Take a title of a well-known book and re-design the cover to suggest something entirely different.

Now, does this cover suggest something entirely different about Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun that what any of the many actual print version does? No. Rather, if anything I wanted to try to make a cover that implies more about the story than most of the ones I’ve seen in stores. But it might suggest something entirely different to the person seeing it without having read it.

It’s one of my absolute favorite books, so I drew inspiration from my favorite passage to try to make a cover that connects more to the story than many of the original ones I’ve seen, that are quite disassociated. The passage when Shimamoto, the female main character and catalyst for the story, talks about hysteria siberiana, can be read here. I wanted to make visual of something that like what it would be wandering in a tundra snowstorm. and then added the graphics lines to make it more interesting.

As for the process, it was pretty straight forward because I decided to work with the .psd file I had saved from the I Can Read Movies cover I recently posted. Removed some of the textures I had used, especially the colored ones because I wanted a predominantly white cover, and added some new ones from the same texture maker as the others, Clawsandfangs. Took a photo of Japanese model Tao Okamoto from google (this site specifically), copied it into several layers and played around with the blending modes and opacity for all the layers to get the right blend. Click here to see the different layers – if anyone is curious I can upload the .psd file and you can see it in Photoshop yourself (I’m a bit too lazy to write out the settings for each layer~)

Create a film-based book cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesick

Now, this isn’t nearly as minimalist and thought out as the original ‘I Can Read Movies’ image series by Spacesick, but I figured I’d give my own spin on it. I did a few tests where I tried to do something closer to the originals, much flatter in terms of design, but it wasn’t really working for me.

So the movie that I chose is called ‘The One Million Yen Girl’ (also known as ‘One Million Yen Girl’, ‘百万円と苦虫女’), a Japanese movie that I really love. The movie revolves around a 21 year old girl, played by Aoi Yuu who travels from town to town in Japan, staying only for as long as it takes her to earn one million yen.

For the book cover, I decided to use a picture of Aoi Yuu, found here through the powers of Google. With the photo as a base, I looked through textures I had saved on my laptop for something that had a retro/sixties feel that would help to give the cover an old school feel like the original ones (despite being different.) To achieve this I used two textures from Claws&Fangs (from this and this texture pack). I decided to use the flower like red texture as the main design point of the cover, and resized and erased parts of the image of Aoi to fit within the flower-y part. On top of that I used an old paper stock image by ofruin-stock, set it to Multiply opacity:45% to give it an older look. Along with that I added a C&F red striped texture, Softlight opacity:66%, and a dotted black/white texture (think Roy Lichtenstein) at Softlight opacity:44%, for more of the retro feel. Lastly I added text and some details like the color border and box, plus a black gradient at Softlight to give some shadow on the left side. The text is written in black font and placed underneath the texture layers, so that they have a similar old look.

So it ended up looking quite different, but overall I’m pleased with it. Might add some more text details to make it look more similar to the originals…!

I’ll do a round up of this week’s Daily Create assignments at the end of the week I think, am a bit of a neat freak so, I feel like it would e a nice way to organize? Until then, here’s the link to my class Flickr, where I posted my photos for tdc29 and tdc30, and while we’re at it, a few other links.

class flickr : tokyo50mm
class twitter : @tokyo50mm

proper flickr : oh. my.
proper blog : oh my! tokyo.

Information Is Beautiful

They mayke, yeah, beautiful inforgraphics that combine being informative with being visual appealing and easy to read pertaining to a number of different topics. One awesome example is the Articles of War

Since for our class we’re going to be both analyzing inforgraphics related to Internet usage (eyeing this one right now) and making our own, I think it could be a great resource for inspiration. They even have a series of Great Inforgraphics linking to outside pages, and their own section on Learning How to Visualize . Pretty neat.

Today started with an earthquake and ended with a headache. Today’s short-lived outing went to Shimokitazawa, to see the annual tengu-matsuri for the second year in a row. My shots from last year were nicer than the ones I’m left with this year, but I blame the headache! In fact the last photo in last year’s post got featured in the print edition of the Metropolis free paper in Tokyo. This is a photo of your’s truly showing off, lol.

