I came across this article recommended to me by a friend.It's a method using JavaScript that allows you to render text in any font, not just the web safe ones. I'm assuming that it also means that unlike using images or Flash, search engines can still "read" your site which of course is best for Search Engine Optimisation (always good).
So I guess I could add in a word of warning for you graphic designers making fully Flash sites. 1. Search Engines can't read your site so you probably won't show on Google etc. 2. Not everyone has flash player. To be fair though my first site was all flash!
So yesterday evening I went over to my friend's house for natchos - good choice - and ended up looking at her dissertation on Outsider Art (Art Brut).
Outsider art is not created with the intention of ending up with a work of art, it tends to be done by people with mental problems who just draw or create work which could then be seen as art. One "artist" who is particularly famous is Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930). Wölfli suffered from psychosis which gave him intense hallucinations.
"Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. A Christmasthe house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most."
Other artists she had studied included one who made his own camera and was obsessed with taking and developing photos of women and another who sought to find truth but when using paper for example would often bore holes right the way through because the paper was a barrier to discovering truth (at least that's how I interpreted it!).
It is a really interesting topic and can lead to some interesting philosophical discussions!
Tonight I went down to Kirkstall Abbey to see the British Shakespeare company's open-air version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have to say it was absolutely brilliant - I highly recommend you go and watch it over the next 3 weeks if you can.
I decided that before I went I would find out the story and a bit about the characters and the language, I found a really handy site and although I had to draw a little diagram to get my head around who was falling in love with who(!), I found that I was able to pick up on some of the more subtle points of the play having read this website through.
It was actually very funny and I was surprised how well I could follow it - I was a bit nervous about having to understand the Shakespearean language. The cast could not have been better suited for their parts, the actor (Steven Blakeley of Heartbeat) playing Puck (the fairy King's assistant) was particularly funny.
The setting was perfect, in the cIoister of the abbey. I had a beaming smile as I clapped the actors off at the end =)
I went along to the Abbey House Museum across the road from Kirkstall Abbey. It's a really sweet little museum where they have reconstructed Victorian streets, shops and homes.
The advertising of the day was very simple, state the brand and the product and perhaps some of the benefits and where you can buy it.
There was an exhibition on about entertainment before TV today. This was quite interesting too! Well worth a visit but it is only small.
I went along to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds yesterday and saw a few interesting exhibitions however this one about the Public Art Development Trust was particularly interesting. The PADT was established in 1983 and defined public art for twenty years.
One of the things that caught my interest were the PADT's plans for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. They had big plans for different statues to stand upon it over a period of years and then a public vote to decide which one should stay. Unfortunately the plans were too ambitious and costly so they had to be scrapped.
Recently sculptor Anthony Gormley created a living sculpture on top of the fourth plinth by inviting 2400 people to stand upon the plinth for an hour each. One of my friends was a successful applicant!
"Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, different people will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like – to demonstrate, to perform, or simply to reflect. One & Another is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living, or staying, in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment. Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who will enter, to represent the entire population of the UK. The rules are simple: you must stand on the plinth alone, for the whole hour; you can do whatever you want, provided it’s legal; and you can take anything with you that you can carry."
The journey from town back to my house reveals all sorts of different architecture, here's a photographic journey for you...
Leeds Combined CourtCentre
Leeds Magistrates Court The Leeds Magistrates Court was opened in 1993.
I think the railings may have been inspired by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
University of Leeds, Worsley Building The only building that manages to disguise itself as a radiator.
Leeds International Pool Built in 1967, designed by architect John Poulson. The pool was inches too narrow to qualify as an Olympic pool. The facilities were closed in 2007 and have become subject to a lot of vandalism and the overhanging wall a shelter for homeless people. There are no plans to either reopen of demolish the buildings. This is a classic example of Brutalist and 20th Century architecture.
The term "Brutalism" comes from Le Corbusier's choice of material "béton brut" or raw concrete.
Some Office Block(!)
Leeds University, Roger Stevens Building...on a poster 70s futuristic architecture, brutalism.
Marlborough Street Flats and Liberty Park (distance)
Unknown
Park Lane College South-facing solar panel wall
Fox & Newt The last little bit of Victorian architecture
Opal One and Two Looking like a futuristic kitchen appliance.
"46% of Internet users* won’t see these features, so don’t use them as a crucial part of the design of your website" (*Internet Explorer users)
Kind of says it all really.
