David on Demand

In the world today, it seems like we are defined by the social media we use. It's not how pleasant of a person you are, it's the number of facebook friends or twitter followers you have. With all of these trends, it should only follow that someone would do something so extremely crazy and stupid that he would be considered the "King of Social Media". And here we are. No, I'm not talking about Mark Zuckerberg, I'm talking about David on Demand.

If you're too lazy to watch the entire video, I'll explain what's going on here. For the 2010 Cannes Ad Festival, Leo Burnett Worldwide Design and Advertising firm decided to unleash its secret weapon: David. David Perez is a 30-something guy who, for a time, allowed anyone and everyone to suggest things for him to do via twitter. For our viewing pleasure, he attached a video camera to the side of his head so viewers at home were able to watch his every move. As David states, almost half of the tweets for the festival were about him, grossly overshadowing that pesky rascal Mark Zuckerberg.

At the requests of strangers, David took a helicopter ride, pole danced in public, got a tattoo, and probably a bunch of other stuff that we were not privvied to in this meager slice of his adventure.

I see this weird little phenomenon as both positive and negative. On the bright side, it's great to see an advertising firm really thinking outside the box with their promotion. Since both twitter and viral videos are such popular forms to communication, combining them with a real-life person who will give you, the viewer (the most important aspect of advertising), control over his actions seems like a great way to generate buzz.

On the negative side, are we really that comfortable with letting social media direct our actions in such a blunt way? If David will get a tattoo (virtually permanent, at least in this day and age) just because someone on twitter tells him to do it, maybe we should sit back as a society and think about how much control we are handing over to social media in exchange for some pictures of that girl's pool party that we weren't even invited to in the first place.

Type Where You'd Least Expect It

It's new project time in Typography III! I am loving that the professors have finally loosened the reigns, considering it's the third typography course in the program. No more boring black and white, now it's photography and painting and so much colour!

This project is the first to use large quantities of text, and I am toying with how to properly lay out type to accentuate the somewhat strange page size (20" x 12"). Since I have been lusting over being able to incorporate photographic/painting techniques into my work since day one, I was particularly inspired by Wayne White's work. (Say that three times fast).

Marcel Duchamp is a big French fag. Not probably the words I would choose for my project, but certainly catches your eye. I love the ethereal feel of the words, especially reflected in bodies of water (which most of his works include). These paintings look like they could have been found in a Value Village for fifty cents. Needless to say, they're probably worth a lot more than that now.

What's even more, Wayne's work was actually picked up by Adult Swim (the night time mature-themed cartoons shown by Cartoon Network). I think that was where I first saw it.

This piece would look (almost) right at home on the walls of your rustic cottage. I never thought all those classes on perspective would come in such handy, but there you go. We'll see if mine will turn out half as good as Wayne's.

Anything But Clothes

Welp, there comes a time in all of our lives (or maybe just some?) where we must brave the social awkwardness that is the theme party. I feel like this milestone was a little late for me, but that suited me just fine. I have seen facebook pictures of parties with as many themes as you can think of, such as jungle, army, and even twins. That one was especially strange. But the most intriguing one in my opinion is the ABC party, or for those of you too lazy to use urbandictionary.com, the anything-but-clothes party. As opposed to any other party, where you might just pick out a piece of clothing from your closet that loosely suits the theme, this theme purposely takes the closet out of the equation. You are not allowed to wear (or at least show) anything that counts as clothing in the normal sense. You can make clothing out of anything else you can think of, including but not limited to:

• wrapping paper
• shower curtains
• toilet paper
• condoms (a la 'abc party' on tumblr)
• beer boxes or other boxes in general
• playing cards
• CDs (lord knows they have no other purpose now)
• twister mats
• bandanas
• balloons
• hula skirts
• shopping bags/gift bags (the less flimsy and transparent, the better for the other party-goers)
• newspaper
• candy wrappers
• or for the truly un-creative: drapes, bedsheets, and blankets

There were some very cool inventions, not the least of which was the two hostesses, dressed in matching dark grey pillow cases (of a classy length to be sure) and large fleshy fake ears. House elves! As the official after-party cleaners, it makes perfect sense. And as we all know, if you give a house elf a piece of clothing, they're free. So don't give them any clothing.

And for my outfit. I borrowed some supplies from work to make this monstrosity. The first step was using a hole punch to make holes in one side of each lid (I cringe at the thought of counting them but I will guess around 70?). You may recognize these lids from your grande iced coffee with three extra espresso shots or vanilla bean frappuccino with chocolate chips. :)

Beautiful but back-breaking

After that came the top portion, made of pastry bags. Makes me look like I rolled around in trash, but hey, that's the point, right?

before I cut the sweetheart neckline :)

And for the finished product:

I will offer word to the wise that it was not a smart idea to tape the lower portion of the skirt right to my leggings, because going to the bathroom two drinks later was quite a challenge. Not even to mention the subway ride. But that's the price you pay. I definitely don't regret it. So how much do you think someone would pay for this? Let's start the bidding!

And when I got home around 3, I had patience for nothing but the scissors.

I can rebuild it if someone wants to pay me! Seriously!