Been a while since we had a new entry to the Large Library, but we’re back! Now with a one page feature in issue 140 of Dzone magazine, showing selected pieces from the recent Stealth & Exploration series. You can view part of the magazine including our feature here. For the longer pieces including interviews and features with the likes of MACHINE you can buy the mag hardcopy here or iGet it on your iPuter from the app store. Oh yeah international audience beware, this mag is strictly in Dutch!
Been a while since we had a Large Library post, this one comes with a heartwarming anecdote. When I was about 8 years old I started to realize there probably wouldn’t be any dinosaur bones to discover in the back yard, and that digging for them is tedious hard work so maybe I didn’t actually want to be an Archeologist when I grew up after all.
My specialist fossil finding notebook had 5x5mm grid paper in it, and for a few weeks I spent most of my time coloring the squares in tile patterns, now convinced that my career destiny in life was to become a floor designer. After that I think I switched back to jet pilot/astronaut or some other kind of scientist. Anyway this article on systematic surface design would have blown my mind.
Stolen from NOVUM Gebrauchsgrafik issue 6/1980 p32-35.
Click images for full-size versions.
If you find yourself at a Dutch train station with some time to kill over the next few months, rock on up to the AKO and seek out the February 2011 edition of Publish, the Dutch digital creative’s magazine. On pages 38-39 you’ll find a spread featuring some of our work for Edits, Bits of Freedom (Big Brother Awards), Hiphop in Duketown & Studio Donbe. Also a great portrait of the two of us and a condensed version of the Largetosti origin legend.
That’s right, a barbeque in every space station. Go humans.
21-02-2011 Update for xtra largeness:
The 3 larger pieces shown in the feature above are all available to download as desktop wallpapers, the art for the Big Brother Awards can be downloaded from the site in widescreen (16:10) and regular old (4:3) aspect ratios.
Our Largetosti X Hortus work is also available in various resolutions on the n8 Edits site.
And ‘the sky is the limit’ has always been available to download here.
Finally, here’s a bigger version of the exclusive portrait featured in the mag:
Large Library is back, now extra large! This time featuring our studio debut in the world of Design Lifestyle literature: ‘I Amsterdam’. Compiled by Franky & Cindy Liao and printed by Origin Publishing (原點) of Taiwan, the book is intended as a design inspiration and an alternative travel guide for the Taiwanese visitor interested in going beyond the regular tourist traps and experiencing part of what it is that informs the design enriched lives we enjoy on a day-to-day basis here in Amsterdam.
The book opens with a ‘day in the life of’ section following Helen, whose day unfolds as follows: 10:00 biking → 14:30 shopping → 18:30 partying → 02:30 sleeping. Fair enough Helen, 18:30 is an early start.
The second section features a number of short interviews with the likes of Erik Kessels & Hugo Kaagman, we would tell you more but bear in mind that this entire book is in Chinese, we really don’t have much of an idea what is going on here.
The last section of the book is in fact the bulk of it, and features all the best Amsterdam has to offer split into 7 subsections: I See, I Eat, I Live, I Use, I Wear, I Play and I Enjoy. Here are some example pages from the book, lifted from its website. (Google translation here .)
The most important section ‘I See’ features some of Amsterdam’s top graphic designers, including: De Designpolitie, Hansje van Halem, LAVA, Lesley Moore, Mijksenaar, Solar Initiative, The Stone Twins, Thonik and of course Largetosti. According to Google translate we are ‘Blowing hot and cold in the beauty of creating chaos’, which we will take as a compliment. Because neither of us can read any Chinese at all, we scanned our page of the book and ran it through an OCR program to get a transcription we could feed to the Google. Here are the results:
“Name is the first after the birth of a dead person restrain some of the CD do not need to lapel garlic, it also represents the women of your first impression of the outside world public opinion code tiger. Each has its own name servers to be attached to expect, so it is also symbolic of a wider process as the beginning of a new chlorine. Largetosti ‘indium curious name for a draft, it is the sin skin Yun (A Large Cloud of Smoke) to avoid the Yin Yu Playsta World on a combined pulp; mean he will be an interesting drum cases leaves, female mask-like skin Sharp grass cover around the world. Regardless of the limitations of their own good Bureau of graphic design brands, Largetosti is immersed in the swim freely in the roundness of the cross-cutting design, design elements They play diverse public opinion media by hand, providing customers with Jun plane, wearing a different, Tong true plug and other Si-Dong Han drum How comfortable crab scratch, big looking color, full freedom of Phoenix Street leap and only the ‘They made to the charge in the big-name designers and so on design flaws business environment, was out of a seal if are Largetosti road.”
So there you have it. Regardless of the limitations of our own good, we are immersed in the swim freely in the roundness of the cross-cutting design. We play diverse public opinion media by hand, comfortable crab scratch and charge in the big-name designers. Was out of a seal if are Largetosti road!
我就是過這樣的生活！
Tangram. It’s the ancient Chinese shapes game. Why isn’t it more popular today than ever before? Nobody knows. I suspect competition has gotten a bit stiffer over the last few centuries. This book contains 1600 illustrations of different figures that can be made from the Tangram pieces, which means you probably aren’t going to see us outside for weeks. We picked it up just recently for a euro on Waterlooplein, and even included the full set of pieces in their original sleeve.
Tangram may be ancient, but it is still cool as hell and culturally relevant as an inspiration to contemporary artists. Here’s a depiction of the Tangram square in the ‘Vruchtenhagel’ colorway by Daan Roukens of NO REST FOR THE OBSESSED. If I’m not mistaken some smart rich person with impeccable taste has a painting of this on their wall at this very moment.
Besides 1600 odd Tangram puzzles, the book also contains essays on the History and Mathematics of Tangram, the History essay details the Chinese origins of the game and its spread to Europe,a long with several examples of figures from older books and a number of Tangram typefaces, our favorite of which is shown below:
Now while Tangram may seem like a relatively safe game you should be aware that it is in fact possible to seriously hurt yourself, as evidenced by the essay on the Mathematics of Tangram. Here are three facts about counting and classifying Tangrams:
1. An interesting property of the Tangram is it’s convexity.
2. A grid Tangram is a Tangram in which every vertex of the 7 pieces coincides with points of the grid.
3. A divisible Tangram is created when two identical ‘half’ Tangrams are put together.
Now, what is the greatest convexity number which can be reached for a connected divisible grid Tangram?
Enough of this shit, time to TANGRAM!
