Mr. Hu - Not Enough Time - The Perceptual Clock

A 24 hour clock arranged according to how I seem to perceive the passing of time through the course of an average work day.

Mr. Hu - My Body is a Cage - Escape!

I promised not to interpret it literally. You have no idea how hard it was to fight against the obvious visual pun in my mind. I count this semi-literal interpretation as a victory.

Mr. Hu - A Long Long Way

Looking at my oeuvre, I do seem to have an obsession with diagonals, don't I?

Mr. Hu - In the Future...

i will finally learn how to type.

Mr. Shen - In the future...

Mr. Shen here.

Someday in the future, Jason and I will look back at this time in our 20s and laugh. We will laugh so hard that we will not need exclamation points.

Hu - Reclaimed - Tasty

Assembled from a cardboard packing piece, a piece of paper, and a mitten from Goodwill.

Mr. Shen - Stain

Mr. Shen here.

I've always wanted to try this little "art exercise" that I read about online. Essentially you take a teabag and drop it on an index card. Then you illustrate something out of the blotch you get.

Apparently I came up with a clown, a man with large hair, an old timey water pump and a woman running away.

Interpret my visions, sir.

Hu - Freedom - Unfastened

The freedom to fail on your own terms.

Hu - Rebrand - Prius

To tell you the truth, I wasn't aware that the rebrand was supposed to be a reimagining of a corporation's products/services. So I simply revamped a logotype for the Toyota Prius. While I am quite fond of the Prius, there are some visual issues that could be improved. The new logo is intended to communicate the duality of the old and new in the car's technology. Serif with Sans serif. All in a dynamic diagonal slash. The original logotype is included below.

Mr. Shen - Branding

Mr. Shen here.

The idea was to take a brand we already know and rebrand it. You know, like making H&R Block a children's toy company or something.

All I'm curious about now is whether it'll make me play like Jordan or Tiger Woods.

Hu - Searching for Faith - Vital Absence

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my overall direction, and I'm observing how certain lifestyle and aesthetic choices I've made (or stumbled into) haven't brought me the satisfaction that I thought they would bring. It makes me wonder if there are different things I should be looking into.

Mr. Shen - Searching for Faith

Two of the most influential things in our society today.

The XBOX360 version includes the King James Version too.

Hu - An Album Cover - Night Piece, Shugo Tokumaru

Update, 3/28/08: Here's a slightly different version...

This is a freaking great album. It feels like a stylistic journey. A mix of East and West, filled with mystery.

I had actually never seen the real album cover before, and my solution shares the unexpected likeness of dimly backlit flora/fauna. I'm just as surprised as you are.

Mr. Shen - Album Art

Mr. Shen here.

I decided to try a new way of illustrating. Basically, seeing what I could convey with simple shapes and try do something they'd put in the MOMA: The Museum of Modern Alex.

Hu - Unexpected - wherever it leads

I'm a sucker for simple visual metaphors.

Mr. Shen - Unexpected

Truly unexpected.

Mr. Shen - Silhouette

Hu - Silhouette - Dive, Live

Mr. Shen - I'm Sorry

Mr. Shen here.

Taizo Hori (aka Dig Dug) is sorry he has to do this.

Hu - I'm Sorry - The Very Tall Man

The Very Tall Man is sorry for so many things, but right now he's sorry for not keeping in touch with the people he considers his friends. I was inspired to try out this style by the works of Saul Bass and David Shrigley.

I tried out a few different variations on this one, but the final is much like my original conception. I'm actually quite happy with the way it turned out, though that's not to say some details could be revisited and rendered more scribbly.

Hu - Surivival of the Fittest - the Struggle

As humans, we are animals on a basic and instinctual level, yet we try to be something more.

Special thanks to Chris, Jeff, Alex, Kaelynn, and Dom for being such great hand models!

Mr. Shen - Survival of the Fittest

Mr. Shen here.

This is a picture of Blattodea (aka the cockroach).

"They were here before man; they will be here after man and why? Because they eat crap." - Al Bundy

Mr. Shen - Holiday

Mr. Shen here.

I hope everyone has a happy National Build Your Own Furniture Day!

You should have seen the original idea I was going to run with. It was basically going to be the Ikea logo and that phrase: National Build Your Own Furniture Day. The End. Fin. How boring that would have been!

I've always had a fondness for the D.I.Y. kind of work ethic when it comes to creating furniture and whatnot. It's like doing those models you did as a kid, but on a larger, functional scale... and there's all these pieces left over!

This was done in CorelDraw12 and prepared in Photoshop 7.0. I've included a really concise tutorial on how I did this little ditty. The key point here is that you absolutely need the right lighting in order for "color range" to work correctly, otherwise you will have a terrible image to work with.

Hu - Holiday - Turn Out the Lights Day

Turn Out the Lights Day: a holiday from artificial lighting. This is when the government shuts down the generators to all but the most vital public services, and everyone is forced to live without electricity for a night. You have never seen starry skies so beautiful.

As a child, I used to absolutely love it when we had blackouts, and a part of me still does.

