Mnet TAG AWARDS

Johan Taljaard (student and The Open Window) with the guidance of Nina Torr and Marinda Botha (lecturers at The Open Window) won the M-Net Tag award for Best Animation! It was also nominated for the 'Best Use Of Humour' award. The PSA ad will be flighted on DSTV for the whole of 2013.

View the short 'behind the scenes' video of the Indigo PSA. http://vimeo.com/54801271

Award-winning newspaper designs

Print and Web are different. Traditional layout techniques from print, particularly an advanced formatting, aren’t applicable to the Web as CSS doesn’t offer sophisticated instruments to design such layouts (e.g. text floating around an embedded image; some “floating” techniques provide such results, however they produce bloated source code just as well).
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/11/award-winning-newspaper-designs/

Art in the digital age: a never-ending converstion video

The second in a two-part series looking at how has art has evolved to take advantage of the new technologies available to us in the internet era. Here Louise Shannon, acting head of contemporary projects at the V&A, says: 'It's not a one-way conversation any more'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2012/nov/21/art-digital-age-video-internet-week

There's still life in the art of photography

Lavish and often a little unsettling, a new exhibition at Bradford's National Media Museum traces the story of still life photography, from a Victorian prototype featuring the contents of an ostrich's stomach to an exploding pomegranate by contemporary photographer Ori Gersht.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/nov/22/bradford-still-life-photography-exhibition?intcmp=ILCMUSTXT9390

NETHERLANDS - Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum Launches 125,000 Image Digital Collection

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, although partially closed until April 2013 due to renovations, has recently launched its digital collection. "Rijksstudio," the 125,000 work collection, provides access to some of the museum's most famous paintings (including Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," and Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"), and also allows users to explore lesser known objects (like an early 20th century airplane).

 Users can build their own collection by choosing works or cutting out details from works and adding them to personal Rijksstudio collections, or sharing them on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Two Picassos revealed

Picasso painted "Woman Ironing" when he was in his 20s. And like so many struggling young artists he often reused old canvases. He first began painting a portrait of a man with a mustache; abandoned it and several years later turned the canvas upside down and painted the image of a skeletal woman ironing over it. The ghost of the man underneath was first detected with an infrared camera in 1989. "Woman Ironing" was recently cleaned and restored by the Guggenheim Museum and is now on display as part of the exhibition, "Picasso Black and White."http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/arts/design/under-a-picasso-painting-another-picasso-painting.html?ref=design&_r=0

Download Hundreds of Free Art Catalogs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Earlier this year, the Guggenheim Museum put online 65 modern art books, giving you free access to books introducing the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky. Now, just a few short months later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched MetPublications, a portal that will “eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals” published by the Met since 1870.

Of the many resources you can explore, here’s one obvious highlight: MetPublications now makes available 370 out-of-print titles, including lots of informative and visually-packed art catalogs from the museum’s past exhibitions.

Full Article

How to incease your creative productivity

These days, more and more artists and creative freelancers are working from home studios, often fitting in their practice around other work and life commitments. This requires an incredible amount of self-motivation in order to stay on top of your work, and to keep your practice going.This article looks at time-management techniques, how to overcome distractions and find out how other creatives make it work.

The bookcover archive

Sometimes, it turns out, it's all right to judge a book by its cover. The Book Cover Archive, run and maintained by Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen, allows visitors to do just that. It bills itself as created "for the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design," and a quick glance over the selection offered confirms its success. The archive website features over 1,300 cleanly displayed book covers in a variety of designs, from simple text to elaborate photo collages. Clicking on any one of the covers will take readers to a page with some more information about the cover, such as the publication date, the genre, and of course, the designer.http://bookcoverarchive.com/

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/centuryofthechild/

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) traces the history of childhood through products designed for - and art objects about - children since 1900. Follow the button wheel clockwise to progress through the decades. Some notable examples are a group of Prairie School objects including a 1902 high chair designed by William Drummond, and one of the most well-known Frank Lloyd Wright icons, the stained glass window from the Avery Coonley Playhouse. Chicago is highlighted as influential in the playground movement with an image of a swing set from 1905, in a city park. A smiling Walt Disney stands next to an aerial view of Disneyland near the beginning of the "Power Play," 1960s to 1990s section of the exhibition. A little later on the timeline, see Jake & Dinos Chapman's "Unhappy Meal III," presented without curatorial commentary, related to an advertisement for Nutricia, an enriched powdered milk supplement, dated 1927-28.  

World War II Poster Collection

During World War II, the United States government crafted hundreds of different posters to promote military service, the conservation of natural resources, and so on. The Northwestern University Libraries has collected and digitized 338 of these posters for close consideration by the curious public. The majority of the items here were issued between 1941 and 1945, and they can be searched by keyword, issuing agency, description, and artist. First-time visitors may do well to look over the two excellent posters created 

by the celebrated artist Ben Shahn. http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/wwii-posters/