Left: David Kelly, 2001. Right: Todd Goldman

This is my favorite story making the rounds this week: Todd Goldman is a plagiarist. Summarizing from about 100,000 different websites, I can tell you that Goldman (of David and Goliath Tees) hung a painting in a gallery, and that painting was a recreation of a single panel webcomic called Purple Pussy, created in 2001 by an artist named Dave Kelly. In a very Vanilla Ice move, Kelly is purportedly claiming that the work is wholly and completely his own from thought through execution, though that may only be wild internet speculation as I have yet to find an official response from Goldman or his people.

I suppose it is worth mentioning that I stole the image above this story from Dave Kelly’s post on SomethingAwful.com. As did about 10,000 other websites proclaiming Goldman’s theft as The End of Days. The idea circulating the blog-and-forum-o-sphere is to simply “get the word out” and expose Goldman as a fraud. The internet being what it is, mostly this amounts to thousands of name-calling posts looking to garner me-too replies and social consensus. Forum posts and blogs rarely change the world, however, so I’m hoping people vote in the way that seems to affect the most reliable change in the world: with their wallets. Stop buying Todd Goldman stuff if you think this is reprehensible.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion of how to make it okay to steal work, however. There’s two boxes to check, and if you have both, you are generally in the clear.

Number One: Give credit immediately to the original creator. Do you think Paula Scher could have gotten away with the Swatch Ads if she didn’t own up to stealing from Herbert Matter? Hell no. Perhaps it was always meant to be an homage or perhaps not. People are willing to let that one go because Paula will be the first one to tell you where the idea came from, and that is important. Credit in the creative arts is very important, and often the thief will be the one to win praise and fame (and possibly fortune), whereas the original creator gets squat. And nobody is going to tell you that doesn’t hurt and hurt bad. Please note that this does not work when one is stealing TVs or automobiles, only art.

This is totally cool to do.

Number Two: Do not profit. In fact, try not to let money change hands at all. As important as credit is, money is more so. And the only thing worse than not getting credit for your original idea is not getting paid for it when someone else is. So if you are doing the stealing, and want to put this thing into the world, make sure you’re doing it for free.

And that’s it, kids! Also try to make sure the original work is not owned by a major corporation, because they really don’t like that, regardless of credit and lack of profit. Intellectual property law and all that.

More than ten years ago I was the victim of something a lot like this. I had drawn a picture or a superhero of my own “creation” (inspired heavily by gritty action heroes like The Punisher) and had a t-shirt made of of it for my uncle’s birthday at the local Kinko’s. About three months later as i was walking the halls of my high school, I noticed a girl wearing the exact same shirt. I learned that she had gotten it from her boyfriend, who had purchased it at “some comic shop downtown.” I also learned that my uncle still had his original shirt, so the only logical explanation was that there were new shirts. There were some rather strongly worded, legally-based letters that followed this discovery, and yet I never found out who stole my drawing, nor how much money they made off of my work (considering the quality of the drawing, my guess is “about $10″).

Locally, there is a story which has grown to epic proportions, nigh legendary, of an art-director who so plagiarized an annual report originally created for Nike that it has been said you could hold the pages side-by-side and detect no discernible difference. And were you to speak the name of this art director ten times in front of a mirror with the lights off, he would appear and steal your soul. Likewise, I’ve also heard a story from a close friend where one of his projects was published nationally, only to receive a letter from an obscure Canadian design firm claiming idea-theft. Canada is far, far from here, and to the best of our research their original work was never published, so we could only assume two unrelated people coincidentally had original ideas similar enough to become linked after the fact. In Todd Goldman’s case, however, there is far too much similarity of detail to chalk it up to mere coincidence.

-nv-

The trend-a-day email newsletter DailyCandy has received even more buzz than usual lately, due to a recent Wall Street Journal report that it was up for sale-for more than $100 million. According to an article in next week’s New York magazine, DailyCandy’s purchase (by “a big-time buyer‚Äù) is pending.

