#some of them also have the magazine mockup thing going on so its got block font bold as hell style usually main focus is drippy splash art

[welcometoteyvat]

too little gfx in the tags lately this is so unfortunate

[caveartfair]

Why So Many Artists Are Reclaiming the New York Times

Dave Mckenzie, Yesterday’s Newspaper, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo by Dan Kvitka. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

In this age of alternative facts, we’re increasingly aware that the news can be manipulated like any other malleable material. FLAG Art Foundation’s latest exhibition, “The Times,” drives that point home in presenting the work of more than 80 artists who incorporate physical (and ideological) aspects of the New York Times. On view through August 11th, the show explores how the self-pronounced “paper of record” has shaped both the scope of world history and our own daily lives.

“We started planning this show two years ago with a shortlist of 12 to 15 artists who we knew had historically used newspapers in their practice,” says Jonathan Rider, associate director of FLAG. “But in the wake of the election, we decided to do it as soon as possible.” To be sure, the importance of—and contention around—news media has only grown since Trump moved into the Oval Office. The president took to Twitter in February to lambast his critical naysayers as the “enemy of the American people” and his administration has even gone so far as to bar major outlets (including the apparently “failing” New York Times) from a White House press briefing.

According to Rider, once he started putting plans for the show in motion, he was shocked to uncover more and more artists using the newspaper in their practices. By the time the list of artists had expanded to 50, he decided to announce an open call for submissions, which garnered over 400 responses that Rider and his team had to pare down within a few weeks. “We got submissions from artists living in the middle of the country who have never really shown anywhere before, as well as from artists living in New York who are showing at top galleries,” he says. (Roughly half of the works included in the exhibition are a result of the open call.)

Aliza Nisenbaum, Kayhan Reading the New York Times (Resistance Begins at Home), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

Michael Scoggins, Tic Tac Daddy (NY Times May 3rd, 2017), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

“The Times” opens with Ellsworth Kelly’s Ground Zero (2003), a simple collage of the paper’s front page bearing the headline “Picturing the New Ground Zero” on which the artist pasted a small green trapezoid indicating what he thought the memorial should be: open green space. The Kelly collage is joined by Dave McKenzie’s Yesterday’s Newspaper (2007)—which, like its name suggests, is a readymade, updated daily—and a new work by Rirkrit Tiravanija that is comprised of pages from the Times’s inauguration edition painted over with the words “tomorrow is the question.” Together, these three works reflect on how the news both documents the recent past and spurs considerations of the future.

Yet the Gray Lady can’t always be relied upon to be a faithful mirror of history or public opinion, a theme on which many of the works on view riff. Take, for example, The New York Crimes, a 1989 performance by the HIV/AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury. Group members removed the front page of the Times from as many papers as they could get their hands on and replaced it with their own that featured stories about the AIDS epidemic; these altered editions were distributed by hand at an AIDS rally outside of City Hall. “Things like women with AIDS, AIDS in prison, intravenous drug use—those were topics that, at that time, just weren’t being talked about, not even in the most major publication in the US,” says Gran Fury founding member Avram Finkelstein.

Gran Fury may have roguishly posed as Times writers, but artist David Colman was actually on staff with the paper, where he helmed a Style section column for a decade. His assemblage in the show, The Irony Hook (2017), includes a snippet of his writing, along with sundry other objects like an iron meat hook and old letterpress blocks spelling out the Latin phrase non verbis sed rebus (“not through words but through objects”). Colman describes his visual art practice as akin to writing. “Finding physical stuff and arranging it in a way that works to say something—I find it very analogous to amassing information for a story,” he says.

Paul Laster, Tracer, 1991. Courtesy of the artist and the Flag Art Foundation.

Gran Fury, New York Crimes, 1989. Courtesy of Avram Finkelstein and the Flag Art Foundation.

Colman isn’t the only journalist with work in “The Times.” Longtime art critic Paul Laster dispenses with words entirely in his collage Tracer (1991) and focuses instead of the advertisements found in the New York Times Magazine, which he skillfully lifts and transfers using 3M Scotch tape. According to the artist, he was always attracted to how the pages were spatially laid out, if not what they said. “I would go around the West Village, where my wife and I were living at the time, on the night that everyone would put out their week's newspapers and magazines,” he says. “I’d find multiple issues of the NYT Magazine with pages of red, yellow, blue and other delightful colors.”