Check out this article if your becoming a web geek like me =)
CSS3 basically means that you can build html/css website without having to use loads of images to make different effects such as rounded corners, shadows and transparency. This sounds great but considering the above statistic, is it really worth bothering with?
This is a Mexican film about how several peoples lives are affected by one car crash. It's a fantastic film about loss and betrayal with an ending that leaves the viewer to make up their own mind about the fate of the characters.
A hitman/tramp is left to reconsider his actions when he suffers a great loss. I don't want to give too much away as it really is a great film well worth seeing.
On Saturday I ventured over to York and seeing as it was free, I went along to the York Art Gallery and Museum Gardens. The best part of the gallery I thought were the historic pictures and drawing of the city of York like you can see above.
The museum gardens are home to the ruins of the medieval St. Mary's Abbey. This abbey is far more ornate than Kirkstall Abbey. I remember reading that the monks in Kirkstall wanted clean lines and a minimal approach to the architecture. This abbey was clearly much more ornate.
This is a must-read for everyone! I would highly recommend reading this book pre-GCSE revision as his memory techniques are really amazing.
Derren Brown covers a range of topics and writes in a serious but humorous tone of voice. He teaches the reader about how to tell if someone is lying, memory techniques, tricks and suggestion, hypnotism (particularly interesting) and about religion and science.
My sister had an exam recently and I taught her one of the memory techniques that evening, the night before her exam. Not only could she remember 5 complex lists with ease (not easy for someone dyslexic) but she could remember every detail and no doubt probably still can. The only annoying thing about the book was the fact that it points out just how wrong teachers are going. Mnemonics schnemonics! That's the craziest method they ever taught me and it's really quite rubbish - pick up this book teachers out there!
So yesterday night I went along to the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds to watch "Guerilla Shorts" a collection of short films and an event held once ever two months.
Last night's short films included "Deep Six" a re-edited narrative from a Hollywood b-film in which repeated footage give the viewer the opportunity to really analyse what they are seeing instead of forgeting or overlooking subtle clues like in usual films. The film had been made by contact printing hand-photocopied strips of overhead transparencies onto 35mm film.
The second film was called "Necrology (Roll Call of the Dead)" a video of the late-1960s general public ascending an escalator in Grand Central Station, New York. The film shows them disappearing into a shadowy abyss with the suggestion of the people on their way to hell. The idea of the film is to leave the viewer pondering their fate. "La Jette" is a fictional film about a man's life in Paris after the Third World War. He is used in experiements to travel back through time in order to get provisions from the past and bring them to the future to help their survival. He encounters a woman in his memories during the experiements and they share wonderful but mysterious moments. The entires film is made up of images held for a few seconds with an accompanying third person narrative and music. The only bit of footage is of the woman opening her eyes from sleeping. I have to say I the film gave the impression to me as just an excuse to film a woman who the director was besotted by!
After the intermission "UNdone" was shown. A 5 minute animation about an Irish scientist orbiting the Earth while the world collapses into nuclear Armageddon. Only the heads of state can flee and make a new life living on Mars.
"The Man Who Planted Trees" is a film I think everyone should see. It is an animation about a man who lives up in the French Alps as a sheppard who plants 100 acorns every day and eventually plants and grows an entire forest which the people of France can enjoy and love. It showed how man can make a possitive impression on climate change and that happiness can be found in even the most "dull" of lifestyles.
Finally a film which did not appear in the program, an animation about a carpenter and the rocking chair that he makes. It dragged a bit I have to say until the end where the director took the mick out of modern art. The art gallery in the film shows off stereotypical modern art such as a blank, white canvas with an admirer bent over looking through a magnifying glass at it. A carefully and cheekily placed second admirer behind the first did make a few eagle-eyed viewers laugh.
Today I crossed the mysterious bridge between Frankie & Bennie's and Aire of the Dog to the Leeds Industrial Museum (Armley Mills). This was a great little museum and for £1.50 you couldn't really complain!
The museum covers the cloth industry in Leeds, Film and Cinema, Letterpress, Tools, Engines and Machinery. It's main concentration is on the clothing industry as that was the original use for the mill. It has hundreds of machines on display and there are loads of pictures of the mills in operation.
The museum has its own cinema in which it plays a video on the industries in Leeds, mainly from the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The entire video is made up of period footage. A section of interest to me was of course the Letter/Printing Press section. In it are two large chests of drawers which wide shallow drawers which would once have been filled with lead presses for each of the popular "founts" (fonts). A fount was made up of more than just the 26 letters of the alphabet, if I remember correctly, each fount had 34 "e"s alone. I was suprised to see labels on the drawers for Gill Sans and Caslon. Layout of a drawer.