But there are those who, having sampled a morsel or two of DailyCandy, say they just don’t get it-what’s the big deal? So how did DailyCandy amass over one million subscribers and leave all of the other “Hey, look, buy this/go here!‚Äù-style newsletters in the dust? One word: branding.

Great design and successful branding are usually the product of intimate understanding: of what an organization or product does, why it does it, who it does it for. But, when something is new (and not even necessarily novel), there is that tiniest of windows (a porthole of opportunity, perhaps) when great design can catapult a product or company into prominence and help to define its activities, values, and audience-the stuff that most design is only intended to reinforce or echo.

Founded in 2000 by Dany Levy, DailyCandy began by creating a brand that appealed to its core audience: hip, stylish, and rather acquisitive young(ish) women. Enter artist Ruben Toledo, fashion illustrator extraordinaire. Toledo’s dreamy yet sophisticated watercolors-whether of sugar-dusted bonbons, elegant cityfolk, or a pair of impossibly pointy-toed shoes-were allowed to shine on DailyCandy’s otherwise minimalist website, where readers can now sign up for 13 different versions of the company’s newsletters.

DailyCandy was a perfect fit for Cuban-born Toledo, whose work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. His signature style is confectionary, and he clearly appreciates the breezy fashion world as much as it does him. (His wife, Isabel, is a fashion designer.) “What I love about fashion is that it’s so sincere in the fact that it’s fake,‚Äù Toledo told Graphic Design USA. “Fashion is all about business. It’s all about selling. It’s all about N-E-W. It’s all about now. And it’s fast. I love fast.‚Äù

But when Toledo got big fast (his work now graces multi-page ads for Nordstrom, among other clients) he quietly stopped illustrating for DailyCandy. Artist Sujean Rim took over-seamlessly. With their shared light touch and whimsicality, it is very difficult to distinguish one artist’s long-limbed silhouettes and deftly-colored scenes from the other’s.

With a white background, a no-nonsense layout, and a single close-cropped photo of the day’s featured trend (a new line of knitwear, a $1,999 winemaker, Jonathan Antin’s shower water purifier), DailyCandy newsletters are designed brilliantly if with a rather troubling message: when you have style, substance is optional.

“The 4 mechanical mirrors are made of various materials but share the same behavior and interaction; any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.”

My favorite is the “Trash Mirror.” I hope you enjoy them as much as I did … now if I can only figure out where I can see myself on one of these in person.

Almost perfectly timed with the units on Renaissance and Pre-Renaissance document design that I’ve been studying with my students in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design lately, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha is currently exhibiting multiple pages from the continuing St. John’s Bible Project commissioned by St. John’s University / Abbey. I won’t take up an extensive amount of space describing here what the Joslyn describes in detail on their own site, but I will briefly comment on what a wonder this project is to behold in person.

Those interested should also visit the principle site for the St. John’s Bible.

Working under the direction of the head scribe, Donald Jackson, a team of designers, scribes, and vellum preparators are just shy of completing what even they thought might be nearly impossible to revive: a newly illuminated edition of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, handwritten, hand drawn, and executed in the same techniques that Medieval scribes and illuminators would have used. A modern scriptorium humming to produce page upon page of vivid, gold-leafed pages and images that once again demonstrate the humbling beauty that the disciplined human hand can execute in word and image.

My students and I had just discussed the reflected light cast off the gold and silver leaf used in Medieval books in class, but the description pales considerably with the actual experience of seeing light glint back in your own eyes from freshly crafted / leafed illustrations. The aura / glow that hovers around the images demonstrates how adeptly these long-gone scribes were in linking spiritual imagery with drawing / painting materials that provided an ethereal visual experience to parallel the subject they were depicting.

