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Blog | laryn.kragtbakker.com

Blog

  • They Structure How We See

    "[We] must begin to see our houses, buildings, farms, businesses, energy technologies, transportation, landscapes, and communities in much the same way that we regard classrooms.  In fact, they instruct us in more fundamental ways because they structure what we see, how we move, what we eat, our sense of time and space, how we relate to each other, our sense of security, and how we experience the particular places in which we live."

    David Orr
    The Nature of Design, quoted in "The Daily Asterisk" (Feb. 18, 2010)


  • Dordt Alumni in Design: Laryn Kragt Bakker

    I am currently the featured on the Dordt College AIGA blog. See below for an excerpt or read the full article.


  • Featured on DC AIGA blog

    Laryn Dordt Alumni in Design: Laryn Kragt Bakker

    I graduated from Dordt in 1998, double majoring in art (graphic design) and computer science. I am currently Senior Designer at CEDC (The Center for Educational Design and Communication), based in Washington D.C., and I've been on the team here since 2003. Our tagline is “Social Justice by Design” because we are a non-profit that serves other non-profits in a number of ways, including through communications services such as web development, print design and logo/identity work.

    The web was still quite new while I was a student, and the fields of graphic design and computer science didn't cross in the classroom except in independent study. Since then, developments in the online world have exploded and there are a lot more ways to integrate the two.

    I am an open source enthusiast, and over the last seven years I have expanded our web toolbox to include two robust and powerful content management systems (Drupal and Joomla). This allows us to design and build websites for our partners and give them easy access to add and edit their own content without having to deal with (and potentially mess up) the design of the site.

    We also work on logo development and print design with our partners, creating everything from annual reports and brochures to posters and newspaper advertisements. One of the benefits of working for a small organization is that I generally get to be involved in the projects from start to finish, from the initial meetings with our partners through concept development, design and completion.


  • Open source software meets street art and paralysis: the EyeWriter

    I found this to be a fascinating intersection of street art and open source software: "Low-cost, creative technology to enable graffiti writers and artists with paralysis to draw using only their eyes...Free and open source software for commercially available eye tracking devices...And DIY hardware and free software for users with only $50 and a computer."


  • Ill-considered Audi ad screenshots
     

    "Ill-considered" Audi ad mocks people who care, then tries to sell them a car

    I have to wonder who Audi is targeting with this ad. Are they really mocking their target demographic and then trying to sell them a car? I suspect they are trying to target the people who haven't yet worked up the energy to ride their bike more often, who realize the environment is important and that they should be doing something about it, but all that they know in terms of alternatives are stereotypes (which Audi plays firmly into as they try to sell more cars, making people who choose other options look uncomfortable, inconvenienced, or dorky). Either way, I agree with @chrisbaskind that the ad is "ill-considered."

    I'd love to see a parody of this ad along the following lines (I'm sure someone else could polish this more, but you get the concept):

    Scenes: Woman in car in rush hour traffic, obviously frustrated, horns blaring. Man on the side of the road with steam coming out from under the hood. Woman trying to start the car in the morning and it just won't turn over.

    Voiceover: Many people assume they can't do anything because of the way things are. Some want to change the way things are.

    Scene: Man on bike passing rush hour traffic on the shoulder.


  • New York Post (Special Edition) / Yes Men
     

    "Special Edition" of the New York Post from the Yes Men

    The Yes Men strike again! Today's "special edition" of the New York Post on climate change is a classic, with the headline blaring "WE'RE SCREWED." "It’s Coming! According to a high tech study commissioned by a concerned Mayor Bloomberg and generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, climate change caused by human-created greenhouse gases is threatening the health, livelihood, and security of New Yorkers—especially those who take the subway to work."

    A hoax with a twist: "Everything in it is factual." You can find the online edition here or view a short video about it below.

    UPDATE, NBC New York:

    One insider at the Post, noted that the faux-paper was pretty funny, and was in fact being passed out in front of their offices at Sixth Avenue and 48th Street.

    The Yes Men were proud of their work, and say they handed out nearly a million copies across the city today.

    "This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

    "Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts," the group said in a statement.

    Carefully checked facts? Wait, that doesn't sound like the Post at all!

    YES MEN press release:


  • Facebook preview (before/after)
     

    Making your Drupal page Facebook "Share a link" friendly

    How to tell Facebook which image and what description to use for the preview when people post your page as a link on their profile

    I was about to post a link to my latest portfolio entry on my Facebook wall and I realized it didn't pull in the correct image. I did a quick bit of research and found a solution that took only a few minutes to implement and allows you to spoon-feed Facebook a title, description and image for your page.

