Cool Careers – Graphic Design

This video clip is about Jeremiah Desmarais who is a young graphic designer who owns and operates a design house called Extremely Graphic Associates. This is a Montreal based advertising agency specializing in fresh and unique concepts.

His view is that study doesn’t teach you how to run a business. You set it up yourself and learn as you go. He goes on to say that the graphic industry is a very fast moving industry and there are always new trends and you have to always stay on top of it.

Jeremiah Desmarais first started off by doing a basic course called pre press, which is the industry of printing graphic ideas on to the final printed page. He also says that the initial stage is to acquire a client base and that is done by going out and being aggressive. He got his clients by visiting stores after school and telling people about what he does and offers them his services. He currently posses around 30 regular clients on an on going basis and majority of his work comes to his company by simply word of mouth.

Jeremiah Desmarais has a philosophy that he lives by personally as well as he applies it to his business. The philosophy is called “C. A. N. I.” which stands for constant and never ending improvement. He believes that if people can commit themselves to something everyday and try and increase how good they are at it by 1%, by the end of the year they would have achieved a massive change.

To stand out in the market today he says you have to be unique and different. You have to know when to push the limit as well as know what your boundaries are. He believes that his youth is an advantage in many situations. He finds creativity and fun in what he does and I personally think that is very important for any sort of designer. Love what you do and do what you love and you’ll never have to work another day in you life.

Monash Art & Design Graduand Show 2009

The creative works of more than 250 final year Design and Fine Arts undergraduate and honours students from Monash University's Faculty of Art and Design will feature in the annual Graduand Student Exhibition, which will be launched this Friday 20 November 2009.

Work includes interior architecture (interior design), industrial design (product design), visual communication (graphic design), multimedia and digital arts, sculpture, painting, ceramics, photomedia, printmedia and glass.

My favourite piece of work was from the industrial design secion. It was basically a air purifying system which was quite simple and effective. It was decorative at the same time. It was a maze which let a plant run through it. This design won the Ivetech Award for Best Product Design (Industrial Design).



Anothr piece of work i found very interesting and eye catching was Amber Harris's “E=mc2”.

10 Populat Australian Logos

1. GM Holden Ltd is an Australian automaker based in Port Melbourne, Victoria. The company was founded in 1856 as a saddlery business, but later moved into the automotive field, becoming a subsidiary of General Motors (GM) in 1931. Holden has taken charge of vehicle operations for GM in Australasia and, on behalf of GM, holds partial ownership of GM Daewoo in South Korea. Over the years, Holden has offered a broad range of locally produced vehicles, supplemented by imported GM models. In the past, Holden has offered badge engineered Chevrolet, Isuzu, Nissan, Suzuki, Toyota, and Vauxhall Motors models in sharing arrangements, with Daewoo, Opel and Isuzu-sourced models sold currently.

2. Woolworths is the largest supermarket chain in Australia, owned by Woolworths Limited. It is colloquially known as "Woolies" and in Victoria the majority of stores trade as Safeway.

3. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is the largest bank by market capitalisation in Australia, with businesses across New Zealand,Fiji, Asia, USA and the United Kingdom. Commonwealth Bank provides a variety of financial services including retail, business and institutional banking, funds management, superannuation, insurance, investment and broking services. Commonly referred to as the Commonwealth Bank (or Commbank), The Commonwealth Bank is now the second largest Australian listed company on the Australian Securities Exchange as of January 2008 with brands including BankWest, Colonial First State Investments Limited, ASB Bank (New Zealand), Commonwealth Securities Limited (CommSec)and Commonwealth Insurance Limited (CommInsure). On 7 December 2007 the bank won its skirmish with ANZ over bragging rights to the title of "Australia's most convenient bank".

4. Qantas Airways Limited is the national airline of Australia. The name was originally "QANTAS", an acronym for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services". Nicknamed "The Flying Kangaroo", the airline is based in Sydney, with its main hub at Sydney Airport. It is Australia's largest airline and is the world's second oldest airline. Qantas is headquartered in the Qantas Centre in the Mascot suburb of the City of Botany Bay, Sydney, New South Wales.

5. Organisation promoting the use of a standard logo to distinguish products where a prescribed percentage of production has occurred within Australia.

6. Cricket Australia, formerly known as the Australian Cricket Board, is the governing body for professional and amateur cricket in Australia. It was originally formed in 1905 as the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket. It is incorporated as an Australian Public Company, limited by guarantee.

Cricket Australia operates all of the Australian national representative cricket sides, including the Australian cricket team, the Australia national women's cricket team and youth sides as well. CA is also responsible for organising and hosting Test tours and One Day Internationals with other nations, and scheduling the home international fixtures.

7. Tourism Australia is a statutory authority of the Government of Australia, with responsibility for tourism marketing within Australia and internationally, as well as research and forecasting of domestic and global tourism trends.

The organisation was formed on 1 July 2004, under the Tourism Australia Act 2004, and merging four previous organisations: the Australian Tourism Commission, See Australia, the Bureau of Tourism Research and the Tourism Forecasting Council.

8. The Australian Football League (AFL) is the major professional Australian national competition in the sport of Australian football and is arguably Australia's biggest sporting competition in terms of membership, corporate sponsorship and attendances (ranked 4th in the world for average attendances.

The league comprises 16 teams which play 22 home and away rounds between late March and late August or early September. This is followed by a four-week finals series which culminates in two teams playing off for the Premiership, in the Grand Final.

9. The National Rugby League (NRL) is the top league of professional rugby league football clubs in Australasia. The NRL's main competition, which is called as the Telstra Premiership due to sponsorship reasons, is contested by sixteen teams, fifteen of which are based in Australia with one based in New Zealand. It is the Southern Hemisphere's elite rugby league championship and the most attended rugby football competition in the world.

