I found in my search logs, someone visitng this site via the keyphrase: “I’m looking for a andrew beeston who lived in fardon nr newark then moved to durham”
Sorry, it wasn’t me. Hope you find the right one.
I was pretty excited to see a couple of days ago that there was a new referrer in my Flickr statistics to the image ‘N.Y. Heart Me’. It was coming from a website with a classic 2000s name ‘Shutl’. They’re a website that promises to deliver your online order to you in minutes. That’s a pretty sweet idea!
Well just looking at the site, I thought, ‘eh, so they’re a new website… not proven, not that great with no detail.’ Turns out they’ve been pretty successful in the UK already and have their sights set on the US.
This is another reason I love Creative Commons licenses. I put up a photo on Flickr, give it a license of ‘Attribution’ and someone comes along and thinks my picture is good enough to use. Sure they have to wade through a pile of porn and badly taken images (probably some are mine… the badly taken images not the porn) to get to it but hey – it works!
I thought the idea ‘New York Loves Me’ was pretty neat. I had been around Paris with my wife, taking more photos of graffiti than the sights (as I’m known to do a little too much) and this little one was on the ground near our hotel. A quick couple of snaps to get the right angle and sweet – four years later it appears on a website. What’s not to like about that?
The image is now my most viewed image in a small list of images that have over 1,000 views.
New York Loves Me (N.Y. Heart ME)
$5.00
While walking around Paris in 2009, I enjoyed the many and various sights – of graffiti. I particularly liked this take on the famous ‘I love New York’ advertising campaign which just has taken over the world in terms of cheap ripoffs in the last 20 years or so. This is currently my most popular photo on Flickr, and has been used as a launch image for the company ‘Shutl’ for their US offering. It’s a rich black with strong red heart, nicely faded white with a glossy wet shine as per the Parisian summer rain style goes.
- Download Size:
- 2.6 MB
- File Type:
- JPG
- Dimensions:
- 2274px by 1602px
9.47in by 6.67in
240.67mm by 169.55mm
It’s all about relationships. It’s all about people.
This is my boringly repetitive 8 word summary when it comes to advertising or marketing my church. It’s all about relationships – between us and God, and between ourselves. A model of vertical and horizontal relationships in one. These relationships are between people. For me, this is an intimate, personal, and should be very close set of relationships.
In the last year I typically have seen in church flyer design be either an abstraction in the form of landscapes, lights (bokeh), and plain text with block colours, or a favourite of many churches: the rock concert. They often feel distant, too inaccessible, or just poorly designed. Not moving that idea of relationship forward right into your face. Both of these forms of marketing to me at least have very little to do with the day to day wonder of church. The real close intimate relationships that develop around a common love of Christ. A common experience of life. A common goal, of running with perseverance the race marked out for us.
So in that mind I wanted to create something for Christmas at least, that moved to a deeper feeling of relationship. And in step with the Christmas story, it was a mother and child. A picture of intimacy that really drives to the affection of God for his people. I thought this would work on a more abstract level as well as tying in to the obvious Christmas theme. I’m guessing though that people skipped the abstract and went straight for ‘Mary and Jesus’. It in fact was my wife and daughter of 4 or so days.
Turns out people connected with the flyer, there was feedback that people came to church at Christmas just because they received the flyer in their letterboxes. I was more than happy to hear that! It’s good news to me when something works to entice and bring people to hear about Christ.
The back side of the flyer shows details with more relational text.
Here’s a few ways which I think generally design can be easily implemented for any church wanting to be seen as relational.
- Use photos of real people in the church.
- Speak relationally. Don’t use organisational language or jargon that an outsider would find hard to understand or connect with
- Have a target audience. ‘Everyone welcome’ is so weak – find out who would want to come and give them a good reason to, or nobody will.
- The church is not a building, it’s the people. Forget about how impressive your building is.
- If you can, find interesting people in your church that other people would connect with, and introduce them to your community. It could be just one photo of them (like above).
Protected: Friends meet up for a day, the annual Harris hosting.
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(From 2005) This was a little bunch of interviews that I decided to begin a while ago. I interviewed a few people and never really finished. The premise behind this series was that a lot of people in the design industry seem to think that porn is okay to put into work because it is simply to them a nude artwork.
