers).
Because his painting style is time-consuming, he primarily serves as a plotter and/or cover artist. Ross’ rendering style, his attention to detail, and the perceived tendency of his characters to be depicted staring off into the distance has been satirized in Mad magazine.
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March 8, 2011
Chip Kidd (b. 1964) is an American author and graphic designer, known for his innovative book covers. He is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, as a junior assistant. Kidd also supervises graphic novels at Pantheon.
His output includes cover concepts for books by Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Alex Ross, David Sedaris, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books. Kidd is currently working with writer Lisa Birnbach on True Prep, a follow-up to her 1980 book The Official Preppy Handbook.
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March 7, 2011
Alfons Mucha [moo-kah] (1860 – 1939) was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, best known for his distinct style and his images of women. He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements, and postcards. At the time of his death, Mucha’s style was considered outdated. Only recently has a Mucha museum appeared in Prague, run by his grandson, John Mucha.
Mucha’s work has continued to experience periodic revivals of interest for illustrators and artists. Interest in Mucha’s distinctive style experienced a strong revival in the 1960s (with a general interest in Art Nouveau) and is particularly evident in the psychedelic posters of ‘Hapshash and the Coloured Coat,’ the collective name for two British artists, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth.
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March 7, 2011
Arzell ‘Z. Z.’ Hill (1935 – 1984) was an American blues singer, in the soul blues tradition, known for his 1970s and 1980s recordings for Malaco. His 1982 album, Down Home, stayed on the Billboard soul album chart for nearly two years. The track ‘Down Home Blues’ has been called the best-known blues song of the 1980s. This track plus the songs ‘Taxi,’ ‘Someone Else Is Steppin’ In,’ and ‘Open House’ have become R&B/Southern soul standards
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March 7, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron (b. 1949) is an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1970s and early 1980s work as a spoken word performer and his collaborative soul works with musician Brian Jackson, which featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron.
The music of these albums, most notably ‘Pieces of a Man’ and ‘Winter in America’ in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron’s recording work is often associated with black militant activism and has received much critical acclaim for one of his most well-known compositions ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’
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March 6, 2011
Bette Nesmith (1924 – 1980) was an American typist, the inventor of Liquid Paper, and mother of musician and producer Michael Nesmith of The Monkees.
It was very difficult to erase mistakes made by early electric typewriters, which caused problems for her. She put tempera water-based paint in a bottle to correct her mistakes, and secretly used her white correction paint for five years, making some improvements with help from her son’s high school chemistry teacher. Some superiors admonished her against using it, but coworkers frequently sought her ‘paint out.’ She eventually began marketing her typewriter correction fluid as ‘Mistake Out’ in 1956, and later as ‘Liquid Paper.’
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March 4, 2011
Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth, Western Australia. His work consists of recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music, a method of sampling first made popular by House music producer and UK Garage influence Todd Edwards in the 1990s.
His track Alice is a composition of sounds from the Disney film Alice in Wonderland. Pogo took part in a project hosted by Disney/Pixar to produce a track based on their film, Up. He has later since produced two more mixes, ‘Toyz Noize’ and ‘Buzzwing,’ based on the movie Toy Story. Pogo has since produced tracks using samples from films such as Mary Poppins, Snow White, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Sword in the Stone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Hook, Toy Story, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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March 3, 2011
Bridget Riley (b. 1931) is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of op art. She was born in London and studied at the Royal College of Art, where her fellow students included artists Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. Her early work was figurative with a semi-impressionist style. Around 1960 she began to develop her signature style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye.
They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or color. Visually, these works relate to many concerns of the period: a perceived need for audience participation (this relates them to the ‘Happenings,’ for which the period is famous), challenges to the notion of the mind-body duality which led some people to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs; concerns with a tension between a scientific future which might be very beneficial or might lead to a nuclear war; and fears about the loss of genuine individual experience in a Brave New World.
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March 3, 2011
C. Allan Gilbert (1873 – 1929) was a prominent American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori) titled ‘All Is Vanity.’ The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull.
It is less widely known that Gilbert was an early contributor to animation, and a camouflage artist (or camoufleur) for the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I.
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March 3, 2011
Lim Yo-Hwan (b. 1980) of South Korea, known by the pseudonym Boxer, is one of the most successful players of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft to date. Dubbed The Emperor by his fans, he is the most popular Starcraft player with a fan club of more than 1,000,000 members.
Lim has a record of 547 wins and 416 losses (56.80%) in his professional career. He is one of the highest-paid professional gamers, with annual earnings that exceed $300,000 US Dollars and endorsement contracts that bring in an additional $90,000 per year.
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March 3, 2011
Lee Jae-Dong (b. 1990), nicknamed The Tyrant, is a South Korean professional StarCraft player representing team Hwaseung Oz. He is currently ranked second in the world by the Korean E-Sports Association and by ELO ranking (a rating system invented by Arpad Elo, used in chess to place players into categories – 2500 and above is grandmaster level). He is one of two players to achieve a winning percentage above 66% with a career record of 482 wins and 219 losses (68.76%).
The computer game StarCraft has an active professional competition circuit, particularly in South Korea. Two major television game channels, Ongamenet and MBCGame, each run a league viewed by millions of fans. Starting in about 2002, pro-gamers started to become organized into teams, sponsored by large South Korean companies like Samsung and SK Telecom. StarCraft is also the most popular computer game competition during the annual World Cyber Games thanks to its Korean fanbase, and it is among the world’s largest computer and video game competitions in terms of prize money, global coverage and participants.
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