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Artist Overview: Brien White

2010-02-22T08:43:00Z

It's been a while but I wanted to at least try to keep this updated.

Today I'm going with the artist Brien White. Brien is a Seattle-based artist I discovered a few months back while on one of the 2nd Friday Art-Walks in Belltown. I actually purchased one of his signed-prints that is now enjoying a place on my wall. The piece I purchased was a painting he had done of one of the birds found in the Paramount Theatre in downtown Seattle.

Brien's work tends to span a few differing themes, his newest seeming to be iconic/mythical statues. His work, both digital and hand-painted, does a wonderful job of capturing the lighting which is what I first noticed when I saw his show at The Gilt Edge Society.

Anyways, I need not bore you with any more blathering, here are a few pieces of his work:

Belltown, Seattle. I Heart You.

2009-08-16T21:03:00Z

Love or Hate? Love.

I've decided that I love Belltown, Seattle more than hate it… There is a lot to dislike about Belltown. It's noisy as all hell at night, especially after last-call at the bars, a large portion of it is packed-full of drunken meat-heads trying to display to bleached-blond bimbos that their testosterone levels are at an all-time-high (EG: sidewalk fights,) and there are enough crazy, smelly people here to fill Qwest Stadium. Regardless of all of that I am absolutely happy here.

Cheers

I believe the reasoning for this is much like the Cheers intro song for me; it's a place where everyone knows my name… This, of course, takes time to accomplish but it has indeed been accomplished…

Today I walked into Under the Needle, my local tattoo parlor and was instantly recognized as “The guy with the weird creature tattoo.” Granted, that is not my name but I'll take it. After I made my appointment for the touch-up on the Jeff Soto tattoo I walked over to Uptown Espresso and ran into Glen, the owner of The Gilt Edge Society and chatted with him about art as we stood in line, being served coffee by Zoe, who I see nearly daily now.

Overall it is just an awesome feeling. I run into these people that I know just from living here all the time and all over town. I've bumped into Glen at The Capitol Hill Block Party, I've run into the people who work in my apartment building office at various restaurants around the area and I run into friends/co-workers (I'm friends with pretty much all of my co-workers) who are in this part of town for various reasons all the time. This is an occurrence I enjoy a lot and I attribute it to living where I do. This isn't the only reason I am happy here though…

Art

Belltown has a thriving art scene. On Friday I went on the 2^nd Friday Art-Walk with a friend and was very, very pleased. There are 25 galleries open during the Art-Walk and the genres go anywhere from entire room paintings, as we saw at the City Hostel Grand Opening, to jewelry, to prints, to sculpture. All in all we did not get to go to very many galleries as the City Hostel took up a lot of the time we had but I did get to stop by The Gilt Edge Society (who is part of the Art-Walk) and pick up a print of Brien White's entitled Paramount Bird II. We also ate (surprisingly good food) at The Two Bells which, as part of the Art-Walk, had a mask-display happening.

Music

On Friday we also went to a show here in Belltown at The Crocodile Cafe, which just recently re-opened. Unfortunately this is really the only good concert venue (that I know of) in Belltown but it is a rather good one. We saw Head Like a Kite who are always a ton of fun to see live.

Summary

All in all I really enjoy where I live, despite the silly yuppie scene. There are a lot of wonderful people here who enjoy art and music as much as I do. It is kind of a hidden scene, but once you look for it it is a rather thriving one. I enjoy living somewhere where I feel like it is "My Area" in that I know the people in the places I frequent and we are happy to see each other when we do. All in all I'm quite happy to be where I am.

IxDA at Frog Design in Seattle

2009-07-23T21:06:00Z

Last night I attended the IxDA meeting at Frog design in downtown Seattle. Tres and I stepped out of the elevator outside the Frog Design offices to a surprising buzz inside the offices and walked in to an equally surprisingly large crowd. I think neither of us were expecting this many people at this event… If I had to guess I would say there was about 120 people there. Anyways, on to my summary of the evening…

The Introduction

As soon as Tres and I came in the door they were herding everyone towards an area where an introduction was given by a Frog employee. I thought that this was a taste of what was to come for the rest of the evening and I was a bit concerned as this was really just a long-winded introduction to Interaction Design and Industrial Design and a brief overview of what the two disciplines were all about. Really, it wasn't exciting. Luckily it was just an introduction to the evening and after it was over we split into 5 groups of around 20 people each, give or take, and moved to one of the five presenting companies there in the studios.

Madison Square Garden Remodel

The first presentation I saw was on the remodeling work of the Madison Square Garden in New York City. This presentation focused mostly on the prototyping and input phase of designing a product (or, in this case, a whole host of products.) They went over the usefulness of using a good ol' pencil and paper to come up with stories and demonstrations for how the thing you are designing are going to work, and most importantly, how human beings will interface with them.

I found this part particularly eye-opening because most things I design never have a human in the drawing anywhere. I always bang out the sketch of whatever it is I'm working on and completely overlook actually placing a human being in the imagery. Pencil and paper prototyping is great because the cost is damn-near free.