Ruby Sky Stiler initially started using the Times for its formal qualities as well, citing its thin weight and smooth texture as ideal for her woven paper works. March 23, 2017 (2017) included in the FLAG exhibition, is part of an ongoing series of abstract compositions resembling textiles, which are created by slicing and weaving together two twin pages of the New York Times. She started them just after Trump’s inauguration in January. “I view the project as a version of a diary,” she says. “Plus, it always struck me as cool how quickly the paper becomes a historical object.”

The objecthood of history is also embodied in Lauren Seiden’s sculpture, The Future is Lost in Yesterday’s News (2016) made up of Times papers that she sourced from her apartment building’s recycling bin over the course of eight months. She read them all, then glued the pages together, drew on them with graphite until they were completely effaced, and stacked them on top of each other to create an imposing grey monolith. “The cultural climate we are living in has made us all re-evaluate our lives,” says Seiden. “For me that meant really considering the idea of time and information as a navigation of our history, and what we choose to remember and what we select to forget in order to create our own narrative.” Towering over the average viewer, the work becomes a kind of monument that memorializes the idea of “yesterday.”

Lauren Seiden, The Future is Lost in Yesterday’s News, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and the Flag Art Foundation.

For Fred Tomaselli, who has been using New York Times pages in his practice since 2005, memorialization was top of mind when he created his new collage specifically for the FLAG exhibition. It features a blown-up version of the paper’s front page from January 11th of this year; the artist drew over the image of President Obama, adding colorful rays emanating from a pair of sharp, beady eyes (cut out from a photograph of a bird). “It was Obama’s last speech before the Trump turnover,” he says, “the last time for a long time that we would have a semblance of eloquence emanating from the Oval Office. It was a poignant moment worth commemorating.”

One curious oversight in “The Times” is that it barely addresses the growing digital presence of the illustrious paper it so robustly seeks to explore, especially since the overwhelming majority of the population now consumes its news online now. (Indeed, the Times has seen such an uptick in digital engagement that it recently announced a slew of buyouts and layoffs, including the elimination of a Public Editor in favor of a crowdsourced watchdog collective shaped by online readers and commenters.) William Powhida’s NY Times Review (After Büchel) (2017), a hand-drawn mockup of a fictional online review of his current show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum by Times critic Roberta Smith, is one of the few works in the show that engage with the paper’s web presence. “The days of clipping out a Friday review for your press book are long gone, along with some of the prestige,” he says. “The Times isn’t what it once was.”

William Powhida, NY Times Review (After Büchel), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

Mark DeMuro, Lifeboats, 2012. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

A performance by PlayLab, however, manages to translate the online news experience into a physical one. Every Thursday afternoon for the run of the exhibition, a member of the collective will sit atop a stationary bike positioned near the gallery entryway from where they will chuck a rolled up copy of that day’s paper at visitors as they come in. “We’re playing on the idea that you’re getting shit thrown at you all day long, every day, digitally,” says PlayLab co-founder Archie Lee Coates IV. “It seems like it would be weird to have an exhibition about the New York Times and not have the news just flung at you.”

—Maggie Carrigan

from Artsy News

[tradeshowguy]

How I Self-Published Two Tradeshow Marketing Books

“Write a book!” they said, so I did. Two, in fact. Here’s the short version of how it unfolded.

As a kid I thought the best job ever was to be a Beatle. The second-best job would be a comic book artist. But the third-best job? Being an author. A novelist! Reading those great science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and other I dreamed of creating a life in the stars (on paper). I tried my hand at a number of stories but was never satisfied. So with my love of music I gravitated to a job that was more fun: being a radio announcer.

After 26+ years of radio, I arrived in the tradeshow world. I wanted to do something to differentiate myself that involved ,y love of writing and creativity (which I never really gave up). Hence, I blogged. Quite a bit, in fact. This blog, the TradeshowGuy Blog, published its first article in November of 2008. Ten years!

Along the way I published a pretty popular e-book called “101 Rules of Tradeshow Marketing” which was downloaded over 5000 times (I obsessed about the stats back then – I don’t obsess on stats any more).

The First Book

But a real book? One that you could hold in your hand and give away or sell? That seemed like a big challenge. My thought was to write a book to use as a heavy business card that thudded when it hit someone’s desk. To differentiate myself from others. To be, well, an author!

