Kenneth Ballenegger

This is by far the most bad-ass video of an insect you will ever...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:33:52 -0800

This is by far the most bad-ass video of an insect you will ever see.

I’m also taking a Packaging Design class, in which my...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:55:00 -0800

I’m also taking a Packaging Design class, in which my first project was to redesign a Soy Sauce bottle. This is my design—I’m going for a very clean and authentic style, featuring the Safeway house brand.

This semester at CCA, I’m taking an Advanced Motion...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:01:00 -0800

This semester at CCA, I’m taking an Advanced Motion Graphics class. This is my first project: a short video which visually illustrates the feeling one gets when going clubbing and drinking, and the night gets crazier and crazier, until it morphs into something that isn’t so fun anymore.

Partying is fun, but it’s important to know one’s limits. I’ve made that mistake many times, and have had many a regretful mornings.

Lament of the Delicious Librarian

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:12:18 -0800

Lament of the Delicious Librarian :

Jessie Char:

I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to Wil. He loved it, and gave us the go-ahead to do the booth as long as he didn’t have to do any work on it; he was busy trying to ship an app, after all.

In 2009, I attended my very first Macworld. In the Mac development industry, Wil Shipley (founder of Delicious Monster) is somewhat of a legend. Having had a few online conversations with Wil, I went looking for the booth to introduce myself and say hello. The booth was fantastic, and I met and chatted with Jessie and Maja. I’m ashamed to say, though, that until today I thought that they were booth babes.

In this industry, where white, asian and indian males are the de facto standard, it’s sometimes surprising to see anything else—and that’s kind of fucked up. Mea culpa.

"There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and..."

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:34:53 -0800

“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow,” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

- Steve Jobs

Working on a totally unrelated project, I made this image which...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:06:00 -0800

Working on a totally unrelated project, I made this image which ended up not being used, but turned out to be a great desktop background. Full-res download of Space Rainbow.

At the end of Level 3 at the California College of the Arts,...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:36:00 -0800

At the end of Level 3 at the California College of the Arts, it’s not uncommon for graphic design students to spend twenty hours a day on campus, fueled by gallons of Red Bull and dreadful coffee (and for many, handfuls of Aderall).

Why, you ask? Because we to finish our projects for the semester, polish off all the work we’ve done over the past two years, and present it to an intimidating panel of faculty and design professionals. After presenting and talking about our work for 45 minutes, the panel goes away to deliberate and writes up a grade and a feedback sheet which sets the tone for the rest of our path through design school, and our design careers thereafter.

The day after the presentation, after the celebratory hangover has passed, we are assigned a 6’ by 6’ exhibition space, in which we curate and present our strongest work done at CCA. My exhibition is pictured above.

Enter the Dragon

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:32:25 -0800

Enter the Dragon:

Mike Lee:

With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to the next level. Those that don’t….

There is a threshold and we are very close to not making it. There’s a non-zero chance the carbon dioxide we pumped into the air has set off a methane cycle that accelerates global warming, that we’re already too late, and that we might not have 100 years. We need to starting thinking on a global scale about our place in the galaxy. Who cares what kind of sneakers you’re wearing? Why are we still killing each other?

Path's "+" Button

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 03:14:39 -0800

Path's "+" Button:

Rick Fillion:

Details take time. Details are exhausting, and require a ton of trial and error. I spent at least 5 minutes last night just tapping Path’s button again and again looking at the animation to try to figure it out exactly, to figure out why it felt so right. Recreating it would take me much longer than those 5 minutes. This exhausting trial and error is how you can manage to create things that not only look good, but feel fantastic.

So I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:23:00 -0800

So I’ve been crazy busy with finals here at CCA, putting up pretty much everything else so I could get these done in time. But now that’s over, I’ll finally be able to show off my hard work. This is my final project for my Type 3 class, a class on information graphics.

Dangerous binge drinking in America’s youth is the result of a prohibitionist culture and excessively restrictive drinking age laws. This video is part of a fictional campaign aimed at parents to promote the idea of lowering the legal drinking age, while culturally fostering a more liberal attitude towards alcohol.