Today I went along to Kirkstall Festival down by Kirkstall Abbey and took the opportunity to enjoy the ruins of the monestry. The abbey really is beautiful, especially with the sunlight pouring through the archways. I learnt quite a bit about the abbey during my visit, it's got its own drainage system which you can see running through the ruins.
Interesting Facts: -the abbey used to have a main road running through it -monks used cabbage leaves as toilet paper! -they had to have a separate kitchen for meat by order of the pope. -when Henry VI came to power the monestry was shut down and looted for anything of value including the church bells -when drinking alcohol, monks had to use two hands to hold their vessel as a symbol of humiliation. -monks were only allowed to talk in the tiny parlour room.
Sat in a waiting room, reading the Telegraph Magazine (an activity only ever done in a waiting room) I was really intrigued by an article revealing a secret plan to bring a giant mechanical animal to the streets of Liverpool! So when I got home I looked it up online to find that the magazine was clearly well over a year out of date. Nevermind!
La Machine is a french company run by Artistic Director François Delarozière. His team of artists, designers, fabricators and technicians have created many mechanical animals to have walked the streets of London, Liverpool, Paris, Madrid and St. Petersburg amongst others.
Unfortunately if you walk into my room you will see, blue-tacked on the wall above my desk, a magazine advert. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't plain white with just a long paragraph down one side. However I feel that it should be used as an advertisers recipe for success!
Make a Great Television Ad and Win £20K
Include Doritos
Avoid Abassador's Receptions
Annoying jingles you can't get out of your head.
Odious condescending one-time hack director's that tell you to "calm down dear".
Penta-bloody-peptides.
Annoying jingles you can't get out of your head.
Talking about ooh-yeah-food in the yeah-right-here style of ahh, aah a phone sex worker.
The suggestion that shampooing your hair can somehow induce a multiple knee trembler.
Badly dubbed four-year-old brats gassing themselves on the bog.
Trying to be like well street blood just coz you is advertising to the yoof, innit.
The talky-walky bit that treats you like you have the itsy-bitsy mind of an ickle wickle child.
Caterwauling tone-deaf former bank clerks having a singsong.
Bev and sodding Kev.
Moronic lactose-obsessed muppets skydiving for balls of cheese.
Dried-up "not fit enough to actually be a model" beauty editors.
"Ever-so-arty" hippy-dippy soundtracks.
Dancing around like a cat having a fit just because you've consumed a pot of curdled milk.
Lipsy company presidents vain enough to think their pigeon English will sway us into buying a two-bit timeshare in some craphole nobody's ever heard of.
Barry Scott.
Annoying jingles you can't get out of your head!
I'll leave you to work out what they're talking about!
The Leeds City Museum is really good. There's loads of interactive things to do, even if you'll probably lose any credibility you had when you're spotted building a roman temple at the age of 20....
My favourite part has to be the section on the back to back houses that us students still inhabit today in Hyde Park. One of the interviewed residents talked about how bay windows were a clear sign of wealth as they allowed you not only to look straight into the window opposite but also down the street as well.
The museum has sections on: The Ancient World, The Leeds Story, The Collector's Cabinet, World View: Out of Africa and Life on Earth.
Not only is having a blog brilliant for killing boredom in the evenings in Leeds over the summer when the only other people around you are writing essays, but it is also pretty handy for encouraging you to actually get out of your double bed (the selling point when signing the contract for your moldy house) and go and see some stuff!
So, I ventured out yesterday and went to the Leeds Art Gallery and the Leeds City Museum, after all they are free!
The gallery has a whole host of different types of art from car engines covered in copper sulphate crystals to magnificent paintings in the hall you can see in the picture above.
A personal favourite of mine was called "Dry Eyes", a well thought-out photograph of a "seascape". The whole picture was made out of random objects, carpet for the sea, crates for the waves and a strange metal thing which I think represented a whale or a ship. It was a very intriging image and somehow showed man's impact on the oceans.
I came across this article recommended to me by a friend. It's a method using JavaScript that allows you to render text in any font, not just the web safe ones. I'm assuming that it also means that unlike using images or Flash, search engines can still "read" your site which of course is best for Search Engine Optimisation (always good).
I came across this 