I wanted to know what other people thought… especially people who stand out in the design area online. Women were hard to come by to interview, there seems to be a lack of female profile which hopefully we can rectify some time in the future.
These are the responses I have gotten, some finished some unfinished. Some don’t even exist because I didn’t get around to it.
I’m always interested in what people have to say about this and the idea was to have a large discussion around the matter. They may be old but the detail is still relevant. So respond how you will.
What is your primary design discipline? (web, print, multimedia, etc)?
I consider myself a multi-facetted designer, but right now, I’m doing primarily web design.
What are you working on at the moment?
World-wide ministry site, site for a photographer, my companies site, and various freelance projects.
What role does Jesus play in your life?
He’s the one that saved my life…so he plays a very large role. Honestly, i love my work so much, that sometimes I don’t let him have as big a role as he should, but I’m slowing adjusting my priorities.
How do you think the design landscape been changed result of the explosion of Porn online?
I don’t know if the basic principles of design have changed at all. But it seems that what gets considered as art becomes more and more crude as our society go on. We’ve become so desensitized that if someone creates a piece of pornography and calls it art, our culture seems to be ok with it. I believe that good design draws the attention of the target audience, communicates clearly and delivers the intended message. By using something ’shocking’ or ‘vulgar’ is, in my opinion, cheating.
What is your opinion of the way that Porn has been promoted as just another part of the artistic world? In your eyes is this a legitimate claim?
With the desensitization of society, we are accepting more and more things as ‘art’. Porn, in my opinion, is not art..in any form. I believe that our bodies are pieces of art created by the master artist himself. Porn is the degradation of that art and the perversion of something that God made sacred between a man and a woman.
I also believe that designers need to stand up against pornography. As people who are always around computers and constantly faced with questionable content that is readily accessible, we need to turn down jobs that are questionable and stand up for what we believe. Also, we need to work hard to keep our own minds pure in these situations. I don’t want to be responsible for causing someone else to fall into the trap of porn.
You can find Jake over at Elevate Visual Communication
(From 2005) This was a little bunch of interviews that I decided to begin a while ago. I interviewed a few people and never really finished. The premise behind this series was that a lot of people in the design industry seem to think that porn is okay to put into work because it is simply to them a nude artwork.
I wanted to know what other people thought… especially people who stand out in the design area online. Women were hard to come by to interview, there seems to be a lack of female profile which hopefully we can rectify some time in the future.
These are the responses I have gotten, some finished some unfinished. Some don’t even exist because I didn’t get around to it.
I’m always interested in what people have to say about this and the idea was to have a large discussion around the matter. They may be old but the detail is still relevant. So respond how you will.
What is your primary design discipline? (web, print, multimedia, etc)?
I primarily work on websites, but occasionally do apparel design and cd packages. I really want to get into magazine illustration and snowboard/skate deck design.
What are you working on at the moment?
- Grits Remix CD Packaging
- Panasonic DVD- Audio Website
- Web Comps for the band Sparta
- BEC Recordings Website redesign
- Corporate.Americana redesign (my personal site)
- Solid State Records Website redesign
What role does Jesus play in your life?
Jesus has changed everything about my life. EVERYTHING. He is my Saviour.
How do you think the design landscape been changed result of the explosion of Porn online?
Well, besides emails letting me know I can have an erection for 36 hours, I don’t think porn has significantly changed the design landscape. I mean, maybe if you are designing porn sites… But I have yet to meet a designer that (at least openly) designs porn sites. While every so often you’ll see a link on Surfstation or the like for a site that is questionable, its not a commonplace thing.
On a more individual level, I think that online porn can easily effect designers more than the average person. Designers log much more time on a computer and can be working pretty crazy, late hours- all which can lead to compromising standards.
What is your opinion of the way that Porn has been promoted as just another part of the artistic world? In your eyes is this a legitimate claim?
I have heard the argument that “the human body is the highest form of art.” Often this is used as a way to promote porn, when in actuality, porn cheapens the artform of the human body. Its something that eats away at who God wants you to be and has some very serious consequences on everyone involved.
