Helvetica on PBS, and Objectified

From The World's Best Gadget Designers Speak in Objectified on Gizmodo:
"As he did for Helvetica's namesake typeface, Gary Hustwit gathered the world's top designers for his forthcoming documentary Objectified, telling the story of the magic behind the objects we use every day." continue at Gizmodo...

But wait, there's more: Helvetica (noted earlier in Type casting) has its US TV premiere on PBS' Independent Lens on Tuesday night (check your local viewings here) in an hour-long version. PBS has launched a fairly extensive mini-site with loads of info, clips, and other treats if you like that sort of thing.

And here's the trailer for Objectified:

Multicolr Search Lab

Idée has some cool technology, and Adobe uses something called Piximilar as the visual search engine in Photoshop Elements 6. It would be great to see some of this in CS products.

Try Idée’s Multicolr Search Lab. If you need an image that is within a range of colors, simply point and click to add and subtract colors, and a set of images is presented that match your criteria.

See the other cool interactive demos: Visual Search Lab, to combine tags with visual search to return unique combinations of images, and BYO Image Search Lab to upload your own images or point to one on the web to see what they resemble. (via SensoryMetrics)

10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals '08

via Create Digital Motion:

the 10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals '08 from the interesting Accent Feed comes with videos.

History of the internet in pictograms

The History of the internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of a student project by Melih Bilgil. Some icons are available for free on picol.org. (via Motiongrapher)


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

The use of pictograms in history and in modern design is an established field of study, with major works by Henry Dreyfuss (Symbol Sourcebook), Otl Aicher, Otto Neurath, Paul Rand, Edward Tufte, and others.

A few sentences on the subject can only be inadequate. For more info, see Navigating Today’s Signs: An Interview with Mies Hora by Steven Heller and Critical Wayfinding by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. Really cool uses of pictograms in explaining pictograms in design and history can be found in Design, Writing, & Research by Lupton and Miller (PDF).

Interesting recent work includes pictograms developed for the Summer Olympics in China by a former Adobe guy; see The Graphic Language of Min Wang (via).

Frischluft releases Fresh Curves plug-in

Frischluft released Fresh Curves, an advanced curves plug-in for After Effects (was Absolute Curves in earlier public beta). It offers a good number of features for more control and greater accuracy.

Syntheyes 101 video tutorial

David Torno re-posted some of his tutorials to PVC. His “Syntheyes 101” video tutorial is a basic look at how to motion track a clip and export the tracked data using Syntheyes, a 3D motion tracking application.

Michael Coleman on using RED files in CS4

Michael Coleman, After Effects product manager, has a Tips for Editing and Finishing RED Raw Files with Adobe CS4 Workflows on Studio Daily.