Other than that, I discovered Geektool today! Finally I’ve found the secret to customizing your Mac desktop to make it look like something worthy of DigitalVanity. I also ended up finding a bunch of other resources to tweak my desktop and now it looks something like this:

Monochrome minimalism, yum.

Take a portrait of a total stranger each day for 7 days. Try to capture their image in a way that gives the viewer a deeper understanding of the person. Write a little about how you approached the person and what you learned about them. This assignment is part photography challenge but the harder part, in my opinion, is forcing yourself to interact with strangers in a fairly personal way.

This is Mr. Takano Yukio.

I met him while walking around Inokashira park today. Or, actually, I first spotted his magnificent painting but couldn’t spot Mr. Takano himself (I think he was standing behind the tree propping up the painting) so I figured I’d keep walking.

As I set off, an older gentleman sitting on one of the park benches asked me in Japanese where I was from. Soviet? No, Norway, I said. At this the older gentleman became a bit agitated and started saying things at a speedy Japanese that I couldn’t quite understand. I must have been very visibly confused because he slowed down and broke it down for me. Last year. That guy. Utøya.

Oh, I see now!

And then he became a bit agitated again and said some things about Denmark and Japan and putting two and two together I realized he was asking me/going on about why we didn’t have death penalty in Norway and how that bastard deserves it. Not being eloquent enough in Japanese to come up with a way to say I essentially agreed with his frustration but that it would go against Norwegian principals and morals, I instead stood mumbling for a bit until he changed the subject upon noticing my camera. Apparently he’s not too impressed with the Nikon corporation.

Anyway, I asked him if he happened to know who had was behind the wonderful painting. He said he did and called out his friend who appeared from I’m not really sure where, and told me to go over and talk with him too.

Mr. Takano is incredibly friendly and soft spoken. He asked where I was from, and when I said Norway he asked, do you speak English? I usually try to force myself to speak Japanese with Japanese people but darn it, he seemed so sweet I couldn’t help but comply. So we carried on talking for a bit in English about him and his art; it turns out Mr. Takano comes to the park every day to paint. The particular painting in the photo above took him a whole month to finish! It’s of a very old tree a bit further in the park. I asked him if there was anywhere else I could see his work, and he said had had a local exhibition in Kichijoji last year and hoped to have one again this year.

In the future, Mr. Takano hopes to open his own little gallery as well.

These Are for the Minimalist TV/Movie Poster assignment. I found this assignment a bit by chance while googling for the link to the other poster assignment (I find browsing through the dsAssignment database a bit tedious) and this came up as the second option.

Keeping in mind the feedback Paul was kind enough to leave on my other post, I decided to make a set of text focused posters. I figured it would be fun then to use iconic/memorable quotes from a TV show. My choice of TV show then was an easy one – Joss Whedon’s Firefly is so full of quotable lines that it became the obvious choice. I chose some that I thought was most memorable, and also eye catching enough that they would make someone curious as to what the show is about. Figuring that just text might be a bit boring – albeit minimalist – I decided to look for images that reminded me of the characters and the quotes I was going to use.

For River Tam’s “I can kill you with my brain” line, using an actual image of a brain was a pretty obvious choice. At first I browsed around deviantArt’s resource and stock photos, but looking at pictures of actual brains was a little too much for me to stomach. Instead I ended up using a great, realistic brush set by Falln-stock . For Mal’s “big damn heroes” poster I used a brush by emoang which looked pretty similar to the revolver the character carries in the show. Jayne’s “let’s be bad guys” got a shot gun whatchamacallit from the same brush set for lack of a better idea. For Simon’s “going mad” poster I used the tech brush set by redheadstock since he’s a doctor. Yeah idek.

For the color schemes I again turned to COLOURlovers and decided to search for palettes with the characters’ names in them. Amazingly enough, there were numerous palettes for all the characters! I didn’t expect that. Yay fellow geeks! I also searched up some poster textures on deviantArt – in hindsight I felt my last poster was a bit ‘flat’ and I figured adding a texture might be good to counteract that.

