Leonardo da Vinci

As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptualising a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull, and outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

collage?

I saw this in a book I was flicking through and I really like it. I’m not too sure what its all about but it looks good!

the grandfather paradox.

Today I was mostly thinking about the grandfather paradox and how complicated it is. I will explain it so’s to make for a decent post. It goes like this, if you go back in time and kill your grandfarther it would result in the death of you, as your dad would not be born thus meaning you would not be born, but then you have to ask question if you are not born, who went back in time and killed your grandfather. It gets a little more complicated when people try and get around the problem by putting it down to parallel universes.

Time Travel.

An article on Ronald Mallett recently caught my eye, as it was suggested that he was on his way to making the worlds first time machine. I obviously read on to find that he was an american professor of physics who has wanted to make a time machine since his farther died of a heart attack when he was aged 10. I have a vague understanding of what he is getting at. In order to travel in time you need to travel faster than the speed of light, Mallett thinks he can achive this by circulating a laser beam thats temperature is hotter than the sun. By doing this he thinks that this will spin space (and time). By dropping and object into this swirling space he things he will be able to send messages back in time to the point where the time machine is switched on.

I want to do a little more research into the area as there are many theorys about the subject and theres is a number of possibilites to develop for a magazine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett

The Last Magazine.

After feeling a bit fed up of looking through magazines, I found myself looking through a book (about magazines). Even though I was jumping the gun a little, I decided to go ahead and document it anyways. It gave me inspiration to get going again it made me feel like drawing and going out to take photographs. Which is what I will do. It also had a bit of collage in there.

Baseline.

Baseline is a magazine compleatly about typography. Baseline appeared in 1995 but has won several major international design awards in the USA, Europe and Japan. It is characterized by its large format, sumptuous double cover which is always quirky in design and relates to the topic. I like parts of the magazine but sections of the magazine comes across as old fashioned, that may be due to the small market of people it is aimed at.

Colors.

Colors magazine is a multilingual quarterly magazine developed in Italy by Fabrica, Benetton’s research center. The magazine is known for its photoessays and features a sardonic point of view. The Magzine usally contains quite controversial imagery (sometimes horrific). Each magazine usually focuses on one topic this editon sent correspondant Karl Prinsson to investigate how climate change and sustainable development affect the island of Vörland, in the year 2057. Which I will look at in a bit more detail later on, for its relivance to my brief.

Wallpaper*

Wallpaper* is a magazine that focuses on travel, design, entertainment, fashion and media. It was launched in 1996, it has since been sold on to Time Warner. They do not appear to have altered there cover design in the issues I dug out (apart from slight witty relivant changes, like the mouse pointer on the * above ^). The title varies in colours. All the covers of the issues I seived through in the libary all had striking eye catching images, Making good use of vibrant colours and intresting photography. One thing that stood out to me was wallpapers high standard of advertisements. They don’t seem to clutter the magazine, just add to it.

Collage.

The task was to compose a picture using things we could find in magazines we had collected. So I went all out and crafted an A4 array of cut/ripped up images with a hint of well thought out blue markering. to eventually get it cropped down to a 2cm square. I quite like it though. One down ten more to come.

BLUEPRINT.

Blueprint is a magazine I discoverd in college, but is something I haven’t kept reading, untill given the task too look at 100 magazines. After looking through a few issues I was dissapointed to see a cover change from october 06 (that is not as good as the previous cover layout). I also notced they had focused there attention more towards architecture. The word culture isn’t present on there new cover design where as the old one advertised Architecture, Design and Culture. I rememberd an article I read while I was at college about the future of head sets, and as it was relivant I hunted down the issue to refresh my memory. The article suggests that in the future everyone will be using head sets that do things from showing people what mood they are in (by coloured lights), to shutting outside noise off by reversing the frequency of the sound making it then become silent (so you can listen to music in peace). Using similar technology they think that the ear piece will be able to hone into one direction so that surrounding sound won’t interrupt ones conversation, genius!