The Open Window sets the benchmark for higher education programmes in the fields of multimedia, animation, film and contemporary design. Our interdisciplinary approach, with a strong practical and theoretical foundation, exposes students to a variety of disciplines, ensuring an unsurpassed employment rate in industry.

Thursday, 6 December 2012

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

Sunday, 25 November 2012

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

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

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.

Monday, 29 October 2012

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

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

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