A Conspiracy of Hogs

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:40:00 -0800

A Conspiracy of Hogs:

Willy Staley on how McDonald’s essentially transformed being in the restaurant market into being in the commodities’ futures trading market:

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

[…]

And unlike a Low Country barbecue shack, McDonalds has the means to circumvent—or disregard—supply and demand problems. Indeed, they behave much more like a risk-averse day trader, waiting to see a spread between an Exchange Traded Fund and its underlying assets—waiting for the ticker to offer up a quick risk-free dollar.

The view from the 19th floor of my new apartment building.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:29:38 -0800

The view from the 19th floor of my new apartment building.

For a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:11:08 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

For a short 1-week diagram exploration project, I made an iPad app. The app is essentially a cocktail recipe book, and this is a quick screen capture showing its interface.

A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew my rusty...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:50:00 -0700

A minimix I made yesterday, in an attempt to renew my rusty mixing skills.

Tracklist:

Otherside (Tim Mason Remix) — Red Hot Chili Peppers
California Dreamin’ (Savoy Remix) — The Mams & The Papas
One More Time (Mike Candys & Jack Holiday Remix) — Daft Punk
The Nth º — OVERWERK

"The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:52:00 -0700

“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

- Barack Obama

"If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles waiting for some piece of..."

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:10:18 -0700

“If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles waiting for some piece of data to be fetched from main memory on a cache miss, or that when you see the little spinny thing, you are actually waiting for your hard drive to track down dozens of fragments of a file scattered across the hard disk drive because it got too full that one time, or that your web browser locked up on you because some novice programmer wrote some portion of it in blocking network code that is waiting for the last byte to arrive from the web server, and that the web server is sending that byte over and over again because a router is temporarily overloaded and is dropping packets like crazy so your neighbor can download a youtube clip of a cat hitting a ball into its owner’s crotch, you might throw up in your mouth a little bit. Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you.”

- Zack Morris

Jack Daniel’s limited edition birthday bottle. Not only is...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:19:16 -0700

Jack Daniel’s limited edition birthday bottle. Not only is it a gorgeous design, but as a Jack Daniel’s fanatic, I’ll be sure to get myself one of those.

Last weekend, I did the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Pretty...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:14:42 -0700

Last weekend, I did the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Pretty crazy night, but got a very cool game built in under 24h with cool folks from Miso Media.

TechCrunch chose us as Staff Favorite and wrote this:

Music Combat: A real-time, player-vs-player music battle. Each player site reads music, playing the notes on the nearest instrument. Their mobile device detects which notes they’re playing. The better you do, the more damage you do to your opponent.

"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers..."

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:00:26 -0700

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

- Andy Warhol

How to fix the US economy in a week*

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:55:00 -0700

* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.

Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.

Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)

Tuesday: Declare immediate retreat from all wars and “police actions” in the Middle East. Cut defense spending by 80%.

Reinstate NASA space program, and reallocate ample funding. Pledge $500B to the construction of a high-speed rail network to cover the entire continental US. Work to be completed over 5 years by the private sector, with no union labor.

Wednesday: Abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to be phased out by the end of the year. Announce new legislation to 1) force private insurers to offer a basic health plan with minimum benefits at a fixed rate, and 2) make health insurance mandatory.

Announce immigration reform. Lower requirements and processing times of work visas, and instate new entrepreneurship visa program. Announce a one-time amnesty on illegal immigration, and announce legislation with severe consequences for future infractions.

Thursday: Abolish oil subsidies, let oil spike to $8/gallon. Order cities over 100,000 inhabitants to develop high-quality public transportation networks. Slash all street parking, and impose a parking tax to discourage car commute.

Pledge $500B in state-owned nuclear and alternative energy developments.

Friday: Announce plan to subsidize employment in creative industries. Subsidize people working as artisans, journalists, artists in order to put to good use people who have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology.

Drastically cut corporate income tax to 13%, in order incentivize corporations to remain headquartered in the US and keep employing US citizens.

Sigh. Enjoy the cool breeze on the White House balcony, sip on a glass of single malt scotch, and get ready to take a much-deserved weekend rest.