These posters took a lot less time than the travel poster as well. I did River’s first, testing out color and text combination. It took about twenty minutes, and once I was satisfied I used it as a template for the rest of them and put those together in roughly a bit more than five, ten minutes each. The basic template was a solid color
layer for the background, a layer set to Mode > Hard Light for the brush image (which I sharpened a few times to give it a more cartoon-y feel), two text layers (quote and ‘Firefly’) in Mode > Normal and the texture layer by bashcorpo set to Mode > Softlight.

For the posters I used these colours (it’s not apparent in the actual posters because the texture layer changes the colors, but still)
River; pale blush and antique fard from ‘River Tam’ by elfflame
Jayne; beleidre and too many from ‘Jayne Cobb’ by saint_611
Mal; piano and malcom reynolds from ‘Mal Reynolds’ by xeenyth
Simon; hao yun bu la and simon tam from ‘Simon Tam’ by saint611

Huuuuu, why I am I not studying graphic design ;;

There’s really no point to this post other than go OMG LOOK SNOW!

I got out of class at 8PM yesterday, scurried over the train station without an umbrella (pssh, I have a scarf.) Thirty minutes later I got out at my station, and it had started to snow. It amuses me that the Japanese use umbrellas even when it snows – in Norway we put on a knit hat or hooded jacket and out we go. It wasn’t even snowing that heavily ! Got home and skyped with my mom, who I gave a new iPod Touch to for Christmas so that she can do video calls. She went out on our verande while we were talking and showed me the good 20 cm snow fall they’d just had in Oslo – and so I figured I would pull back my curtains and show her my own neighborhood with it’s very very light snow.

Light snowfall. Right. More like 500 yen coin sized flakes falling at intensity that felt almost like home (though without the added  I swear to god this is the winter I’m going to die coldness.) I think I might have squealed out loud before telling my mom I would have to call her back because I need to go out and take pictures. Because that’s what you do at 11PM.

Took a lap around the neighborhood (and gosh I love my neighborhood) and stayed out long enough to get some snaps of the Arakawa tram passing by and for my fingers to begin to freeze.

The photos overall turned out super grainy because I cranked the ISO up to 1600 /shudders. Plus added blur from 1/80 shutter speed and f/ 1.4 – but who cares? SNOOOOOW

More shots on my actual blog.

This is one that I had my eye in early one while browsing the ds106 database: the Minimalist Travel Posters Based In Movies. I Had to think a bit about what location I wanted to feature since I watch more reality-based movies than not. In the end I decided to do an ad poster for Yubaba’s bathhouse, from Studio Ghibli’s spectacular Spirited Away.

The Process: I spent on and off about and hour and a half putting this together, haha. Overacheiver. Perfectionist. Geek. Anyway. Though I’ve been using Photoshop for about six years now, I’ve mainly used it for photo editing and simple graphics. I feel like this sort of poster would have been better made in Illustrator – if only I knew how to use it ><. Anyway. I was a bit up in the air about whether the poster should feature onsen imagery or an image of the bathhouse; I decided to go with the bathhouse itself because it's more recognizable. For about a second I played with the idea of sketching it out freehand in PS, but having no tablet and no drawing skills I instead went with finding an image and manipulating it.

The base image is a beautifully sketched drawing by deviantArt user Yuko324. At first I used the Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges option, and then continued to add layers in Mode > Hard Light against a blue background (#C5E2E6, found through ColorLOVERS) to create thicker and simpler lines. Then I used the Filter > Artistic > Cutout option to remove even more details for the minimalist look. Added some Layer > Adjustment Layer > Curves and B/C to up the contrast of the white to remove even more details for minimalism sake. It took a while to get it right – I wanted the bathhouse to be recognizable while still removing as much detail as possible, not to just look like a blob of white, black and grey. Ack it’s been too long since I did anything but photo editing.

