The art of self promotion is a funny one. It has been fun to watch personal icons develop. Myspace is littered with alluring women and attention getting animated jerkiness.

I came across the greatest personal icon I have ever seen. It is the entire movie Terminator 2, beginning and end credits included. And it loops for eternity.

Click the link below to see it!
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A friend showed me this video a while back. It illustrates and provides a good example for something happening on a larger scale, something referred to as The Loudness War. And now a quote from the glorious wikipedia:

The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry’s tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness each year to create a sound that stands out from others and the previous year.

I designed my own written language for the final for a Graphic Design class. It was a lot of fun, making up words with no meaning and establishing rules for grammar that don’t need to be enforced. I got a lot out of the project so I thought I would share it with you. Here are some designery words from the syllabus outlining the assignment:

Project 3: Modular System of Forms

• Use a grid as a design and production tool
• Generate varied forms from the same grid
• Design forms that are distinct yet visually related
• Resolve formal and aesthetic issues through experimentation
• Practice hand and/or computer skills

My language is comprised of nine characters and the style reminds me of those cool symbols that the predator has on his arm computer. A student in my class pointed out today that they look like constellations.

Here are two books that explain grid systems well. The second link has some nice preview pages.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung

Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop

The Free Sound Project functions as an online repository of sounds licensed under the curious and lesser known Creative Commons Sampling Plus! License. There is a good mixture of both straight field recordings and processed sounds. Under the terms of the sampling license, there are also multiple versions of many of the files which different members of The Project have tweaked and offered back up.

At the time of this post the site currently has 53557 audio files. That’s a lot. There are a couple of different ways to sift through all of that information: different searches for people on the look out (hear out?) for specific sounds and automatically generated lists like “Most popular files” and “Highest rated sounds” for general browsing.

I’ve always had this picture in my mind when it comes to places that have vast quantities of information and material like Free Sound. I envision most of the available good content lying dormant and collecting dust. Sure, new content is always featured in a ‘newly uploaded’ list. Sure, high ranking content is featured in a ‘high ranking’ list. What about the other stuff that hasn’t made those lists? Who has the time to go through every page of an archive of this size?

Fine, maybe all 53557 audio files of Free Sound do not need to be utilized at every minute of every day. Maybe the site serves its purpose and that’s it. More on that later.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the “random sample” link on the lower left side of the main page of The Free Sound Project. This link is a nice feature and allows for a slight churn of content.

Project Idea: Click that “random sample” link and make something out of what you find. Beware, it may be some birds chirping, chant music, or someone’s grandfather snoring.