We Make Holes In Teeth

The Audacity Of A New Hope

This just flat-out makes me smile.

For the uninitiated, the late graphic designer Saul Bass was responsible for some of the most iconic film titles sequences of the 1950s and 60s, notably Hitchcock's Vertigo and North By Northwest as well as The Man With The Golden Arm and the screen adaptation of Leon Uris' Exodus. He also gave us the AT&T globe logo.

Design student and YouTuber 'bhilmers' describes his homage to Bass' distinctive graphic style as what the titles might have looked like "if Star Wars was filmed two decades earlier". He adheres to the common trend of the time of including sly visual references to the discipline being credited. My personal fave is the paper-cutout Max Rebo peering sideways from the edge of the screen in time for composer John William's 3 seconds of fame (although Williams' most famous score is swapped out for a 1967 Buddy Rich track "Machine").

GDC 2008:: Slides for "Do, don't show"

Somewhere around 11pm last night I discovered that Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder has been systematically posting the highlights of the TED Conference. I swore to not look at any of this cool stuff until I'd finished annotating my slides. Not because I'm particularly diligent, but because I knew that watching even one of these visual communciation masterpieces would be utterly demoralizing...

As promised - and naturally, somewhat belatedly - I've uploaded the monster slide deck for my talk at this year's GDC, entitled "Do, don't show: Narrative design in FarCry 2".

In case you're wondering where the actual spoken part is; I've embedded directly into the notes pane of the Powerpoint doc. If that ends up being a pain in the ass, someone let me know and I'll paste the chewy center into a separate Word file. It's a whopping 6+ MB, and that's after I went through all the image compression/cropping wackiness. I'm sorry. Actually, no I'm not. If you can wait patiently through 350 MB of BitTorrent action to pirate the latest episode of Dexter, you can spare me a measily 6MB of your time... Damn you, Dexter.