A couple years back I deliberated on taking a anatomy drawing course. In the end, I decided I wasn’t personally strong enough spiritually to take the course and not be lusting all the time. While I don’t know if I can go so far to say that it would be an outright sin or every artist, for me, it definitely would have been a very big stumbling block. I think that the human form can be displayed in a very artistic and beautiful way, but porn would not be that way.
Sex can be a very, very beautiful thing- within the context of marriage, a definite artform. To promote porn as another part of the artistic world, for a Christian, is just a way to twist convictions and ease burning consciences. John 15:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your mind and all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.” If we are keeping this in mind, rationalizing porn as art just isn’t going to cut it. Obviously, you can’t hold Christian standards to those that don’t live by the Bible, but for Christians, especially young Christian guys, its important to love God more and more and fight for purity in our lives.
You can find Greg over at Corporate Americana
(From 2005) This was a little bunch of interviews that I decided to begin a while ago. I interviewed a few people and never really finished. The premise behind this series was that a lot of people in the design industry seem to think that porn is okay to put into work because it is simply to them a nude artwork.
I wanted to know what other people thought… especially people who stand out in the design area online. Women were hard to come by to interview, there seems to be a lack of female profile which hopefully we can rectify some time in the future.
These are the responses I have gotten, some finished some unfinished. Some don’t even exist because I didn’t get around to it.
I’m always interested in what people have to say about this and the idea was to have a large discussion around the matter. They may be old but the detail is still relevant. So respond how you will.
This interview is incomplete due to the slackness of the interviewer.
How do you think the design landscape been changed as a result of the explosion of Porn online?
I think that Porn has been around long before there was design online. Since design has come into the design field it wasn’t “safe” to view sites as much at work because it is hard to explain to coworkers you were just surfing “design” links.
What is your opinion of the way that Porn has been promoted as just another part of the artistic world? In your eyes is this a legitimate claim?
I think using nudity for nudity’s sake is a mindless process. I don’t see any legitimacy in combining nudity or sex with design, there are far more sites dealing with that subject matter that one can surf. Design isn’t adding anything to the Porn industry besides legitimizing Porn. Personally I disregard most design with nudity in it because it makes design feel cheap, and design in this age needs no further reason to feel cheap. Design needs to elevate itself beyond the mundane and the world, to communicate at a higher level, not lower.
You can find Mike over at We Work For Them.
(From 2005) This was a little bunch of interviews that I decided to begin a while ago. I interviewed a few people and never really finished. The premise behind this series was that a lot of people in the design industry seem to think that porn is okay to put into work because it is simply to them a nude artwork.
I wanted to know what other people thought… especially people who stand out in the design area online. Women were hard to come by to interview, there seems to be a lack of female profile which hopefully we can rectify some time in the future.
These are the responses I have gotten, some finished some unfinished. Some don’t even exist because I didn’t get around to it.
I’m always interested in what people have to say about this and the idea was to have a large discussion around the matter. They may be old but the detail is still relevant. So respond how you will.
What is your primary design discipline? (web, print, multimedia, etc)?
I work mostly for print materials, more specifically about 75% of my work is for magazines. I do record sleeves/album art, books, flyers, stuff like that…I’ve also done work with motion graphics and commercials, shoes, fashion, clothing…
What are you working on at the moment?
Just finished up work for Complex and Wax Poetics magazines, and I’m currently working on new illustrations for XLR8R magazine and a tutorial for Computer Arts UK.
What role does Jesus play in your life?
I grew up with a pastor for a father and it’s resulted in nothing but positive and good things for me. I totally credit God for all my success, especially at my young age, the blessings and opportunities I have had so far are rare. I mess up so much but I know that the reason I continue to be blessed in life is because of mercy and compassion. I wish more people could grasp that, so many people tell me I should be taking full credit for all my work because I’m the one whose gotten to this point, not God.
Well, in fact that is not true by any means. God has allowed me to have what I have and to receive the blessings that I’ve gotten. I’d love to see more humility among designers and artists. Humility and selflessness are two of the most important things a successful artist can have.
How do you think the design landscape been changed result of the explosion of Porn online?
