As well as uni,  I’ve been working on a number of little projets. The Confab Audio Files is a venture into the land of podcasting with Michael Bojkowski of Linefeed fame. The first episode has just gone live and we’re looking to to 1-2 episodes a month. If anyone manages to listen to the whole thing, I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Section Magazine is another project that is currently underway. Section is a  bilingual, free quarterly surfing publication that will be available in Japan. The magazine features Australian surfing destinations, interviews with Australian surfers as well as visiting Japanese surfers, plus the usual product reviews and give-aways. Issue 1 will be out in August. I’ve also been putting together another publication, which on type. The Typographic Journal has taken a bit of a back seat while I’ve been working on uni assignments, but I’m hoping to get the first issue out in the next month.

Some other small updates are that I can now be found on Twitter, and am also trying out the Google Profiles, which seem to be ok so far. If only I could include it into my other sites … An aaronmoodie.com reworking is also currently underway as well as a bit of a folio update, and I’ve also moved studios after three and a half years of sharing with Tin&Ed. I haven’t moved far (only a couple of floors) but will miss the antics of those boys.

Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll be keeping things here moving a bit more regularly, so more soon.

This is going to be fun! Will post more developments as they happen.

If you’re about town tomorrow night, my studio pals Tin and Ed are having a Exhibition opening at Lamington Drive in Fitzroy. I’ve seen the work in progress so far, and it looks really amazing. The show runs until the 28th of March, so be sure to get along before it ends.

Opening tonight at Don’t Come Gallery, Melbourne. There’s a good little write up of the show over at For The Love of Type who covered the exhebition at the Peer Gallery in Glebe.

If you have any such work which you would like to submit for consideration, please email a low res, greyscale jpeg to info[at]thetypographicjournal.com by Friday the 20th of March. We are also interested in any type or design related articles and essays submissions.

http://www.thetypographicjournal.com

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to get up to Newcastle for the launch of Renew Newcastle, a project by Marcus Westbury that I have been involved with since the end of last year. The project aims to find artists, cultural projects and community groups to use and maintain the empty buildings and shop fronts that litter Newcastle’s CBD until they become commercially viable or are redeveloped.

The project was officially launched on Saturday, starting with a small tour of the 5 buildings currently housing projects, followed by the galleries and projects having their own opening and launches later that evening. There was a great turn out, and it was terrific to see the enthusiasm and excitement in the local community over the project.

The stand out of the weekend would have to be The Project Room, a project designed and installed by a number of local Newcastle architecture students. No less that 10,000 pieces of timber went into making the floor, and there were still cutting timber right up to the 6pm opening …

The logo for Renew Newcastle was something that I worked on with Marcus. The idea was to use simple and clean text treatment which would customised with a swipe of paint by each artist or group occupying the space.

More images over at Flickr

Few things have raised my interest more this year than the announcement of webOS, the operating system for the new Palm Pre. I know another OS isn’t exactly what we need, but the potential of such an OS is worth noting. Unlike other mobile OS’s, webOS is built completely on HTML, CSS and Javascript, which opens up the playing field for development to pretty much every web developer on the planet. Even more exciting is that webOS “is designed to run on a variety of hardware with different screen sizes, resolutions and orientations, with or without keyboards.” [more here] Netbooks and tablet PCs are two things which jump straight to mind here. With such a lightweight OS, and all the applications essentially web apps, a US$200 netbook would deliver outstanding performance. Add in a $200 monitor, and you’ve got a desktop workstation. But what about storage?

The Cloud. Although this buzz word had been getting thrown around a lot lately, it shouldn’t be dismissed as just a fad. As more and more information and applications are moved from our computer hard drives to the web, the potential for collaboration and productiveness is increased dramatically, not to mention accessibility. Google docs, Basecamp, and more recently Bespin, are three great examples of this. Multiple users, in multiple locations, editing a file at the same time, in realtime. I for one would also love to have my music and movie collection stored online to be accessed anywhere at any time.

Where am I going with this? Well, quite simply, the operating system as we know it needs to die.  What is the need for a 2+ gig OS install, when everything is running and developed through a browser? When every application is essentially a web app?

There is none.

Last month Animal Collective released their latest studio album Merriweather Post Pavilion. Although the album itself is one of their best so far, it’s the cover artwork that seems to be getting the most attention. As you can see, the image appear to move even though it is just a single still image. Iterestingly, this effect really only works on screen and not when you look at the printed artwork.

With the massive move to digital files and distribution methods in the music industry, along with dwindling CD sales, I had been wondering at what point we would start seeing album artwork that was specific to the digital medium. Artists like Nine Inch Nails have taken small, but interesting steps in this direction already, with last years free online release of The Slip including individual artwork for every song on the album.

Stunning.

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo.