Thursday, January 03, 2008
Forms follow building's function
Personally I appreciate a lot historic buildings. In my country, ancient art is everywhere. Art, culture and tradition are part of my heritage.
Anyway I'm attracted by contemporary art and history too, particulary I'm fascinated by the modern movement in architecture and industrial design because it's strongly connected to graphic design and typography.
In Europe the Bauhaus founded in Weimar, Germany, was one of the first colleges and an innovative training centre and has influenced design and architecture all around the world.
Switzerland is another country which can be considered innovative in developing modern architecture.
I'm interested in architectural photography and I like to get abstract images from my shots. In all my compositions, I usually like to play with lines and chromatic contrast.
Below there is a very narrow selection of snapshots I did at the USI campus, Lugano, Switzerland. Enjoy!
© Davide Montellanico, all rights reserved.
© Davide Montellanico, all rights reserved.
© Davide Montellanico, all rights reserved.
All the photos were taken using a digital compact camera Panasonic Lumix FZ2 in a very low light condition and without a tripod, therefore they would result much better exposed and more sharpened if I had used a more appropriate equipment.
Labels: architecture, art, design, photography
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Today, New York City artist, floral and event designer Wolfang Thom challenges World AIDS Day traditional practice of covering artworks in museum and galleries with black cloth.
The practice was started in 1989 from the activist organisation Day Without Art. In 1997 the group decided that hiding art wasn't the right answer and proposed it as a means to bring AIDS awareness to the masses. Thom agree on that:
Given the option of a Day Without Art and a Day With Art, I say definitely with.
Wolfang Thom.
Labels: art, design, health, politics
Friday, April 27, 2007
To blog or not to blog
A couple of years ago I wasn't very convicted to start blogging. I always compared the blogs out there to a sort of teenage diaries. Not very interesting for a mid-aged man indeed.
I was wrong. I didn't know very well the world of blogging. Blogs are now an important part of the Web and they will evolve even further -God only knows in which direction! Nowadays corporations are constantly increasing their presence into the blogosphere to consolidate trust and confidence with their clients. A new term is coined: Radical Transparency.
Anyway, blogs are very diverse in nature and they cover a wide variety of topics. I read regulary the ones devoted to technology and design.
One of the reasons that kept me from publishing my personal blog was the fact I didn't know how to use it. I was a bit scared and intimidated by something that it seemed I was not totally in control. Again I was wrong. I checked out Blogger and it was very simple to learn and use. But again I wasn't very impressed with its standard templates and I couldn't imagine my blog without a whole new personal look.
Therefore I learned the most I could about proprietary Blogger tags and the learning curve was difficult at first. Anyway, I'm a web designer and I had not to learn all the nuts and bolts of coding a website.
A completely new visual design was created in Fireworks, then I decided to code the XHTML from scratch, because I didn't like the ones used for the standard templates -too much classitism and span tags- after that I styled the page with CSS. The trickiest part was yet to come! Integrate the Blogger tags with my code. This was the most consuming task.
The only things that don't work at the moment are backlinks. You can anyway create backlinks to your site but they will not appear on my weblog. Probably my weblog page is at the moment unreachable when googlebot try to crawl it.
Labels: blog, blogger, blogosphere, design, web