In 2010 I started. And fizzled. Tried again a year or two later. That fizzled as well. Long-term focus on this goal was difficult with lots of distractions.

But in early 2015 I started again with renewed focus determination, and was not willing to take no for an answer. After about six months I came up with a first draft. I reached out to Mel White at Classic Exhibits, who has been very supportive of me and my business over the years. He offered to go over the manuscript and offer his comments. This was critical to keeping the project moving forward.

In the meantime, I’d been reviewing a number of self-publishing platforms and kept seeing and hearing about CreateSpace, which was by then an arm of Amazon. It seemed easy-peasy to be able to submit a manuscript in almost any shape and by choosing a specific package you could have yet another editor or two or three do their magic. CreateSpace also handles the registration of an ISBN number, and since they are owned by Amazon, the seamlessness of having your book appear on Amazon for sale as both a print-on-demand paperback or Kindle download. CreateSpace also wrote marketing copy based on your outline.

Based mostly on budget, I picked one of their mid-range packages which meant they would have two editors look at it. One would do “line editing,” which is where a professional editor helps “strengthen your manuscript’s content with one round of feedback and connections to structure, plot, characterization, dialogue, and tone from a reader’s point of view.” Then a copyeditor goes over the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, picking it apart grammatically and with an eye to classic punctuation and editing standards: “includes an average of 10-15 typographical, spelling, and punctuation revisions per page that your readers will notice – but your word-processing software won’t.”

The whole process of editing was eye-opening, and a learning experience. I disagreed with a few of the suggestions made but kept most of what the pros advised. I figured the best thing was to humbly submit to the process and do what was necessary to make the manuscript better.

Something I really wanted in the book to break up the big blocks of text was a series of cute black and white line drawings that supported and enhances the “fun and educational” feel of the book I was going for. I looked first on Fiverr.com but didn’t find any style of drawing that I liked that much. Eventually I landed at Thumbtack.com, asked for some examples and ended up choosing an artist named Jesse Stark. His drawings were exactly what I had envisioned, and his price was reasonable and fair.

Now for the cover. Not being a graphic designer, but wanting to at least give it a try, I mocked up a handful of potential covers. I didn’t really like any of them (did I mention I’m not trained in graphic design?), and asked Jesse if he would be interested in doing a cover. He was, and after some discussion, came back with a mockup. I wasn’t crazy about it, and thought it needed a photo of a tradeshow floor that showed dozens of booths from a high vantage point. I finally tracked down a photo I had taken at Expo East in the early 2000s from that angle, and had him use that to complete the cover. (Side note: Jesse also designed the TradeshowGuy silhouette that I use in the company logo).

As you might imagine, the hardest thing to do when assembling all of the pieces of a book project is what to name the damn book? I rejected a handful, but only debated a few over the nearly year-long project:

Deconstructing Tradeshows: 14 Steps to Tradeshow Mastery

Create a KickA$$ Tradeshow Experience: 14 Steps to Tradeshow Success

There were a couple of others that were floated, but those two got serious consideration. Eventually, though the book was titled Tradeshow Success: 14 Proven Steps to Take Your Tradeshow Marketing to the Next Level. You’ve got to settle on something sometime, right?

The book made it to Amazon on late October 2015, and I officially launched it the next month with a video series, a flurry of press releases and some giveaways. My view on publishing a book, though, wasn’t to sell as many copies as I could. It was to have something that no other tradeshow project manager had: a book.

The book was mentioned in some local business publications, and I’ve showed it off at networking meetings (who else has their own book?!), but the most notable mention came when Exhibitor Magazine published a multi-page article on the book and me. As one LinkedIn colleague said, “It doesn’t get any better than that!” So true.

The Second Book

Time passes. After the initial excitement of having a book to promote and giveaway fades, thoughts turn to what to do as a follow-up. It’s been said that one of the best ways to sell and promote your first book is to write a second book. But what would that second book be when I felt I put all I knew into the first book. And I knew I wanted a second book to follow up the first one.

It took a while, but I came to settle on the idea of taking the dozens and dozens of list blog posts I’d written for the blog. It took some time assembling all of the posts – many covered similar topics and had to be combined and edited – but once that was accomplished, I reached out to Mel again for help.

