marchaprilpreview2014

COMMUNICATION ARTS INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 20

Anagrama Peter Lippmann Victo Ngai Baldwin& American Type Designers Exhibit

March/April 2014 Twenty-Four Dollars commarts.com

PETER LIPPMANN HUNGRY HEART

by Aaron Schuman

A

t the foot of Montmartre, in a darkened room behind a rather nondescript gate covered in graffiti, photographer Peter Lippmann and his team are circling intently around a vase that sits atop a French Empire dresser, bursting with fresh flowers. Amid the fallen petals, leaves and various worn and weathered leatherbound books that have been placed on the dresser’s marble top, a glittery, bronzecolored Christian Louboutin clutch leans at an upright angle. It has been positioned subtly within the scene—its edge hides slightly behind the vase, and its tone elegantly echoes the patina and gilded edges of the aged books surrounding it. Its twinkling reflection gently shimmers upon the dresser’s highly polished surface. Lippmann’s assistant, Quentin Reytinas, moves around the set making miniscule adjustments to the tangle of lights, stands and reflectors that surround the delicate arrangement.

Simultaneously, Marie Noelle Perriau, the set designer for today’s shoot, intermittently inches and twists the flowers, books and floral debris this way and that, so that they rest in just the right place. Occasionally she digs out one of the studio’s Sennelier pastels (originally used by artists such as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) from an old Kodak Ektachrome 4" x 5" film box and smudges the sky-blue wallpaper backdrop in such a way that its pattern appears painterly, as if it’s slowly evaporating.

Meanwhile, Lippmann himself quietly moves back and forth between the viewfinder of his Hasselblad H4D 200-MS and a grid of monitors, where each ultra high-resolution test frame instantly appears onscreen, allowing him to study every aspect of the photograph and then direct the others in their long and meticulous journey toward a finished image.

Over the course of the last three decades, Peter Lippmann has established himself as one of the most sought-after advertising and still life photographers of his generation, working regularly with clients including Cartier, Audemars Piguet and Hasselblad, and publications such as Vogue, Marie Claire, the New York Times and Le Figaro. Lippmann is currently in the midst of working on the upcoming Spring/Summer 2014 Collection lookbook for Christian Louboutin—a collaboration that Lippmann instigated, developed

Right: “Christian Louboutin’s Fall/Winter 2013 Collection lookbook. A Rubens fantasy.” Jean Pierre Canavate/Carole Gregoris, stylists; Robin Risser/Patrick Toulmond, retouchers; Christian Louboutin, client.

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INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 20: TABLETS/HANDHELD

Interaction of Color “This will totally change the way you see, understand, manipulate and think of color.” —Ana Serrano Overview: If ever a book were truly made better as an app, it’s this interactive edition of Josef Albers’s timeless guide for artists, instructors and design students—one of the most influential books on color ever written. Released on the heels of the book’s 50th anniversary, the Interaction of Color app reveals professor Albers’s concepts through highly interactive versions of the original color plates, offering an entirely new way to experience this masterwork in twentieth-century art education.

Users can read the book’s full text, browse and interact with over 125 color studies, perform experiments using a new color palette tool and watch newly added expert video commentary produced by Blood Brothers. The result is a groundbreaking new way to understand and practice Albers’s color principles within the context of his original words and commentary.

• Potion designed and developed the app over nine months, using Apple’s native Objective-C language and the iOS Software Development Kit, combined with a few

potiondesign.com/project/interaction-of-color

open-source libraries. A custom CMS was also developed with WordPress, to store book chapters and color plates.

• Albers worked with cut pieces of Color-aid paper in the classroom and provided folders of silkscreen studies in the original publication, challenging Potion to recreate the physicality of those materials in a digital way. The elegant and highly interactive solution is built around a color wheel where users can pull out multiple swatches to explore, save and share combinations while working on their studies.

• With more than 75,000 downloads, the book-turned-app has been described by Debbie Millman of Design Matters as as “the example the world has been waiting for. An extraordinary piece of education and inspiration.”

Caroline Oh, art director Nicholas Fox Weber, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, writer Edyta Lewicka, graphic designer Steve Varga, senior designer/senior developer Phillip Tiongson, principal Bruce Drummond/Josh Knowles/Filippo Vanucci, developers Michelle Komie, Yale University Press, editor Abby Palmer, senior producer Sara Sapire, Yale University Press, project manager Adam Jones, Blood Brothers, production artist Brenda Danilowitz, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, curator Blood Brothers, production company Potion (New York, NY), project design and development The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Yale University Press, clients

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“A useful design resource before it went digital. This beautiful digital version promises to be even more useful.” —Troy Lachance

Comments by Phillip Tiongson: What were the most challenging aspects of the project? “Color is completely different when using pigment and ink on paper than it is on a screen where light is emitted through pixels. Initially, we worried that if we could not recreate the exact color properties of the original studies on paper, the project would not be possible.