    The "Basic Tags" section on this page gives you the three lines of code you need:

    <meta name="title" content="Smith hails 'unique' Wable legacy" />
    <meta name="description" content="John Smith claims beautiful football is the main legacy of Akhil Wable's decade at the club. " />
    <link rel="image_src" href="http://www.onjd.com/design05/images/PH2/WableAFC205.jpg" />

    In my case, I already had a Drupal CCK field containing the image path I wanted to use, as well as a page title and a short description, so all I had to do was add the lines above in the <head> seciton of the page and replace the content with the PHP variables containing the appropriate field information.

    Facebook will try to guess which images to include if you don't do this, so you may find it unnecessary if it's guessing correctly. On my site, the images Facebook guessed on a number of pages were the RSS, Twitter, and Facebook icons -- completely unrelated to the content. If you're having similar issues or if you're just a control freak, the code above should help you out.

     


  • Banksy vs. Bristol Museum
     

    Banksy v. Bristol Museum

    "Banksy vs. Bristol Museum" looks amazing. I heard about the show a while back but just recently came across a video that reminded me about it and showed a bunch of the works (see below). It's a lot of fun just to see the video -- wish I could see the show!

    The trailer that is linked from Banksy's site contains this disclaimer: "contains scenes of a childish nature some adults may find disappointing."

    Read more about Banksy on his site and on Wikipedia.


  • Flight patterns
     

    Flight patterns (by Charlie McCarthy)

    Flight patterns of bugs around a street light at night. Charlie McCarthy took 156 shots with a long exposure (4 seconds) and then edited them into a video at 12fps. Add in some cropping/scanning in a few spots and a soundtrack (Telefon Tel Aviv - What's The Use Of Feet If We Haven't Got Legs) and you end up with a pretty cool 43 second video.


  • Good50x70 Sample entries
     

    Good 50x70 short list (2009)

    I'm finally getting around to posting this -- Good 50x70 have announced their short list for 2009. It's always fun to browse through the categories and see what people have come up with.

    About Good 50x70:

    A group of young creatives wanted to create a non-profit independent initiative to:

    • promote the value of social communication amongst the global creative community.
    • provide charities with a database of communication tools they can access for free.
    • inspire members of the public through graphic design

    Pictures in the header are credited below (left to right):


  • Still from Firekites video (Chalk animation)
     

    Great chalk animation (Firekites video)

    Here's an interesting low-tech hand-drawn chalk animation involving 6 months of time (beginning to end), and about 1900 frames. Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg have done an amazing job with the music video for Firekites Autumn Story. The trailing clouds of chalk dust from the rubbed out images creates a fitting atmospheric effect, and I'm amazed at the consistency of the chalk outlines. I'm curious if those were traced somehow. Lucinda comments that it "was drawn onto the chalkboards frame by frame, shot with a stills camera and edited together in [Final Cut Pro]."

    Via CR Blog and Elbert.


  • Radical Jesters
     

    Radical Jesters: A film with 11 pranksters, provocateurs, culture jammers, and situationists

    On the heels of the last post about Adbusters legal victory, here's a film that explores some similar themes and which looks quite intriguing. Tim Jackson directs Radical Jesters, spotlighting "11 hoaxers, culture jammers, performers, Situationists, and Interventionists who find entertaining ways to provoke thinking and discussion on a range of important cultural issues from the use of public space to feminism to advertising and celebrity."

    Watch it online (the preview is embedded below and links have been added for each section) or buy it for only $10 at RadicalJesters.com.


  • Adbusters: Buy Nothing Day Pig / Big Mac
     

    Adbusters gets a legal victory (finally)

    It's taken a long time, but Adbusters finally has something that can be called a victory in its case to set a precedent regarding public access to the airwaves.

    From a recent email sent by Adbusters:

    "The airwaves are public property – just like city sidewalks or parks. They are a public space where freedom of speech must prevail. This is an inspiring idea for media activists and could pave the way for further legal victories down the road not only on the TV airwaves, but in cyberspace as well."


  • Printing press = revolution
     

    Shirky and the death of newspapers

    Clay Shirky writes an interesting piece about the forthcoming death of newspapers and the experience of being so close to the beginning of a revolution not unlike the one that followed the invention of the printing press as the "old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." According to him, our need is for journalism, not for newspapers, and we're going to need to be creative to find a way to fix what we already know is broken with the old system of journalism so closely linked to newsprint. I'll paste a few choice quotes below, with a link to the entire thing.