Medical Equipment Test Equipment

The next presentation was on the design of very specialized equipment used to actually test Medical hardware. This test equipment would do such things as ensure no voltage is seeping out of connections on the equipment and that sort of thing. I cannot honestly say I understood what exactly this equipment did, or how it was used but I got the general idea as described above.

I have to admit - this presentation did not really strike my fancy. It seemed that their prototyping stage involved cardboard models of the form-factor with stickers of controls/buttons/LCDs/knobs/etc. that the client could place in various positions. To me, this seems wrong. You are inherently limiting the ingenuity and problem-solving by only allowing yourself and the client to work with a very limited set of parameters for how the end product will be interfaced with. This actually feels like design, backwards. You have all the LCDs/buttons/etc. as well as the form-factor before you really even get to go and design anything…

Another thing that kind of bugged me about the way they do things came up during the Q&A phase of their presentation in which someone asked them if they ever suggest alternative/better ways of interfacing with these devices to their clients. Their reaction was that since they have such a small client-base, and know them all intimately, there is no need to change how these companies are currently doing things. Again, this seems backwards to me. I believe it is always, always, always the designers job to find a better way of doing something. Otherwise it just isn't design it is production. If the client disagrees with you and tells you to fuck-off-and-die, then fine but you should still make the effort.

Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000

Next was a presentation on the Industrial Design of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. This was pretty interesting to me as this was the only presentation on a product that was passed around the room to be played with. Of course, in hindsight, that was probably a bad thing…

As far as how this thing was designed the speaker did not go into that very much. It seemed mostly like a marketing slide-show. The mouse features buttons on the underside for playing a presentation, and apparently took 18 months of research to design. They apparently had 12 different prototypes for how to tell if the mouse was in “presentation mode” meaning the scroll-wheel and such wouldn't function anymore so you did not accidentally push them while presenting. After all of this research, time and money they went with a on/off switch to tell the mouse if it was in presentation mode. *face-palm*

This mouse actually is designed pretty well, there were just a few things that were big no-noes for this kind of presentation. First, the guy was on a Macintosh giving his presentation. That in itself is not so bad, except this mouse, which is especially made for people like him (out and about, giving presentations) does not work on OSX. *snicker* Also, when you have the mouse in your hand there is a back-port for the batteries. There is a big, obvious, tempting, holy shit I cannot not hit this button on the mouse to pop the battery panel off. When this mouse when around the room over 75% of the people who got it in their hands popped the battery-panel off first thing and couldn't figure out how to put it back on. It is probably not such a good design consideration to make a battery-panel button so awesome you hit it first-thing.

Lastly, this presentation was also annihilated by a question during Q&A time. After all of this time and money spent on this mouse, and it's success, (it is a successful product.) it appears Microsoft did not actually do any research to tell if they hit their market demographic with this product, who it was being sold to or how it was being used. It kind of blows my mind a company would spend this much development and production resources on a product and not do the menial work to ensure they learn from the success of this product. I suppose this should be no surprise to me coming from Microsoft.

Intel Point of Sale Kiosk

Next up was Frog Design discussing their work on what really amounts to revolutionizing Point of Sale. Currently Point of Sale devices are ugly, beige, black-and-white-screened computers that, along with their mass of wiring, are hidden behind a black counter or glass surface out of embarrassment. Apparently Intel wanted to change this, so they hired Frog design to make this device sexy. What they came up with was an entire surface that was capable of scanning and displaying the item you were purchasing as well as potentially offer you matching items and other items people who bought that item purchased.

This would essentially give you the same experience you get online but with the added bonus of someone there to actually speak with while making your purchase as well as the instant gratification that comes with making in-store purchases. I actually really like what they ended up designing, they have really good, cheap computers and processing power - why not put them to the paces when it comes to Point of Sale devices? Here is what they came up with:

Conclusion

Overall I think the conference was just OK. I felt too much emphasis was put into the difference between Interaction Design and Industrial Design, how the differ as positions and what each job “does.” To me this distinction isn't too hard to understand but maybe it is for others… Also, it was hard to tell if the products and how they were designed actually met given requirements and if they learned anything from the experience and what could have been improved upon in the future.

Art Link of the Day!

2009-07-22T01:43:00Z

Since I have a fancy blog thing now, I'm going to start posting these on here instead of on Facebook. This will allow me to keep them in a central place as well as not be limited by the character-limit Facebook has on messages. So, here we go!

Today I'm going with Michael Page. Michael is a 29-year-old painter born and raised in California (SHOCK!) Michael's work is, once again, pop/American surrealism. (Sorry I keep rolling with the pop/American surrealism, I swear I have other styles in my giant list of links, here.)

Michael Page tends to have a lot of political and environmental weight in the shows he does and can be pretty easily picked out in his pieces. His paintings tend to be extremely vivid, even if they are more on the gray-scale side of things.

Since I do have a blog now, where I control the formatting, I can post some of his actual works here:

"JohnBlog!" is Up and Running!

2009-07-21T08:17:00Z

I've just finished setting up my new blog! I finally have a use for johnpostlethwait.com rather than a landing page…

I'll be using it to post all sorts of things such as: programming experiences, the recent “Art Link of the Day!” I've been doing and my rants & raves of which I tend to have many. I will be posting my most recent “Art Link of the Day!” here soon as my first real entry.

-John P.