I was spending the day today researching things for an upcoming job. As usual when doing this sort of thing you often find yourself wondering off down unexpected alleys that form the wonderful world of the information super highway.
I came across some old covers of Ray Gun. I’d completely forgotten how much I used to love the design of that magazine. The man responsible was Chris Ashworth, their art director. Turns out he’s done some pretty cool stuff since then too. He’s also apparently the “Executive Global Creative Director” of Getty Images, which sound pretty wanky, but I wont hold that against him. I think he’s a genius. If you’re into graphic design check out his website
Then I came across some amazing aerial photographs. Turns out they’re RAF reconnaissance photos from World War 2. So obviously they’re predominantly of German cities. They’re part of an archive that’s been put online by the RCAHMS. Its apparently the largest collection of arial photographs in the world. In time they hope to make available their entire archive of over 4 million photographs. The website is not exactly user friendly, but a good place to while away a bit of time. Here are some pictures of the Olympic stadium and the rather wonderful and now sadly disused Templehoff airport in Berlin.
They reminded me of this rather amazing arial photo of ground zero
Amazing in its clarity and detail. You don’t really get to see such high quality images from this perspective very often. Also what struck me about it was that considering the scale of the destruction the actual area of devestation seems tiny. If you want to look for yourself you can find the link to download this image here. Its quite a big file though.
After wallowing around the world of arial photography for a while I found out via twitter that apparently 40cm of snow could fall on dear old London tomorrow. No doubt this prediction will prove to be somewhat hysterical but I had been planning to finally go and see the Design Real exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. Seeing as even 1cm of snow makes London capitulate and grind to a halt I decided to hot foot it over to Hyde Park and check it out this afternoon. Glad I did it was pretty cool. Once you get over the Industrial design masquerading as art premise you can just appreciate the very diverse products, from the spoilers from a Lamborghini to aeroplane seats to robots to body armour, for what they are. There’s some pretty damn clever people out there. Well worth a visit. It’s on until the 7th February
If you can’t make it then there is this excellent website: www.design-real.com
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