Portent

This is not about building sand castles but is a remarkable video of a live performance on “Ukraine’s got talent”. An artist called Kseniya Simonova tells a tale of love in World War 2 using just sand and her fingers and artistic talent.

She conjures up images in the sand with her fingers then wham they’re gone, wiped clean and replaced by something else. A truly remarkable performance.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I love it when you see somebody talented do something extraordinary with everyday objects. It gives me the hope that maybe, just maybe I could do that. Though deep in my heart I know I can’t and never will.

A point in question, this photograph and many others (Link goes via Google.com translation as original site is in Spanish). You can also see his art on the online Saatchi Gallery.

These are photo quality but drawn by hand using ballpoint pens from photos he has taken by the Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas. Apparently he goes through 4 pens per painting! They are of the “i can’t believe it’s not a photo” quality. Just amazing!

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Popularity: 2% [?]

These are quite wonderful, puzzle boxes and remind me of puzzles in films. You have to solve the puzzle to open the box.

You can buy some, for example the snake box, which costs just under $700 has tessellations on the top. By moving pieces around, eventually you end up with a chessboard pattern and the box opens.

The designer Kagen Schaefer is into maths and woodworking and makes puzzle boxes for a living in Denver, Colorado.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

It’s far too easy to spend all day reading web-comics. The web is chock full of them but I’m only showcasing the ones I like. course i haven’t found them all yet.

The Noob is one of the nicer ones, pages change quickly and it uses Flash unobstrusively; I love the menu in the top right. With 354 episodes/issues/pages (I’m not sure which is the best name) there’s a few hours of browsing here.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This is the end scene from one of Jacquie Lawsons’s classy animated e-cards. Normally if I receive an email saying “You have received a message from a friend” it’s spam, but here knowing both who sent it and that the link clearly points to this website is reassuring.

I rarely mention commercial sites but a subscription of £6.25 ($12.00) is not exorbiitent and the card’s animations are very well done, synched to music. You can view them yourself before joining and each is a work of art. As e-cards go these are high quality. (Note, I have no connection finacial or otherwise and receive no reward for recommendation- I’ve received two and I really like them!). And Hey they’re a British website…

this is their card of the month link:

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Popularity: 8% [?]

I really like this. Shove in a load of words and it will generate a word cloud- there are loads of parameters, fonts, colour schemes to try.

I used the text from all the previous stories on Portent though you need no more than 150. You can then decide whether to have them horizontal, vertical or a bit of both as well as other parameters and create a picture which you own. Excellent stuff.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

The image pictured is called a Filigram and was invented by programmer Simon Tatham. He was playing around with code trying to come up something vaguely fractal and came up with this.

There are several examples on the page and if you know which end of a C compiler you pour the code in, you can download the source code and try these out for yourself.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.

ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Now over 21 years old and still standing! This was erected in 1986 as a protest by American born Bill Heine who stayed in Oxford after his postgraduate degree at Balliol College. It’s 25 foot long and Bill successfully overcame the ire of local town planners to keep it up. You can read how on the linked site.

Bill is now a presenter for Radio Oxford. I think for this one act with the shark, never mind his cinema naming end-run around the planners (read that on the linked site as well) he should be made an honorary Englishman.
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Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve seen this effect used recently in an advert in a newspaper or magazine so I expect to see it happen more over the next 12-18 months before it becomes a clche and advertising agencies look for something else new and fresh.

That said, it’s still pretty clever and must take a fair bit of time, tweaking and adjusting to get just the right shadow you want.
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Popularity: 20% [?]

Catherine Mulbrandon is an Economics graduate and Masters in Interaction Design who is into visualising data (her job is an interaction designer/information architect) and creates posters about aspects of the US economy, particularly income distribution as a hobby.

The segment shown is from one showing incomes levels for typical jobs from the year 2000. Depressingly, I realise that my salary then was exactly what she shows for the average income (and Computer Programmers, which is what I am!). If you like her posters- which have a clean open look to them, you can buy them online at cafepress.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

I have no idea what this is about but it’s colourful if rather badly wrong!

It’s just a map of the USA, seemingly as the Japanese (well those who can’t read an Atlas or view Google Maps) perceive the USA.

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Popularity: 35% [?]

Well there are high-brow websites and cultural ones but then you get something a little less intellectual like this one. The title may be a clue: statue molesters.

It’s a fairly easy concept to explain. Take a statue- the ruder or sillier the better, have somebody pose near it, maybe holding their hands or posture in a rude or naughty way. Take a photo… The gallery screen shot gives you a clue… there are a lot of pages of photos…

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Popularity: 13% [?]

This is a bit early for Halloween and I’m not the world’s best virtual carver of pumpkins(don’t think it’ll get me featured in the Museum of Bad Art though!) but it’s a fun toy.

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Popularity: 11% [?]