  • Helvetica (screenshot from intro)
     

    Helvetica documentary

    I just watched the Helvetica documentary (I know, I'm a little behind the curve; it was released in 2007 to coincide with Helvetica's 50th birthday). Fascinating! It interviews a variety of designers over that span of time, from Massimo Vignelli (who came away sounding like a nice man, but a man with one tool in his toolbox) to David Carson (whose talk reminded me of the scolding I got in grade five for experimenting with distorted type in art class). I greatly enjoyed the history lesson as well as the spirited opinions some of the interviewees held about the typeface, and design in general.

    I definitely ended the film with more respect for Helvetica as a typeface instead of just the vanilla default setting. The film follows the large swings in popularity, from widespread acceptance and pervasive presence to a backlash against it, to designers who are beginning to return to it. Particularly interesting to me was the story of its creation, as Rick Poyner explains, coming out of the desire of the Swiss designers to "make things more open, make them run more smoothly, be more democratic. There was this real sense of social responsibility." Or as Massimo Vignelli puts it: "The life of the designer is a life of fight...fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us visual disease is what we have around and what we try to do is to cure somehow it with design." (This makes me wonder if Vignelli's Canon was put out by Massimo in the hope that he could cure the "ugliness" of current design by teaching people Swiss Modernism from 50 years ago).


  • How to theme Views RSS output (and include CCK fields) in Drupal 6

    I continue to tweak and refine this site as I have time, and one of the things I recently fixed was the RSS display. (This will be technical mumbo-jumbo to some, but it may be helpful to folks who are using Drupal and want to do the same). I wanted to include a CCK field in the RSS feed display and theme it -- by default it was just using the Drupal setting (/admin/content/rss-publishing) which was in my case to display the title and teaser. Then it was tacking onto the bottom whichever CCK fields were visible in the teaser, but it was very unsightly.

    I experimented with different .tpl.php files in my theme directory but was having trouble getting the Views RSS feed to pick up the changes. The solution I ended up using was simply to install the contemplate module, which made it extremely simple. All you have to do is go to the Content Templates page in your admin panel (/admin/content/templates), choose the content type that you wish to modify, and click "Create template."

    This opens up a window giving you control over the display of the teaser, body, and RSS for the content type. I had already themed the teaser and the body using .tpl.php files, so I just modified the RSS setting on this page. The beauty of it is that it provides a clickable list of variables from your content type that can be inserted directly into the HTML code you are building for the output.

    I'm beginning to think I should handle most of my custom theming for teaser and body this way, too. It makes it extremely easy to update and much simpler to paste the variables in. (Previously I spent a lot of development time using print_r ($node) to try to figure out how to refer to the variables in the .tpl.php files.

    Hope it's helpful to someone.


  • Swiss Miss
     

    Swiss Miss (Tina Roth Eisenberg)

    Swiss Miss (aka Tina Roth Eisenberg) has a prolific blog which throws up plenty of interesting content. There's a lot to sift through, so obviously not everything is as intriguing as the next, but she has a high enough "interesting to ho-hum" ratio to make it worth adding her RSS feed to the list.

    Images taken from these recent posts:


  • Talk Back: The Bubble Project
     

    Talk Back: The Bubble Project

    Ji Lee's Talk Back: The Bubble Project looks fascinating (I wish I had thought of it for one of the main activist characters in my upcoming novel). Here's how he describes it:

    The Bubble Project Manifesto

    Our communal spaces are overrun with ads. Building walls, bus stops, phone booths and subways scream one message after another at us. Once considered "public," these spaces are increasingly being seized by corporations to propagate their messages solely in the interest of profit. Armed with heavy budgets, their marketing tactics are becoming more and more aggressive and manipulative. We, the public, are both, targets and victims of this media attack.

    The Bubble Project is the counterattack.
    The Bubbles are the ammunition.

    Once placed on ads, these stickers transform the corporate monologue into a public dialogue, encouraging anyone to fill them in with any expression free from censorship.

    More Bubbles mean more freed spaces, more sharing of personal thoughts, more reactions to current events, and most importantly, more imagination and fun.