However, the Albers Foundation showed us how Albers’s color principles actually transcend any specific medium. The phenomena he describes throughout the book are fundamental to the human experience of color across all mediums.

“Figuring out how digital interaction could be truly integrated with Albers’s color principles turned out to be the real challenge.

Our solution recreates the original studies in vector form, enabling all of the interactive capabilities. First, the studies themselves can be ‘pulled apart’ as if made from paper, so that users can juxtapose the pieces in any way they want, to understand the principles Albers was illustrating. Second, the studies can become empty templates for users to create their own studies. Finally, the studies were connected directly to Albers’s commentary, so that when he describes a specific feature of a study, that feature could highlight itself in a way that paper could not.”

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INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 20: ENVIRONMENTAL

Cadillac ATS vs The World 3D Chalk Mural “A cool example of integrating digital with the real world.”

—Sean Klassen Overview: Augmented reality merged with street art in this spectacular digital OOH campaign for Cadillac by ad agency Fallon.

Building upon the Cadillac ATS VS The World campaign, in which the new car journeyed abroad to conquer the world’s most brutal roads, Fallon brought the experience back home to the states— and gave it a whole new dimension. In Miami, San Francisco, New York and Chicago, millions of people reenacted the car’s epic adventure by navigating their own virtual ATS through three-dimensional, chalk-drawn sidewalk landscapes.

• Using the hand-drawn artwork as the setting for the virtual ATS driving scene, AR technology specialists Daqri worked on-site, adjusting their image sensors to recognize important details of the murals as they came together.

• Once the murals were complete, animation of the virtual ATS was perfected to follow the newly-drawn roads. Simultaneously, the mobile app for iOS and Android was trained to use the completed murals to trigger the animated AR experience for participants.

• Two million people experienced this groundbreaking fusion of art and technology, making this one of the most successful social experiences in Cadillac’s history.

Nicholas Berglund, art director Jeremiah Follett/Charlie Kuhn, writers Joel Vasquez, Daqri, 3-D designer Leif Simonson, Daqri, senior designer Jeffrey Morgan, Daqri, design director Patrick Figueroa, creative director Todd Riddle, executive creative director 150

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Dana Morgan, Daqri/Marty Wetherall, directors of creative services Aki Spicer, strategy Alexander Kim, Posterscope, strategic planner Tracy Lee Stum, artist Rocky Novak, director Whitney Husnik, producer

Molly Krebs, project manager Ruth Schinn, Posterscope, production manager Posterscope, production company Fallon (Minneapolis, MN), project design and development Daqri, development partner Cadillac, client

“I love the way you can fuse handmade 3-D chalk art with AR. Both design platforms work with illusion to transport users into another world, but one just happens to be analog and the other digital.”

—Ana Serrano

Comments by Fallon: Is the audience you were targeting difficult to reach? “Typically, automotive companies are limited when it comes to getting consumers to actually experience the car. Our solution gave consumers who don’t usually seek out a dealership or car show a feel for the Cadillac ATS outside of the standard retail space. Brand ambassadors armed with iPads demonstrated the ATS speeding down the chalk-drawn roads through AR, and afterward, viewers were encouraged to pose for a photo, explore campaign videos within the app and download the branded app on their own devices using our complimentary Wi-Fi hotspot. Armed with the app and a special AR-enabled postcard, people were able to take the ATS 3D experience home to share with family and friends.”

What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “Using justcompleted, hand-drawn, large-scale chalk art to trigger a synchronized augmented reality animation was uncharted territory. It required countless rounds of trial and error under extreme time constraints at each event to get it right. Ultimately, all involved coordinated efforts to pull this off despite the unpredictability of threatening weather and other variables.”

How did time constraints affect the final outcome? “Final training of the ATS 3D app to recognize the chalk mural target image and synchronize the animation could only happen upon the completion of each mural, which usually occurred just hours before the opening of each event. These constraints required weeks of advance preparation to ensure that our augmented reality content could be fine-tuned, and the animation perfected, in the limited time we were given.”

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“If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 10,000 meetings.”

—Tom Hulme, IDEO, via Twitter

“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A LOGO AND A BRAND? ABOUT $500,000.”

—Louise Fili,

RE:DESIGN/Creative Directors conference

“What I like about the difference between art and design is that nobody proofreads art.”

—Paula Scher, agi Open London 180

Interactive Annual 2014

“THE TRULY RESPONSIVE DESIGN WEB DESIGNER WASN’T BORN UNTIL AFTER THE LAUNCH OF THE iPHONE. WE HAVEN’T SEEN HIS OR HER WORK YET.” —Andy Clarke,

in The Pastry Box Project

“Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about.” —Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering

“As you’re writing your case study video: there has been only one ‘world’s first’ thing, and it happened fourteen billion years ago.”

—Chapin Clark, R/GA, via Twitter

“More damn time, energy and money is spent on creating and administering RFPs than it’s worth. Just do the research and pick someone!” —Kim Rees , Periscopic, via Twitter