This book didn’t write itself, but since the content had already been created it was a matter of grouping the lists into specific topics was the main task. And of course I wanted the same illustrator so I emailed Jesse to see if he was interested. He said yes, so we moved forward.

The second book, still untitled, was a lower budgeted affair. I enlisted Mel again, and he also had his English professor wife, Mary Christine Delea, do through it once. Once their two edits were done, I uploaded to CreateSpace, agreed on the more modest single line edit requested before going to print.

Now…what to title the book of lists? I had a couple of lists that referenced zombies, and one that referenced superheroes, so I played around with them for awhile:

Quirky Interactive Activities, Exhibiting Zombies, and Tradeshow Superheroes: A By-The-Numbers Guide on How to Take Advantage of the Most Effective Marketing Vehicle the World Has Ever Seen (I think this won a record of some sort for longest proposed title!)

Exhibiting Zombies, Tradeshow Superheroes and Quirky In-Booth Activities:

A List Manual on How to Take Advantage of the Most Effective Marketing Vehicle the World Has Ever Seen

Exhibiting Zombies, Tradeshow Superheroes and Delighted Visitors:

Exhibiting Zombies, Tradeshow Superheroes and Elated Customers:

Exhibiting Zombies, Tradeshow Superheroes and Delighted Customers: etc…

After some back and forth, it came down to Tradeshow Superheroes and Exhibiting Zombies: 66 Lists Making the Most of Your Tradeshow Marketing.

For publicity, I did a little, including sending out copies of books to tradeshow publications and press releases to local business publications. I also spent a very modest amount of money on a Twitter book-promotion platform that promised tens of thousands of views of promotional tweets. Modest: less than a hundred bucks. Nothing came of it. Again, the point was to have another book to give to prospects to differentiate myself, and if a few copies sell, well, great!

Interestingly enough, sales have picked up in the past few months with no further promotion. Maybe having both books out there and easily found on Amazon is working!

If you have an idea for a book, should you self-publish, or should you pursue the traditional route through a publishing house? Both have their pros and cons, but to me having complete control over the look and feel of the books and getting a much higher royalty rate made sense for my approach. Yes, the distribution at this point is ONLY online, but to me that’s sufficient. I didn’t write to sell a trainload of books, I wrote to differentiate myself from other exhibit houses and project managers. And to that end, I feel I’ve succeeded.

Now my main thing is making sure that potential clients have a copy of one or both books. That, and thinking about what I might write for a third book in the next couple of years.

Got any ideas?

The post How I Self-Published Two Tradeshow Marketing Books appeared first on Tradeshow Guy Blog.

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[iyarpage]

20 Best New Portfolio Sites, September 2017

Greetings, Readers! Yep, it’s that time again, that sweet, beautiful time when all the kids go back to school and there is a daily eight-hour window when I can play online games in peace. But instead of doing that, I wrote this article about portfolios you really should be checking out.

This month, what now feels like “classical” minimalism is back in fashion. Sites mostly feel modern rather than post-modern, and we’re partying like it’s about, I dunno… 2005 or so? 2008?

Anyway, have a look!

Cryptogram

To start, we have a stylish one-pager that relies on type, and a very minimal amount of imagery to get the point across. I mostly like the animation used. However, I think the visual static effect that appears when you hover on project names is a bit jarring. On the whole, though, it looks good.

Seventeen

weareseventeen bills itself as a “design-led motion studio”. As you might expect, bits of that motion design are seen in their animated state all over the site, showcased with a simple and decidedly modern design.

One thing I found especially interesting is their image feed. It’s just that: a context-free feed of images that showcase various screenshots of their work, test renders, experiments, and stuff like that.

Rafael Derolez

Clean, modern, dark. That’s what Rafael Derolez went for in his design, and he did it. Add in a dash of animation and asymmetry, and you’ve got a lovely portfolio.

Dennis Adelmann

Dennis Adelmann embraces classic web-minimalism, with tons of white space, large text. I particularly like the presentation of featured project on the home page. It just feels elegant. it feels magazine-like. Hey, just because we’re not designing for print doesn’t mean we can’t borrow a few ideas.

Alexander Coggin

Alexander Coggin’s portfolio is part collage, and part presentation site. The thing that sets it apart for me, is—believe it or not—the custom cursor. The cursor changes based on what you’re doing on the site.

