The hoopla surrounding the Academy Awards ceremony often overshadows the awards themselves. But at Sunday night’s gala, low-budget silent film The Artist stole the show, taking home Best Picture honors. It also offers a throwback to a quainter era of filmmaking and art.
Director Michel Hazanavicius won an Oscar as well – among the five the movie earned – for magnificently executing a black and white film during a time not known for subtlety and restraint. Once you remove color and sound, the story hinges on emotion and the film requires audiences to pay attention more closely.
Many artists regularly strip down their work to the bare bones, leaving only what’s absolutely necessary. Through providing less, you may sometimes add complexity or sophistication. With black and white photography, for instance, some artists have demonstrated a certain boldness that emphasizes equally what’s there and what’s not.
Check out the Everett Collection for some great examples of how photographers have captured powerful human emotion through the absence of color.
Photo Hack Day, put on by Aviary, is a 24 hour image-centric hackathon that brings together the brightest minds in photography, photo-editing, web design, computer science, and more. Shutterstock sponsored the first Photo Hack Day, and is thrilled to sponsor it again; we love the free thinking, spontaneity, and often serendipitous discovery that comes from hackathons, and to have one focused specifically on photography is simply awesome. This year’s event takes place at General Assembly in New York City on February 25-26.
The first Photo Hack Day (last summer) had over 200 developers who put together 43 impressive hacks with APIs from 25 different companies. These “hacks” showcased some amazing ideas, ranging from an application that allowed you to upload a photo and instantly add a beard or mustache, to an application that gauges the emotional stability of a website based on facial recognition of its photos.
We hope to see some more amazing hacks this year across the board, and are eager to see how folks will use the Shuttertsock search API in their projects. A few ideas that particularly excite us, are: searching the Shutterstock collection based on mood (using facial recognition), searching the collection by matching a color from another photo (like mood boards), and finding similar photos in the collection based on specific people in the photos. And, of course, we are super excited to see things that we haven’t even thought of yet!
To top all of this excitement off, we are giving away a DSLR to the team who creates the best hack using the Shutterstock API!
People around the world are projected to spend a total of $17.6 billion this Valentine’s Day to show their loved ones how much they mean to them. With so much on the line, it’s important to get the message just right. Picking out the right card or gift is an annual labor of love.
Over time, hearts have become the predominant symbol associated with Valentine’s Day. Like all relationships, no one heart is the same as the next one. Color, size, imagery, and emotion are just some of the qualities to consider when you choose the heart that best represents your relationship.
Are you looking for playful and cute, or sentimental and romantic? Do you want traditional red, or would a burst of color highlight your excitement? Or do more abstract hearts speak to you? Take a spin through our favorite heart-shaped images here.
Graphic designer and branding enthusiast Adam Ladd recruited his five-year-old daughter, Faith, for a little creative experiment. Ladd set a series of the world’s most famous brand logos in front of Faith and asked her to share her first impressions of them. Ladd recorded her observations and then compiled them into a video that has been shared around the world this week.
It’s not surprising that Faith recognizes some of the logos immediately – such as Disney, McDonald’s, and Apple – but it’s her thoughts on the ones she’s unfamiliar with that have entertained her fans. “Baby toys. Those look like baby toys,” Faith says about the Olympics logo.
More and more companies are considering the next generation of consumers, and they are trying to make a mark on young minds like Faith’s. Judging from Faith’s associations, some companies have succeeded where others have failed. Starbucks, for one, has captured Faith’s attention and remained in her memory without the assistance of “kid-friendly” characters like Ronald McDonald or Disney princesses in commercials and collectibles. However, that doesn’t mean that the coffee chain hasn’t made an effort to appeal more to kids in recent years.
At the end of the day, the logos Faith recognizes may reflect more about effective marketing strategies than they do about children’s sensibilities, interests, and attachments. What’s evident though is how fierce the competition is from companies vying for kids’ attention.
After 8 years, 17 million images and over 200 million downloads, Shutterstock has become one of the world’s leading marketplaces for visual media. We have artists and photographers from more than 100 countries, and customers in more than 150. But perhaps most significant about these milestones is that it has led to tens of thousands of image searches each day – giving us valuable insight into design trends around the world.
From vintage-themed photographs, to vibrant vector graphics, here’s an infographic detailing what visual stories were told over the last year.
