Color Me Beautiful, 2012 — Taking its aesthetic cues from Douglas Sirk and 1950s Hollywood melodramas, this title explores the strange world of color as it relates to feminine ideals and the concept of beauty.
Co-creator of design studio Common Name, Ken Meier has worked with clients such as Wolff Olins, The Yale School of Art, and The Queens Museum of Art. Most recently, Common Name was responsible for the identity design for new art discovery tool, Artsy. Aside from running a design studio, Ken teaches Advanced Typography at Parsons. To see more of their work, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.
TEMPORARY AUTHORITY for MANNAM and PROJECT NO. 8 —— The first known webcam went live in 1991, broadcasting the fill status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University. Known as XCoffee, the camera was eventually linked to the internet and ran continuously until 2001, when it was disconnected and sold at auction. Today, consumer webcams are used primarily to enable real-time communication between people, or to display live images of public space. This project connects two New York boutiques (Project No. 8 and 8b) via a customized web feed, rendering each location in abstract, technicolor graphics.
IDENTITY SYSTEM and APPLICATIONS for ARTSY —— Artsy is an ambitious new art discovery tool, connecting users with an expansive database of works, spanning movements, styles, and time periods. Through partnerships with galleries and museums around the world, Artsy collects and organizes art using its proprietary Art Genome, a broad, ever-growing semantic database. Interested parties can also choose to buy work directly through the site. We were asked to help develop the brand identity and related applications in collaboration with Artsy’s in-house design team. The resulting system has been implemented across print, digital, and environmental media.
INFINITE LANDSCAPE for PARALLELOGRAMS —— Parallelograms is an online publication and multi-artist project exploring the relationship between images and interpretation. Each week, an artist, writer, designer, or collaborative team is presented with an image found online. The curators then ask each participant to craft a unique web project in response to the assigned image. New projects are published at the beginning of the week, with past projects archived chronologically.