I would say porn online has changed things mostly by distracting designers who use computers and the internet for work. It’s always there. No matter how far you think you are from it, it’s usually no more than one or two clicks away. Even if it’s unintentional. Porn has been a huge obstacle in my life for years, ever since I became hormonally crazy, it’s been a struggle. It has deterred me from work, life, family, friends, girlfriends…made me feel bad and guilty…it’s just not a cool thing. But it really is like a drug. You think you can stop trying it but the smallest of samples can reel you right back in. I’m trying to be as honest as possible here so while I’m at it, I’ll speak for almost every guy and say porn or at least sexually explicit thoughts of women has to be one of the biggest distractions men face. It’s tough and it’s not going to go away.
The best way to avoid it is to find other things to do and to keep you busy. Or you can put a lame parental control on your own internet and pound on the keyboard when you have to create your password, so theres no chance of you getting around it. That would be hilarious if anyone really did that though.
What is your opinion of the way that Porn has been promoted as just another part of the artistic world? In your eyes is this a legitimate claim?
I think people pass it off as no big deal sometimes…I mean, tastefully done, nudity can be a really beautiful thing to implement into design or art. But there are still lines and blurry areas when it comes to that, it’s so subjective…Everyone has an opinion you know. Porn in and of itself is in no way artistic. It serves no artistic purpose. It serves to stimulate and to make money. Hell, it’s not even ABOUT the porn for the creators and people who invest in it. It’s about the MONEY. Everything is about the money. I suppose you could take pornographic themes and concepts and utilize them in design but once the imagery takes away from the message and the purpose, it loses its affect as an artistic element. It just becomes an unneccassary distraction.
You can find Chuck over at No Pattern.
(From 2005) This was a little bunch of interviews that I decided to begin a while ago. I interviewed a few people and never really finished. The premise behind this series was that a lot of people in the design industry seem to think that porn is okay to put into work because it is simply to them a nude artwork.
I wanted to know what other people thought… especially people who stand out in the design area online. Women were hard to come by to interview, there seems to be a lack of female profile which hopefully we can rectify some time in the future.
These are the responses I have gotten, some finished some unfinished. Some don’t even exist because I didn’t get around to it.
I’m always interested in what people have to say about this and the idea was to have a large discussion around the matter. They may be old but the detail is still relevant. So respond how you will.
What is your primary design discipline? (web, print, multimedia, etc)?
I’m a designer. I design for print mostly I guess, most of my time is spent on identity, logo design, and that dreaded “B” word… Branding (shudder). I also design a fair amount of typefaces.
What are you working on at the moment?
Right now… I just finished up a line of T-shirts with a company I often work with that does a lot of branding and identity design for the sports industry, the client is adidas/FIFA World Cup 2006. We did about 60 designs that will be available for the World Cup in Germany in ‘06.
I also have a number of fonts in progress, right now, including a new foundry called Handselecta, which is devoted to working with graffiti artists, analyzing their scripts and handstyles and converting them into fonts. Currently we’re working with a number of great artists, hoping to get the online font foundry up with about 7-8 font families by fall.
What role does Jesus play in your life?
I am a Christian. I don’t mean to be pretentious or obnoxious, but I find that the Apostles Creed is the best way to explain my faith at it’s core:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
How do you think the design landscape been changed as a result of the explosion of Porn online?
Ok, so I’ve been thinking and talking about this with my wife and my friends for about a week, so let’s see how it goes….
I suppose this could be answered in two ways. The role of design in the industry of pornography and then the role of pornography in the industry of design. Its the second that I think you’re asking about.
I think there needs to first be a definition of pornography, which is probably the hardest, murkiest part of this as a subject. I’ll start first with revealing my cards just a bit and saying that like sex, which is beautiful and appropriate and right within a context of marriage, outside of that context it is wrong, a perverted and distorted form of the reality of what it was meant to be by God. Similarly I think the same of the body, nudity, and sex as a subject matter, appropriate in some contexts and wrong in others.
That being said, cultural norms change and shift constantly, and applying historical models of modesty is not necessarily a biblical answer. Victorian modesty is not by any means the pinnacle of morality, yet I think most of culturally-christian, protestant America, specifically the generations of our parents and grandparents, tend to err in that direction.
