Holiday Reflections (2008)
Anderson Ranch 2011
Bags for Miquelrius (2008), and The SAK (2010), demitasse for _______? (2009)
Prius Plug-in Hybrid: Signature Series (2011); Toyota collaborates with four artists to bring you a collection of unique, custom decals for the first-ever Prius Plug-in Hybrid.
Design as Art
Designer Joshua Davis www.joshuadavis.com hacks Flash and Illustrator to make “paintings” with software. He was a groundbreaking web designer and embraced code early on, in the 90’s, as a painting medium. He is another example of interdisciplinary thinking “within one’s own head”. As a young painter and illustrator, Instead of being put off by code, he went for it, conquered it, and took it on as a tool for making form that would not be possible any other way. It’s interdisciplinary in the sense that he invents his own tools to make his images. He uses programming languages like Pearl and Python, meant for other kinds of computation, to generate visual complexity. He pushes the limits of technology. Further, he applies his flat work to products (bags, dinnerware…). Interdisciplinary thinking allows us to ascend creatively; once something is done, use it to make something completely new. It’s about ascending levels of involvement, thinking and production. Again, it’s about asking, “what if?”
In 2002 he published Flash to the Core, which has an online version, too. http://flashtothecore.praystation.com/
Once Upon a Forrest is an online work of his.
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This below is from an Adobe profile of Davis, August 11, 2007 by Elise Malmberg:
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/joshuadavis/
“I’ve always done kind of weird, strange things, and that’s what I get hired to do: weird, strange things,” he says. “The type of work you make is the type of work people will hire you to do.”
“And since I work with programming, I can do things I would never dream of doing manually. For example, I might say, ‘Let’s draw a seahorse, then add it in again 20,000 times.’ Believe me, I don’t want to be the guy that’s sitting there copying and pasting a seahorse 20,000 times. But a program can do it in less than a second.”
Once Davis has determined which elements to combine, much of his creative process involves watching and waiting as the programs arrange his forms into different configurations. “I might spend two weeks just waiting for that perfect composition, that beautiful accident,” says Davis. “I decide what to keep, what to add, and what to eliminate. I have the best job in the world: I get to be the designer, the programmer, and the critic!”
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From an interview on the website of the Design Museum in London, around 2002:
http://designmuseum.org/design/joshua-davis
Q. Describe your working methods. How do you begin work on a new project, for example? Do you sketch, make notes, write code or go straight to the computer? And how does the process develop from then onwards?
A. I’m totally into free-flowing consciousness. I tend to NEVER sketch. I just sit down and start exploring ideas. Some nights will pass and I’ll have made eighty builds of pure crap. Other nights I’ll make sixty things and turn out with one good idea or exploration. I try to let the work lead me instead of the other way around. I guess I still want to explore, create accidents, make mistakes – and planning or sketching seems too serious and rigid for my taste.
Zvez: Good example how method cannot be prescribed. Take the general guidelines and develop your own method.
Q. What do you consider to be the main challenges facing web designers right now?
A. Learning what’s already been done, the hacks, the work-arounds, failing, succeeding etc. I know designers who still don’t know how to write HTML by hand. It’s like being a print designer and not wanting to know about typography or paper.