10. Telstra or Telstra Corporation Ltd is an Australian telecommunications and media company, formerly owned by the Australian government. Telstra is the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, mobile services, dialup, wireless, DSL and cable internet access in Australia. Telstra is based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Formerly Telecom Australia, the company was renamed in 1993 under the Telstra brand. It was privatised in stages between 1997 and 2006. Telstra's headquarters are located at the Telstra Corporate Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

Transformations

Transformations was a exhibition held from the 12th of November to the 18th of November at the J space centre for contemporary arts at Chisholm Institute of Tafe Dangenong. The exhibition was held by the graduate students from the certificate IV interactive digital media course. The exhibition featured the works of Mireille Beaufremez, Benjamin Chan, Oslyn Franks, Michael Mavracic, Yvonne Picot, Sylvia Riley - King, Leanne Roberts, Quan – Hung Truong and Annie Watkins.

I found most of the work was computer based. However, quite a few works were done using manual techniques. Some of the work had a 3D element to it as well.

My favourite piece of work would have to be ‘Interior No 1’ by Michael Mavracic. I personally thought the detail in the work was amazing and the whole feel of the piece just grabbed my attention.

Another piece that I really liked was titled ‘Protection’ by Benjamin Chan. The piece had a lot of emotion to it. It showed a person covered in cloth and afraid.

Another interesting piece of work was ‘Paris’ by Sylvia Riley-King. I liked the whole text element that was added to it. It gave the work an added bit of interest and the combination of both the visuals and text really worked.

‘Evolution Highway’ by Annie Watkins was a really good piece of art that had been produced digitally. It won the Best Digital Painting & Drawing Award.

"The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything that's eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy" - Ralph Lombreglia

The Offering By Robbie Rowlands

Robbie Rowlands is an Australian visual artist who is interested in sculptural work. He bases his work on things that exist at the fringes of our awareness, utilitarian objects such as lampposts, desks, chairs and rundown buildings and houses.

He graduated from The Victorian College of the Arts in 1999. Part of this study was based at Pratt Institute, New York after, his first solo exhibition found came out of this work. His work looks closely at the everyday objects around us, he questions their nature, their stability. Working both familiar and found materials, Rowlands cuts into and manipulates the recognisable, peeling back one form to reveal another, reflecting upon the passage of time and what lies beneath the surface of our familiar world.

The Offering is bases on a 105-year-old church that was scheduled to be demolished. The church was in the process of been taken apart when Robbie Rowlands obtained permission to use it to create his form of art. The church was not always this ragged looking. It was once a site for worship and community gathering. Rowland allowed the building to show what it still had to offer as a site for exploring themes of memory and history, revelling the formal and aesthetic potential contained within the building itself.

The challenge he faced was to evoke the rich history of the building and single its fate within the context of artistic practice. Robbie Rowlands cut into the walls and floor, peeling and stripping back the buildings basic materials in a process to create his art. The sculptural forms created are aesthetically rich, and the use of materials derived from the essence of the building offer a tribute of some kind by making us newly aware of the buildings past splendid beauty.

All in all, Robbie Rowlands truly demonstrates that art can be of many forms.

Arthur Ganson – Sculpture that’s truly moving

Arthur Ganson is a renowned kinetic sculptor. Ganson makes mechanical art demonstrations and Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes. Ganson was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

Arthur’s work has a lot to do with happiness. He started out as a young boy making things for people as a way of showing love. When he was a child he started to explore motion as he loved the way things moved. He started out by making little flip books. In college he found himself making fairly complicated and fragile machines and this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. In high school he was interested in programming computers and later on was interested in becoming a sorgeon as it ment working with his hands in a very focused and intense way. So he started taking courses which helped him create art and making them very precise with his hands and coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system and also working with wire made everything that he did both visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time.

My favourite design of his was the wish bone that was made to walk across the table. He engineered basically constructed a mechanical solution to just make a wish bone walk across a table. He says this reminds him of a cowboy who was sitting on his horse for too long. I found that quite humorous. He describes this sort of work as pupetry where his the puppeteer and he control and designs the objects.

Im my opinion his work doesn’t really mean anything, but all his work is just simply inspired by movement. In a nutshell, Arthur Ganson loves solving mechanical problems.

Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures

Theo Jansen (born March 14, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

Theo talks about a project he started 16 years ago and its about making new forms of life. These forms of life are made using plastic tubes. These creatures are mainly powered by the wind. He explains the propotion of the tubes in each animal is very important for walking. There are 11 numbers which are called the eleven holding numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk the way it does. Infact it’s a new invention of a wheel. The axis of a wheel stays on the same level just like the hip of the creature does. He says it’s a better method than a wheel and explains if you try to ride a bicycle on the beach, its not very easy to do. But this new method makes movement easier as the feet of the animal just steps over the stand and need not touch every bit of the ground in between like a wheel does. So basically, 5000 years after the invention of the wheel, he says, we have a new form of the wheel.

Each animal is made to detect all the dangers on the beach. And one of the biggest is the sea. Thus, each animal is equipped with a water feeler. This is basically a tube that normally sucks in air. But when it detects and swallows water it feels the resistance of it, therefore, causing the animal to move away from the water. The animal is also equipped with a brain. This is a binary step counter. The purpose of this is to let the animal know where exactly it is on the beach at all times. There is also a nose attached to the creature. This helps to stabilize the animal during a storm or harsh winds. A hammer sort of device hits the nose which is a sort of pin that is driven into the ground helping the animal fixate itself to the ground.