This is a double edged sword, however, and living outside of a community that looks to Christ and biblical authority for answers is wandering in a wilderness, where moral norms are always shifting and it’s easy to become lost.
Man, that’s a long tirade to a question I didn’t answer, huh?
So, practically, is there more of a pornographic influence in design as a result of the explosion of the pornography industry, online? I think technology always is linked to pornography, the invention of paint most likely led to pictures of naked ladies. The reason why VHS surpassed Beta is linked to backing by the porn industry, the reason why DVD’s are produced but Laserdisc never caught on is linked to backing by the porn industry, I didn’t even want to check on the statistics what percentage porn takes up on the web. There was an article in the NY Times today about the projected $1.5 billion expected from adult content available on European cell phones within the next year.
What does that say? Is this industry the evil puppet master deciding which technology it will champion. I have a slightly more democratic view of it. People are spending outrageous amounts of money in this arena not because the industry is evil, but because we are evil, that industry is just selling the most popular product depravity can buy.
As a designer I see myself, primarily as a communicator. Viewing my profession in this way creates a certain amount of responsibility that one must shoulder. You can’t please everyone all the time. That¹s a truism, of course. But I don’t view my responsibility to please, I view my responsibility to communicate. To communicate the core of a message, or product, or attitude, or brand, may involve pleasure, it may not. But it always has a desired effect in mind at the start. Art, especially in the abstract postmodern sense doesn’t always have that goal in common. Some artists are unphased by what you take away from their work and think it is just as valid as what they thought of while creating it. An audience always brings their own experiences to design work as well, but my job is to communicate within a range. And it would be my failure for someone to take a message away from my work that was outside of that range.
Here’s the tricky part. In most instances I take whole responsibility of the work I put out there. But when dealing with an issue like the appropriateness of sex as a subject there is almost always a shared responsibility with your audience. What may be porn to one person may just be a Michelangelo sculpture to me. Dealing with subjects like this make me take a wider view of the context within which the work will be seen, a more pointed view of who my audience is, and how something can be misconstrued or misinterpreted or just missed altogether, because of an element that I must decide is either integral or superfluous.
I find much of the sex in advertising today superfluous, but I don’t point to the advertisers and say shame on you, I point to the public, and say shame on you. If it didn¹t work they wouldn’t do it. This is where I see organizations like adbusters really doing a wonderful job at creating work that is critical, pointed, and hopefully educating people to look beyond the messages that get planted in our heads. (I say this to their general goal, although some of adbusters political messages I don’t agree with)
I’ve always seen advertisings mantra as reflective of the churches method of acting out the great commission. We are to spread our message by “Afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted.”
What is your opinion of the way that Porn has been promoted as just another part of the artistic world? In your eyes is this a legitimate claim?
I think that the artistic world, or the individual artist should have carte blanche to deal with any subject matter, it/he/she deems worthy. I think good art interprets and make some commentary on its subject. Outside of that I guess I occasionally see pornography disguised as art and I suppose pornography can also be artistic. The photos of Robert Mapplethorpe or Jeff Koons come to mind. I find Mapplethorpe’s portrait photos to have a little more artistic merit than the “Made in Heaven”/Cicciolina seies by Koons, which seemed to be merely a living out of his own fantasy, in porn. He simply chose to sell through galleries and museums as opposed to videos, magazines and websites. His painting series from 2000-2001 however (”Pancakes,” “Pam,” and “Lips” to name a few of the paintings), which dealt with sexual subject matter but was a little more abstracted and refined than the photo series, I find to be quite nice, evocative of the sexuality of Dali’s paintings, where it is not so front and center.
But this is an example where I think the responsibility is shared between artist and audience, because I am unwilling to say that either of these artists should have stopped short of creating the work that they did, however some works are more appropriate in some instances than others, and the subjective question of whether something has artistic merit is always something that is a bit of a sticking point.
You can find Christian over at Adnauseum.
From the vault
This interview first appeared online at Niphal.com.
Since then, the world has changed and things have moved on. It is replicated here for historic interest including associated imagery.
