007: tangled hands
Sometimes I think about pirates, how it comes from the Greek work peiratēs which literally means "anyone who attempts something". I'm thinking about how the internet allows us all to easily pirate content, and be pirates. I think about what it means to attempt something, and how that is indeed a threat to capital.
I think it's good to keep one's first attempts at something close, like a first try at Photoshop. Anyways...some tangled phrases and entangled hands this week.
Sometimes a phrase or a sentence just gets stuck in my head and I just want to find a way to visualize it. And sometimes a phrase just works better in a non-linear fashion. Make it a circle and the phrase has new dimensions..."our tangled mess makes for a good nest", "a good nest our tangled mess makes for", or even something just silly like, "mess makes for a good nest our tangled".
More importantly, we love a design that has very simple building blocks, only to build towards a complex shape. A set of repeating circles, rotated a few times around, and now there's a web of connections.
Also of note, I made this a few years ago and this might be one of the first designs where I used Photoshop. I primarily design in Illustrator, but had to pop into Photoshop to create this bloom effect, which I promptly forgot how to do.
I talk about hands in video games, what we do with them, and why they matter. And if you want more gushing about Ico and game designer Fumito Ueda, you can catch my favorite video game essayist talking about the architecture of Ico and Ueda's other games here: https://youtu.be/NLphTtVZfvw?si=9n5ffM6L8VcU_nUu
Hands—the connection (usually) between player and video game. Most video games have you using them to handle the controller, to then control a character, which in turn is probably also using their hands to do something. Hands are where a lot of verbs come into play, and while video games are often an avenue to explore actions outside our everyday, namely violent actions—punching or using a gun, there’s something special when the verb connects to a very relatable or intimate action. In some ways, the fantastical is the norm in the virtual space, and it feels exceptional when our everyday is mirrored.