Anyway, then I tried to figure out a slogan and text of some sort to go with the image. Having zero creativity in that department, I simply went with having Yubaba’s Bathhouse as the name, and the “get spirited away” as the tagline. Figured an obvious reference to the movie couldn’t hurt too much. I don’t much like the fonts, but since I’m doing this on the school Mac I don’t feel like downloading a bunch of stuff for it (and unfortunately I no longer have PS on my own Macbook ><) Played with the kerning and line height for the text, used a copy in the blue background color and moved it to create a "shadow" for the white text so that it wasn't too harsh.

At first I was just going to leave it in blue and and shades of white for you know, even more minimalism – but it was kind of boring so i decided to color the tree to the right in the poster. For this I turned to ColorLOVERS again and found a beautiful palette bassed on Chihiro (the main character)’s in the beginning of the movie and used two of the colors, era smoke and sen to chihiro, to do the tree.

So yeah, basically. This is the result. I probably spent more time on this than necessary but graphic design is something I always wish I could learn, so I don’t mind spending a lot of time on it. Learning experience. Plus a lot of my time was spent searching up images and scenes from the movie, and browsing for color and other inspiration, which beats most of my other homework by a mile! Makes me wish I’d actually pursued a creative degree…. Anyway.

Get spirited away.

Now, I’m not a serious photographer™ – I’m just a girl with a camera who likes (puts effort into) taking pretty pictures and sharing (post-processing and uploading) them with the world. . But it’s probably this group of photographers who are the most uncredited of all. How often don’t you see a pretty picture on weheartit, fffound, Tumblr, or a blog with absolutely no trace back to the original photographer? I’ve had it happen numerous times with my own photos, both from my proper photo blogs and my concert photos.

I go to a lot of K-Pop lives and there’s a big community of fansites and fansite photographers who take pictures at shows and post them for other fans to see. An issue that flares up every now and then is the issue of Korean fansite photos being reposted against their wishes, sometimes with watermarks cropped out, on (particularly) Tumblr. Some users would and still will take photos and edit the colors, and then remove the original watermark to add their own – because now that they’ve played with the colors, clearly the photo (or “edit”) is their work. It’s a big issue within the fandom because the Korean photographers get frustrated and limited their content to registered users of their sites (and if you known nothing about the internet and Korea, let me tell you that it’s often impossible to register for a Korean website without a Korean social security number once access is restricted).

The argument of overseas fans? If you don’t want something to spread, don’t put it on the Internet in the first place.

Insert groan of frustration here as I pull my hair out. Seriously. Just because something is online does not give you the right to remove a watermark. It also doesn’t mean that you should forgo the simple curtsey of linking back to the creator of the content. This is Internet curtesy 101 and if you are not Internet literate enough to understand this your posting rights should be revoked. In terms of concert photography, it’s actually not an easy thing to do when you don’t have a press pass – apart from you know, sneaking your camera in, a lot of work goes into the technical aspects of camera settings, working in a moving crowd, and then post-processing. It’s not just pressing a button. Yet more than anything, photography tends to get screwed over in this aspect. Do we need to start putting watermarks all over our photos in obnoxious neon fonts in order to retain recognition of our work?

As much as I like Tumblr, I find that it’s one of the driving forces in creating an online culture where the concept of giving credit where credit is due is being completely flipped over. There’s barely any control over whether an image posted has proper credit – and so that photo can be reblogged/reposted infinitely without the photographer ever getting any credit. I find it mind boggling how skewed people’s views are. I’ve had people take photos of mine, that I have put proper effort into taking (whether it’s getting stepped on at a show or walking around for an hour just to find the perfect sakura tree), messing around with the colors (which on a childish level I take as an offense because dammit my photos are prettier without the mess of oversaturated layers you add to it) and then adding a watermark and posting it to their own site, with not a hint of credit.

Anyway, for the tl;dr crowd: CREDIT YOUR PHOTO SOURCE. DON’T REMOVE WATERMARKS. RESPECT. RAWR.

Here’s a pretty picture I took at a concert in Seoul, with an ugly watermark, for your time. (not shot with the 50 mm though, but with a Sigma 70-300 mm f/4.-5.8 aka grainy as hell because I had to crank the ISO up to 800 or so)