For example, if you’re hovering over a photo in slideshow mode, moving the mouse to the right will turn it into an arrow that points right. And the word “next” will trail your cursor. The instructions make the context a lot clearer. It has some problems with contrast when you move the mouse over dark photos, but if you’re going to use custom cursors, this would be a good example to follow.

Darren Oorloff

Darren Oorloff designs album covers and band logos. These are displayed prominently in a masonry layout, with an industry-appropriate dark color scheme. Let’s just say you get the idea pretty quickly.

Bobby Giangeruso

Bobby Giangeruso’s site feels odd, at first. You see the solid, almost default shade of blue, and the vertically-squished text and perhaps you’re not sure what to think about his skills. Then you see the “glitching” photo, and begin to understand that this is a stylistic choice. Scroll on down, and you’ll get that clean sort of design you would normally expect.

I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about it, but it certainly caught my eye.

Karolis Kosas

Karolis Kosas brings back some of that classic Apple-style minimalism. It’s clean. It’s smooth. It has lots of literal white space. Some of it will look almost blank to people with badly calibrated monitors.

Other than that, it’s a delight to scroll through. It is reminding me to go on a rant about contrast, though.

Tomek Niewiadomski

Tomek Niewiadomski is a kind and wonderful person. I know this because he made it easy to copy and paste his name into this article. Aside from that, his website follows a distinctly magazine-style layout to showcase his work. For a photographer whose work is probably regularly featured in print, this works thematically.

Ponto

Ponto’s unique approach to design is in evidence from the moment you load their site. They…just go look at it. I am not about to try and describe the way they’re using 3D on the web. The rest of the site continues the theme of being elegant, professional, and more than a little avant garde.

Eric Hu

Eric Hu has embraced that post-modern feel, and combined it with a penchant for elegant type. And his site tells you when it was last updated. I find that a brave thing to do, because I wouldn’t dare date my personal portfolio quite so overtly.

Jack De Caluwé

Jack De Caluwé’s portfolio doesn’t do a lot to stand out from the rest, aside from the work it showcases (which I would argue is probably the most important). It is, however, clean, elegant, and overall incredibly well done. Go give it a look-see!

Mesh Mesh Mesh

Mesh Mesh Mesh is our monthly reminder that just because it uses monospaced type does not mean it’s brutalist. It’s also yet one more fabulous example of telling the user a lot without inundating them with information.

Alessandro Rigobello

Alessandro Rigobello seems to rely first and foremost on typography, until you start to interact with stuff. I’m actually kind of partial to the background-animation made to look like old video. It fits the theme of the rest of the site, and provides a unifying theme.

Josephmark

Josephmark (yes, the spelling seems to be intentional) is a digital agency that has embraced classic minimalism in a big way. Animation and motion design is their technique for spicing things up, mostly.

Ever & Ever

Ever & Ever breathes new life into a fairly standard dark theme by rendering the entire team of creatives as statues. It’s a theme that reoccurs in the site, and definitely gives it a “timeless” feel.

othervice

While many designers these days will temper a site’s modern aesthetic by mixing it with other trends, othervice goes all out. It’s everywhere, in the typography, the motion design, and the layout (of course).

While I’m certainly a fan of what can be achieved by designing trends, there’s something to be said for picking a theme, and going all out with it.

Wedge

I have slightly mixed feelings about Wedge. Let’s start with the good stuff: the design is clean, modern, and beautifully laid out. It uses a very familiar style of minimalism, but still has its own personality.

The downside is the cursor. In this case, changing the user’s cursor to a simple circle really doesn’t add any context or help for the user, and so is just a distracting change. For less computer-literate people, it might even be off-putting.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty site. Go look.

Studio Dumbar

Studio Dumbar shows off their print and other design work in a site that mostly just stays out of your way, but spices things up a bit with animation. The style of design closely matches the style of their work for a cohesive experience.

Some might say it’s a bit self-indulgent to have an entire page dedicated to your awards, but if I had dozens of them going back to the ’80s… I’d make a page like that, too.

Norman Behrendt

Norman Behrendt’s portfolio embraces that post-modern, nearly-brutalist aesthetic that has all but disappeared from new sites. Not a fan of the circle-cursor thing as I mentioned above, but here, it only appears when hovering over portfolio links, so that’s better.

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