Among the many contemporary / ancient technical mergers involved in the creation of this book, perhaps one of the most striking ones for me was the revelation that the scribes had worked with a single graphic designer (Vin Godier) to initially set the model text / columns and text balances of the many pages of scripture which the scribes would then in turn inscribe the actual vellum with. This was such a concrete reminder of how many hours / days / months it must have taken the ancient scribes to work through the page composition of their manuscripts without the benefit of InDesign, QuarkXpress, or even a program like Word to incrementally letterspace and linespace the body text. Undoubtedly the setting of the text even today within any of these programs likely took a few weeks worth of finessing to get right – the hours that this must translate to if you did it all simply by eye and by hand…

I’ve spent a handful of hours already just scrutinizing the line after line of letterforms that Jackson developed for this project – all the scribes involved learned to make Jackson’s hand / “font” with meticulous accuracy. You simply can’t believe your eyes when you move from page to page and are reminded that completely different scribes were involved in the creation of each of them, only to look again and again at letters you’d swear were all made by the same hand. The “shimmer” of the subtle variations in letter characters that is often described in reference to illuminated manuscripts vibrates from every word, line, paragraph and page of this masterwork – I would challenge anyone who claims their mastery of typography to see these pages and not feel at least a bit like a novice once again.

If you find yourself in Omaha between now and April 16, take an hour or two to see this exhibition before it moves on – the pages in person are both intensely otherworldly and incredibly human in the same breathless moment… Any designer who needs a reminder of the true art that lies in our collective past should spend a day with these pages and these letters to see again how the quill and brush live on even in their contemporary / digital counterparts.

PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces.

Just imagine painting your studio walls with giant typography murals or some badass illustrations. Of course if printers like PixelRoller do hit the mainstream, I expect there will be a *slight* rise in grafitti spottings.

(via futurefeeder)

“Have you ever just felt a need, nay, an urge- to purchase an item the very second you see it.
Well let me tell you about the last time I felt this strange power come over me.

I was at the gas station at 84th and O, I had walked over to get a snack during work. I have selected my diet mountain dew and was perusing the aisles for a tasty snack. Little did I know that my life was about to change, and that I would soon be face to face with the greatest food product that has, or will ever be, produced for the mass market.

I give to you‚Ķ RAP SNACKS”

How great can this get? Hold on folks, it’s www.rapsnacks.com. Turns out its an entire product line. I’m sure we could spend some time here talking about target markets and whatnot, but I think its just time to talk about how freaking awesome this is. Murphy Lee, obviously from St. Louis, with, what is that? A cutout filter?

No report on how good they taste, but if they taste anything like they look, well…

Comments always welcome.

AIGA Nebraska is having a gallery exhibition of all 25 postcards that made it into the competition – similar to the 2004 exhibition for Design the Hand Your Dealt, where all 54 playing cards were enlarged, and on display for an evening.

There is a last minute surprise however, and that’s that the Fluxion Gallery (where the exhibition is held) will also have a handful of original Andy Warhol artwork on display at the same time.

NCC has been around for some time now. I have always liked their work. I admire them because
they create design that is art…art that is design. Experiments in color and typography and
get paid to do it somehow. They just opened a new online store but be sure to check out their
project section too.

NCC-Shop

EVERY DAY ART will feature 24 randomly selected pieces of work submitted to
the site that day. Each piece will be shown for one hour and feature the
artist’s name, location and web address.

Anyone can submit work in any media, such as painting, sculpture, drawing,
photography, digital media, or found objects.

Every Day Art

Kathleen Lolley grew up split between Louisville, KY and Pittsburgh, PA. She started painting during those formidable years of farm life and life as a surgeon’s daughter. Her work depicts characters and stories that are playfully unusual. Two-dimensional figures painted on old parchment paper appear to be a part of a complex story- as if the characters escaped the pages that bound them. She moved to Los Angeles five years ago to attend CalArts for animation, where she experimented with handcrafted stop motion characters. In addition to working on various commercial animations, including Nickelodeon’s Sponge Bob Squarepants and titles for the movie Willard, Kathleen has created a handful of short films. Her influences are Leanora Carrington, Remidios Varo, Max Ernst, folk tales, poetry, comics and old books.

Kathleen Lolley’s Lolleyland