    Ji Lee
    Founder of the Bubble Project


  • Robert L Peters
     

    RobertLPeters.com

    I believe it was my brother Elbert who sent me a link to robertlpeters.com -- "a 50s-something designer and principal of Circle, a design consultancy I co-founded in 1976 in Winnipeg, Canada" (my hometown). I added the RSS feed to my subscriptions as I do to put a blog on "trial mode" and I've been impressed with the concise but almost always interesting posts he makes on topics from design to pacifism.

    Images featured from these entries:


  • Mr. Potato Head For Adults
     

    Mr. Potato Head For Grown-ups

    Thanks Karim, for the link to the Facebuilder (or what I like to call Mr. Potato Head For Grown-ups). You can drag and drop all the features and then individually adjust the scale, brightness, angle, width, and height of each. I wasn't actually logged in so I couldn't save my masterpiece except by screenshot.

    Click here to play.


  • Magritte-book-pro
     

    Magritte-book-pro

    I generally dislike having logos on my things and would probably prefer a nice method of removing the Mac logo on my laptop so that it doesn't feel like a product placement every time I open my lid, but I have to admit, this Magritte-inspired mod is pretty clever. It's laser-etched using a technique like this.

    Alternate titles:

    • Ceci n'est pas un Macbook Pro
    • Son of Mac (Note: title of Magritte's painting is "Son of Man") See this also.

    Originals here and here. Etching instructions found via here, and I was originally put on this trail by this guy.


  • The Vignelli Canon
     

    The Vignelli Canon: Free PDF Ebook

    Massimo Vignelli has a PDF download available on principles of design which he has learned and developed over his career. ("Vignelli works firmly within the Modernist tradition, and focuses on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all of his work.")


  • Greenpeace
     

    Greenpeace Design Awards 2009

    Greenpeace Australian Pacific is running a poster contest. The winner gets a special trophy and entries will be considered for major Greenpeace campaigns. If you've got a great idea or are a student that needs to design a poster, take a look:

    The brief

    Historically posters have been inextricably linked with cause-related campaigns. Visually striking, often iconic and frequently iconoclastic, posters grab the attention like no other medium. They effectively help spread a succinct message and in doing so shift attitudes and contribute to significant changes within society.

    The brief is to design a poster that delivers the message ‘Be a Part of the Action’ – this does not necessarily have to be expressed in words. The poster could bear witness to catastrophic environmental damage and in doing so, cause outrage. Alternatively the poster could actively encourage peaceful protest to expose an environmental problem.

    Above all, the poster needs to raise awareness of environmental issues and inspire action.

    Our campaigns

    Greenpeace Australia Pacific campaigns focus on the following issues:

    • Catalysing an energy revolution to address the number one threat facing our planet – climate change
    • Defending our oceans by challenging wasteful and destructive fishing and creating a global network of marine reserves
    • Protecting the world’s ancient forests and the animals, plants and people that depend on them
    • Campaigning for sustainable agriculture by rejecting genetically engineered organisms, protecting biodiversity and encouraging socially responsible farming

    Our values

    The following values guide all Greenpeace campaigns:


  • Osocio
     

    Osocio: social advertising and non-profit campaigns

    I'm a big fan of non-profit design. I've been daydreaming since my college days about one permutation or another of my plan to start a non-profit design firm or focus a freelance career around non-profits. I continue to work on this idea, and I think it's still a real option for the future (after Janel is done with her dissertation, assuming we have to move somewhere when she gets a job offer). And, of course, the diversity of non-profits and projects is my favorite part of working where I currently work. So I was pleased to stumble on a design blog that focuses on exactly the kind of design that interests me most. Osocio "...is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns...the place where marketing and activism collide." The images above are from a few campaigns that caught my eye:

    1. Diversity of Species in the Rainforest: "The destruction of the rainforest comes in many shapes. And there are all kinds of animal and plant species which suffer as a result. Every hour three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct."
    2. Second hand smoke campaign: an "oversized arm to let you see that smoking not only harms yourself."
    3. Brisbane Advertising and Design Charity Challenge: "“Despite what many think, our industry has a big heart..."

    (Originally posted on larynandjanel.com with alternate example images).


  • Bittbox.com samples
     

    Bittbox.com

    Who can resist freebies when it comes to design elements. Bittbox.com is a great resource to follow for free vectors, brushes (for Photoshop and Illustrator), textures, and tutorials. I've got the site in my RSS feeds to get a general sense of what he's got on the site and I check it out every now and then when I'm looking for something in particular.

