hughsato.com

Thought this was a very interesting thing to see, seems small but they are all over the world… slightly more expensive strings than most, but worth it as you can see.  I’d like to learn how to make strings, such a specialty thing! I’d recommend actually visiting youtube for this one, or going fullscreen.

I thought this website was worth the note, especially since I’ve been in love with it since first finding it.  The interesting thing about information is that it can be organized in several different ways, some, which can be incomprehensible, but data, like nature, has inherent structure, which if you use it for good… can be pretty damn awesome.

link: Information Is Beautiful

This seems to be the epitome of my current life direction –toward the culmination of all my interests, bringing together art and information, or simply giving meaning to words and numbers (not that they don’t have a meaning already) in visual form, so we can appreciate the patterns that we mimic from nature.  Our social memes are not so different from patterns found in nature –in fact, I think they’re exactly the same.  But their contexts are different, and beautiful in each sense; what we can achieve is better.

Luke and I had a cool idea for music, where in the last several number of years, a diagram is drawn, with circles indicating melodic patterns.  So much of our popular music is similar in the sense that most of the songs follow a certain melody, for example, pachabel’s cannon famous 8 note, found in a lot of different songs.  A beat would play in the background of this dynamic infographic, and as you mouseover the melodies, which are differentiated by size (popularity/number of times found in songs of that year) and by year, the melody will play to the beat.  Furthermore, you can adjust the tempo of the beat on the page, to search for different songs at different melodies.

Doesn’t sound like  a bad idea… as soon as I finish learning Java, maybe I’ll venture to creating dynamic infographics with Flash or Html 3.0

I did a quick poster for my theater friends back in high school… unfortunately this is the web, and cmyk colors look terrible.  I tried to convert the colors as much as I could to rgb, and with good enough resolution, but I guess you get the idea.

Previously I made a much more simple, perhaps too mature of a theme for the idea of the play, which was more beige and used a color noise mask to make it look a little older and colorful.  Still it was too “clean” looking for the play.  The idea they had was for the poster to reflect a sort of “super-hero comic” style, which I’m not exactly used to, so it made sense to make something that represents a book cover, but not too intense for the sake of not making it look cheesy.  Anyway, hope y’all like it.

This links back to flickr, and a larger size is there too.

also, if you’re in Chicago, you should go see it!

//Edit: this is the trailer for the Stonehenge theater… er… was//

See also my youtube video of the making

alpha 2.0 the making of

also, random …

So… I was watching a couple of episodes of CoolHunting video podcasts that were from maybe 2007 or so, and though I’ve seen them already before… I really started to appreciate what they do:  they not only take into view those people who are in essence, the independent, local shops, the proprietorships that exist in the world, but also those who are involved in larger companies: say, they did a piece on Jacques Polge, a perfumer who works for Chanel.  He goes on to explain his work, and why it is significant to be a perfumer, why perfume as an art is important to him, and all that is very interesting.

Now then I look at what the normal citizen sees every day – the shops that are like Target, and Walmart… then the higher end, specialty stores (I guess I’m speaking for downtown Chicago, especially) such as Banana Republic, Neiman Marcus, Calvin Klein, Chanel… so forth.  I think what has happened is that since a normal person cannot exactly afford to shop at any specialty store, they opt for stores like Macys, Target… which in hand, causes this further disconnect from the makers to the store.  These… say, “third-hand” stores open the market to a lower revenue market, and eventually (at least, this I feel true for myself,) the brand names become more of a wall of names… essentially, they lose meaning because I can go to one shop, and see “everything” there is that is available to me at my income.

Then I see CoolHunting again, and I notice that disconnect… that departure from the whole idea of relationship between a maker (and I use that term loosely) and their market.  Admittedly, the market is expanded, since they have the “third party merchants” that expose your product to the world, but I really am interested in the people behind the scenes; the people involved in creating that product in which probably most of us take for granted.