Mr. Cheung - Fruit / Veggie Stamp - Cherry

allo allo allo

fruit stamp getchoo fruit stamp

i like the futura font a lot

cherries, not such a big fan, but i picked it because it's visually pretty simple to draw. just a circle and a twig on top. pretty minimal in that way. not like that fancy pants pineapple.

french stamps because i gotta represent!



here's a detail of it (circles are vectors that i drew in cad, i then imported it into photoshopped and rendered it...)

Hu - Fruit/Veggie Postage - lo-fi sketches

I've been thinking about this assignment ALOT, and yet I haven't been particularly happy with any of the solutions that I've generated. It's getting me little neurotic. Here are some sketches of my ideas rendered in Adobe Illustrator (and yes, I am tempted to redo one of my previous kickfaces for this purpose - boo-urns, I know). Whichever one I end up settling on, I would probably want to end up painting and texturizing my final choice in Photoshop. Alas, my time is running down and I need to just pick one and keep refining it. Which one do you like best?

Mr. Cheung - Street Corner - South Park

south park. this is where i work in san francisco. a little park south of market, in between a freeway and warehouse lofts. it's a piece of green in an industrial zone. i often wondered how it got here. i heard that in the 80s, south park was where the garment factories were. a hundred years ago, it was supposed to have been a rich real estate until the wealthy moved north to the hills near pacific heights. when they left, the park was abandoned. during the dot-com boom, internet starts ups worked here. when it busted, they moved out. now it's full of architects.

at center, to the left of the playground, all the way down there is a yellow coffee shop - butler and the chef - that makes a vanilla latte that i'm addicted to. i work across the park, in one of those buildings to the right in the distance. ground floor, all the way in the back. there's a guy who walks a dozen big dogs every afternoon while carrying a baby. i smile when i see him. there's also a garage full of old treasures - a sports car (the kind that james dead drove), fake palm trees, old movie cameras, regal furniture - that is strictly not for sale. i grab my bagels by the green building to the right. at night, it's all dark and foggy, and the street lamps look like hazy lazy angels, a bit too tired to get off the ground.

Mr. Shen - Vegetable Stamp

Mr. Shen here.

So here is a vector piece I did of a vegetable on a stamp. Would you pay 34 cents for a stamp like this one? Yea, neither would I.

Those yellow moon like objects can either be moons or potato chips/crisps. You know, the chopped up bodies of his fallen brothers and sisters. He sure is awfully happy about that.

Hu - Street Corner - Hong Lih Food Products Inc.

Near my work, there's a great little red brick warehousse that has a lot of character to it. It's small and dingy and houses Asian food products of some kind, perhaps to transport to Oakland Chinatown. This photoshop coloring was done on top of a scanned ink sketch. Color that simulates luminiscence is tough. Right now, the sunset light on the hills looks like fire. And I haven't done enough shading in general.

Mr. Shen - Street Corner

I work on the corner of Technology and Skyport. I figure by the time 2027 rolls around, only a short 19 or so years from now, people will be living with robots and they will try to get dates then as awkwardly as they do now.

We follow the adventures of Alexander, the ugly water cooler guy, and Sally, the hot computer from the office across the way.

Mr. Shen - Video Game

RPG Lesson from Alexander Shen on Vimeo.

Oh, the things I have learned!

video game - mr. cheung - teetris

teetris from booce on Vimeo.

uggggh... sunday's laundry day.

Mr. Shen - 8 Seconds - It Takes Two

It Takes Two from Alexander Shen on Vimeo.

I had a run-in with myself the other night.

Hu - 8 Second Epiphany

8 Second Epiphany from Jason Hu on Vimeo.

A recent thought of mine, stuffed into a small package.

Mr. Shen - Diagram

Mr. Shen here.

If you've forgotten how, this is how you're supposed to laugh at a joke.

mr. cheung - diagram - cinematic

in the process of developing a new film project at the moment, a bit of a photo narrative where the whole video will be told with photographs. this is some research i did over the weekend: breaking down some of my favorite scenes into stills and learning some storytelling techniques. one is from jean luc godard's "band of outsiders" and the other is from wong kar wai's "fallen angels." love those films!

mr.hu - revisit, a really late one

Mr. Shen - Icons

Mr. Shen here.

The first icon is for pachinko, one of the greatest games of chance ever to grace the planet.

The second is an icon for bald people because, frankly, bald people need icons too.

The third is an icon of the 4th member of our group who has gone missing in the world of medicine.

Mr. Hu - Icons - Kickfacers, Fibonacci

The first is a pixelgraphic representaion of the members of this Kickface endeavor. The second is an expansion upon the central pixel in a Fibonacci spiral-like way.

mr. cheung - icon - sunlight

here's a pattern of sunlight that i made in CAD. rays of light in pixel form...

mr. cheung - part two - invisible waves

hi yall

sorry that this took so long to put up - hectic at work plus i spent some time preparing this...

anyway, i wanted to revisit the poster i did for "Invisible Waves." make it more minimal, just patterns of waves and words.

Mr. Shen - Revisit - Remix

Mr. Shen here.

I decided to revisit the theme Remix that we did a few weeks ago.

Though terribly rough and incomplete, I tried to redo the song "Happy Together" on my guitar with background vocals.

You can listen to it here.