Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’
13
Oct
2008
Mad Men Illustrated
What Madison Avenue and Upright Citizens Brigade have in common.
We love Mad Men. We also love illustration. And we’re obsessed with Flickr.
So, naturally, we’re all over the Mad Men Illustrated series by NYC-based freelance illustrator, designer and comedian Dyna Moe.
If her style seems familiar, it’s because Dyna Moe’s credentials include posters and other work for cult comedy outfit Upright Citizens Brigade, for whom she’s been the “unofficial official house designer” since 1999, plus a ton of album artwork for various indie labels.
The illustration look and style are inspired by the work of commercial artwork legends from the Mad Men era, including Aurelius Battaglia, Alice & Martin Provensen, and J. P. Miller. The collection started with a holiday card capturing the Mad Men Christmas party from last season, after which Dyna Moe, um, didn’t stop. Right now, all of the images are available as desktop wallpaper downloads, with the most popular up for sale as custom prints at Zazzle.com.
We, for one, are all the more inspired by the far-reaching resonance of this show, which has revolutionized the scripted drama television genre, rekindled some of history’s most taboo controversies, spurred intense debates on consumer culture, been credited with skewing retail fashion, and now inspired an art following.
We bet it can even do our laundry.
06
Oct
2008
Image Search Redefined
How to hunt down interestingness by its hexadecimal color.
METADATA IS SO 2007
It’s been a while since we’ve stumbled across something along the lines of PicLens, retrievr and the Flickr Related Tag Browser.
Today, we bring you another inspired algorithm that revolutionizes the image search experience.
The Multicolr Search Lab, offers color-based search, spitting out images in up to 10 colors you’ve specified. Out of the equally inspired Idée Labs, a self-proclaimed “technology playground for visual search,” Multicolr utilizes the proprietary Piximilar visual similarity search technology that scours large collections of images without using keywords or metadata.
The Multicolr Search Lab is currently available for Flickr and Alamy Stock Photography. The Flickr version extracts the colors from over 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images. The notion of “interesting” is actually one of Flickr’s own cool algorithms that assesses an image’s “interestingness” based on various meta elements like where the clickthroughs are coming from, who comments on it and when, who marks it as a favorite, its tags and more.
Because these factors are in constant flux, so is the “interestingness” of any given image — something meant to inspire more exploration and discovery inside Flickr.
And while our 8th-grade English Lit teacher used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby,” we have to admit this brand of interestingness falls squarely on the baby pagent side.
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