I know, I’ve made fun of many fashion fads, and arbitrarily hated many products designed for the masses, but there’s definitely a need to observe where products come from, because THAT’S where we go wrong:  when that disconnect happens, and when the designers can only understand their market through the select people their company interacts with, and the select friends that the designers themselves have, they definitely have a limited point of view – and I think, (this is just a guess, but) maybe that’s where design obsolescence comes from… maybe, that’s where we see all these unnecessary products built to last a year and then be thrown away –we see products poorly made, look cool, but are completely impractical… there’s just so much that we miss today because all we see is…. Target.  Macys.  Walmart.  so forth.

I respect these companies and their motives, because that’s exactly what’s driving the market right now.  I just think maybe it’s important to take a look at the core of these companies, and the people who drive their ideas.  Sure, we see a whole lot of douchbag designers who think they’re the shit, but they can’t all be that way, and I’m sure they want to be appreciated just as much as any worker.
It’s not as if I have a lot to say about being a worker like that, but I firmly believe that it’s NOT the brand, NOT the logo, not even the image that is completely important for these large companies, because by the time that company got corporate, that original idea has gotten diluted by the several, maybe hundreds of shareholders who also have ideas.  Sure, that’s important too, I’m not saying their visions aren’t important, but it’s always interesting for me to see that original vision and purpose of the proprietor to create that market, or societal niche for him or herself.

And maybe, iunno, maybe that vision was incredibly stupid… or just bad in general… but it caught the attention of people, right?
(I know I’ve ignored the proprietorships that are still small-scale stores, and maybe I’ll talk about them in another post too )

Made my contest entry for engadget’s kindle contest and submitted it!

The inspiration for it was obviously escher’s neverending staircase, and also the idea that a kindle is a storage, or a box of organized words and are lifted out of the box when you access them.  Using the swiftish arrow that is from the amazon logo itself, i made a movement toward the top, ‘amazonkindle’ to create a little flow between my artwork and what is already there.

Hopefully i win! That would be great.

I don’t necessarily love the idea of a kindle, and e-paper books, but in the long run, I guess it will be saving a hell of a lot of trees and though it will never replace the feeling of a real book… it’ll be nice to have… especially if it’s free ;D

See ya when I see ya.

So I’ve been working at this for a while now, and been trying to make an easy-to-make, household material wind turbine. This is apparent from my previous post with the picture of wind efficiency, but the only difficulty I see (besides being able to spend time doing this) is acquiring a motor large enough and strong enough to create… enough energy. (enough is enough!)

So I’ve researched quite a bit and found that the wiring from old dryers or washers, and the motors from them can be quite useful. Seeing as though I don’t want to spend the time coiling thousands of small coils then going through a strenuous electrical engineering endeavor, I think that is the best option right now.

However, how many people have broken dryers/washers lying around? Not many I’m guessing, and it’s not that easy to break into one either. I might leave the option of getting a motor up to the one who decides to make the turbine.

Sure, depending on where you live, you might be able to just put a advertisement online on craigslist. I’ve got about 5 emails back just offering about 20 bucks for an old broken washer.

Anyway, here are some really crappy photos of what process I have so far.

it’s been so complicated with all this coding mess.

anyway, the photo section is up now, the fonts are bigger, and instead of Georgia, the font is at gill sans.  if you have ie, i recommend you switch to something else because… well, ie sucks.  also it makes everything you see on this page suck too.  might as well prevent people with ie from seeing it anyway.

there’s only two photos up on the photo site now, since i had to delete everything and revamp it with new things.  i’ll be working on a new template for this site too but for the meanwhile, this looks pretty nice, (it’s even a japanese design called karappo, which means “empty” in japanese).

im running this site on wordpress now, which is pretty nice since it’s nicely streamlined and such.  my photo site is still running on pixelpost because it’s still a nice organization tool.  over time ill start making my own programs and sites but for now it’s really convenient.

id like to fully lay this page out when i get to it with nice colors and stuff.  for the meanwhile, you can stare at my turbine design layout.  (mind, the colors aren’t going to show up right since it’s in cmyk, and the web only has limited colors.) nevermind, found closer colors and updated to RGB

-h

efficiency map for turbine designs