Links are provided to the closest view of the site as you would have seen at the time, using my favourite internet archive site Archive.orged.
@niphal So much happened since 2003. Lots of projects. Teaching at uni. Married. Two kids. Geometry Daily. Website still in progress though!
— Tilman (@Tilman) October 4, 2012
Name:
Tilman (sorry about my quirky English, I’m German).
How long have you known Christ as your Saviour?
You start with the big questions, right? “…known Christ as your Saviour”. Sounds a bit too big and melodramatic to my ears. Nobody would call it like that here in Germany, where I live, and: Can we ever say we really know him? I dont think so. But thats just my nit-picky narrow-minded Germany-Ghristian background I think… The answer is: About since I was 15 or so. I was raised in a Christian family, but my faith never took off until that age. Still evolving.
Influences in your design:
Another one of those BIG QUESTIONS… really early influences: Sci-Fi and other phantastic literature. And Nature. Then a guy called David Carson showed me that design can be about emotion and individual feelings. And that you don’t have to rely on the rules. My time at Fork, with the guys from Tomato and with Amy and Josh from FutureFarmers taught me that you CAN make a living out of these things and still stick to your ideas if you really want it. Other influences: Godspeed You Black Emperor (band), Andy Goldsworthy (artist), Super Mario (hero), travelling, mountains, people, the web, trees, the sea.
Should your faith in Christ affect the way or what you design?
Yes.
No.
Well, “should” is not the right word. Faith SHOULD not affect you design. It just does. I mean, running around and saying “man, there should be more faith in my design, let’s squeeze some holiness in it!” is not a good idea.
If you try to live with the Lord, there is no way this will not affect your life. And it surely will affect the way and what you design. Don’t try to force it, that way you will do just crap. And don’t think you will earn
anything by doing some design work for the Lord. It just does not work that way. He has loved you from your very first day and gives you anything you will ever need, no chance you will ever pay that back or earn anything more by “working for the Lord”. So don’t try.
Many people seem to say that they were “called” to design by the Lord, how did you get into design? Is it a calling of yours? All I am and all I will ever be able to do comes straight from him. And surely my talent for design (if there is something like that, I don’t see that very often…) is a gift. So if THAT’S not a calling, then what?
To be honest: When I started, there was Tilman the cool designer and Tilman the Christian. And these two were completely different persons. It didn’t even come to my mind that my designs could have anything to do with my faith or have Christian-related content. In my design-world [there] was no room for something un-cool like faith. It took me years to see that keeping the Lord out of my designs was a big mistake. I discovered that I could do “Christian design” and still do something interesting and – yeah – COOL. Now I like turning my thoughts and feelings into any visual form. Sometimes the link to my faith is pretty obvious, sometimes not so much, but it’s always there in a way. I try to do stuff that is not too “flat” or repents people because
it’s too missionary or “too holy”. And I don’t hide my negative feelings, doubt, anger, blindness. I’m not a perfect Christian (haha, who is?) and I don’t see why I should pretend to be. To be as honest is harder, but I think it’s the only way to really talk to people.
Favourite design that you have done:
Hm. I tend to be very picky about the stuff I have done. There is always something that didn’t turn out right, something I could have done better. I somehow like the story of the two sites I have done so far (my own home http://www.tint.de and the collab projecthttp://www.The-Mount.net), mostly because of the wonderful feedback I got from some very kind people.
A design you are most unpleased about:
Nearly everything, see above. I REALLY need to update tint.de soon. I hope I can find the time soon.
And I hope we can all find the time to build a better “Christian design community” soon. There are and were already some great sites and some great people doing excellent work. We have to find a way to communicate more closely, work together, inspire each other.
My stuff:
http://www.tint.de
http://www.The-Mount.net
http://www.diekriegerdeslichts.de (English coming soon)
The one and only design community portal (in case you don’t know it yet):
Friends:
http://www.futurefarmers.com
http://www.plasticpirate.com (under construction)
http://www.suture.com
http://www.fork.de
http://www.tomato.co.uk
Andy Goldsworthy
Godspeed You Black Emperor (note on that: They tend to religion, but as far as I know they are not really Christians, but a great band.)