    (I used some of his grunge watercolour textures for the CEDC web redesign)


  • A life in type
     

    Typophile Film Fest Opening Sequence

    Here's an interesting video sequence to open the Typophile Film Fest 4. Summary: a life in typography, in three minutes.

    There's an interview with the creators here:

    B R E N T "It’s definitely more digital than one would suspect. But it’s got an analogue soul. I will say that several scenes were shot frame-by-frame, and a lot of the art was scanned paper."

    C O L E "The hand-made look is partially a result of our limited abilities when it comes to using After Effects, though that aesthetic was originally part of the art direction. I think almost all the parts that look really hand-done look that way because they were hand-done (retirement cake, desk/book doodles, TUMS and menu board, crayon drawings and so on) while some parts were digitally created to look hand-done. For the most part though, the ideal behind the piece was to find and create as much of the work as possible by hand before bringing it into the computer."

    Hat tip


  • Joomla!
     

    Joomla: Open source content management

    Joomla! is one of the primary CMS's that I use to develop sites at the moment (the other being Drupal). I often recommend Joomla! for smaller sites without complex hierarchies or the need to tag beyond a simple section or category.


  • Tipping Flypical...er...Flipping Typical
     

    Flipping typical: font previews in parallel

    Check out Flipping Typical ("A way to explore the popular typefaces you have on your computer") to get an on-screen comparison of a bunch of different fonts that you have installed. The site uses some fancy tricks to determine whether you have certain fonts installed and then displays an assortment of them. You can click on the font names and choose different fonts to customize which fonts show up in the comparison.

    If you're like me and you find yourself scrolling through Font Book with custom text entered to see how it looks in various fonts...perhaps there is a use for this site. No guarantees.

    Hat tip


  • First Things First Manifesto

    I stumbled across this manifesto again today and thought I'd post it up here. It came out shortly after I was out of school, in 1999. It rang true then, it rings true now. This is an updated manifesto, based on Ken Garland's 1964 First Things First manifesto and published in "Adbusters (Canada), Emigre (Issue 51) [1] and AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (United States), Eye magazine no. 33 vol. 8, Autumn 1999 and Blueprint (Britain) and Items (Netherlands)." (Wikipedia).

    Here's the updated text:


  • Samples from Wooster Collective
     

    Wooster Collective: Ephemeral art

    One of the sites I like to check out now and then for visual interest (and I'm rarely disappointed) is Wooster Collective. They showcase various street art that they find and which gets sent in to them.

    "The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world."

    Wooster Collective


  • A resolution I wish I had made years ago

    As I prepare this site, I have thought a number of times how I wish I had kept my portfolio in mind as I've worked on projects over the years. I have the files, but it takes a long time to go through and prepare each one and write a short paragraph about the projects. (Not to mention that the paragraphs would likely be a little fresher if they were written shortly after I had done the work and brainstorming instead of months later).

    No time like the present to start, I suppose.


  • Drupal
     

    Drupal: Open source content management

    This site is running on Drupal, a powerful and flexible open source content management system which runs on PHP and MySQL. Drupal has a slightly steeper learning curve for development and doesn't have as much eye-candy in the back end as does Joomla!, but it more than makes up for that with its robust system of tagging (which is referred to as "taxonomy"). Where Joomla! requires categorization of content with one section and one category within that section, Drupal allows multi-tagging, hierarchical tags, and even free tagging where you can type tags on the fly. See my portfolio on this site for an example of multi-tagging: items are tagged with client name, client type, and project type, so each page can show up in multiple locations on the site, depending what the user is searching for.


  • Obama logo drafts
     

    Logo concepts

    It's always interesting, I think, to get a peek behind the curtain of a successful logo and see some of the other possibilities that were being considered (or at least thrown out there in the brainstorming sessions). For example, here are a few draft concepts from the team that developed the Obama logo that has been showing up everywhere this year. (Source)
    I will be including some of my early drafts and concepts from time to time and when I do, I'll tag them accordingly for those who are interested in seeing some of the work and concepts that flavoured the final piece.


  • Welcome
     

    Welcome

    This site will be primarily a graphic design portfolio site with a blog that covers design-related themes. I'm building it on Drupal and it is meant more as a presentation area for some of my work as well as a bit of a testing ground for some ideas and concepts that are more experimental (such as the PNG overlays I'm testing on the front page and some of the internal tag listings). I'm sorry to tell all you IE6'ers out there, but as it is a more experimental site, I'm not going to break my back trying to make it work for your outdated browser. Go ahead and move to Firefox already.


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