Honest Logos

April 28, 2011

Part of a series of honest logos created by Viktor Hertz.

Marius Roosendaal

April 8, 2011

Tron: Legacy and Unix

April 6, 2011

Josh Nimoy, a special effects artist who worked on Tron: Legacy, recently released these images (among others) and talked about the process used to generate the final product and how he gave it authenticity.

“I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t.”

This is why I geeked out when I saw Tron. I look at a unix terminal every day, and seeing legit commands in the film made my job seem somewhat cool and redeemable.

The Five Vignelli-isms

April 5, 2011

On the evening of Tuesday, March 8, The Architectural League gave its President’s Medal to Lella and Massimo Vignelli. The award (past recipients of which include John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Hugh Ferriss, Joseph Urban, Richard Meier, Robert A.M. Stern, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown) was given to the Vignellis “in recognition of a body of work so influential in its breadth that it has shaped the very way we see the world.”