To view the infographic without a plug-in, click here. To see a lightbox with all of the images featured in the infographic, click here.
Now it’s your turn. What do you think the biggest trends of 2011 were, and what do you think 2012 will bring? Was there anything surprising in the infographic? Share your thoughts in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.
Meagan Kirkpatrick
Director, Public Relations & Social Media
Pantone has announced the color of 2012: Tangerine Tango, a vibrant and energetic reddish-orange hue. To search for images featuring this or any other color, use our color search tool on the left side of our site (part of our advanced search functionality). And for more ideas, browse our curated Tangerine Tango lightbox: here.
When we began working on the launch plan for Shutterstock for iPad months ago, we knew we wanted to do something really creative to communicate just how beautifully the app showcases the millions of images in our library. We got the team together for some brainstorming and decided to do a video highlighting three things: 1) the intimacy afforded by the iPad, 2) the images, and 3) the experience of bringing extraordinary images to life. These three things are, after all, the very essence of the app.
A few of the original storyboard sketches were used on set to help guide our creative vision.
Conveying intimacy was the easy part: Girl + Bathtub. Check. Then came the fun part: deciding which images to bring to life. With 17 Million of them, we had no shortage of ideas. We talked about the iconic “handshake,” circus performers, dragons, magicians, cupcakes, rose petals, and chickens. (Just to name a few.) Our two main requirements were it had to be in our library and we had to be able to find it locally. To see the images that inspired the video, check out our lightbox.
As head of the Mobile team at Shutterstock, I’m excited to announce Shutterstock for iPad is officially live in the iTunes App store. (You can download it for free, here.)
After six months of researching, planning, developing, and fine-tuning, we hope customers find this application makes browsing for images a more seamless and beautiful experience than ever. With the simple swipe of the finger, you can:
Scroll through thousands of images, seamlessly tiled together in a unique Mosaic View that doesn’t compromise image quality or aspect ratio by cropping or distorting;
Save images into your existing lightboxes, or create new ones; and
Share them via email, Facebook or Twitter.
As I’m sure many of you know, getting to the point of app launch can be a challenging, yet exhilarating, experience. Since this was to be our first venture into the mobile space—and because understanding the customer and their workflow is always central to product development at Shutterstock—this initiative started with a bit of research.
In a creative business, your fuel is your imagination. Yet imagination is slippery; it takes skill to harness it. The safest course of action is usually to avoid it entirely: “We did this before and it worked.” “Our competitors are doing it.” “The survey said we should do this.” Far too often, we reserve the riskier courses—”I know this is crazy but it feels right”—not for creative business, but for personal projects. Art versus commerce. Rare is the person who can serve both interests simultaneously—so rare that losing one leaves an empty void.
Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday at age 56, was one of those people. He suffered no lack of imagination, and he applied his creativity to building one of the world’s most beloved companies. Why must an operating system require training to use? Why can’t a computer case be blue? Why can’t a cell phone be as advanced as the computer on your desk? What’s more, he inspired those around him to imagine products unlike any built previously, to rethink every component. Like the character in the famous “1984″ Macintosh commercial, Jobs shattering the boring precedents that dominated the computer industry.
Many of us in the visual arts learned digital design on an Apple product. Maybe it was using a strange, new device called a mouse to select a font from a pull-down menu on a black-and-white Macintosh. Maybe it was tweaking the contrast of photos we’d scanned into a pizza-box PowerMac. Maybe it was getting our first taste of timeline editing when we fired up Final Cut Pro.
Today, Apple’s impact is strong. There’s a good chance you’re reading this on an Apple product. Or maybe you’re working on a design for customers to view on an iPhone or an iPad. Any way you look at it, Apple has profoundly influenced the graphic design community, both through its products and its approach to branding and industrial design.
After the announcement that Steve Jobs is resigning as Apple’s CEO, a new chapter begins. Jobs has been the face of Apple during its best years, and many Apple fans regard him as a visionary. Jobs and his team have introduced a series of hit products, made Apple one of the world’s richest companies, and set new standards for how humans interact with machines.
The hoopla surrounding the Academy Awards ceremony often overshadows the awards themselves. But at Sunday night’s gala, low-budget silent film The Artist stole the show, taking home Best Picture honors. It also offers a throwback to a quainter era of filmmaking and art.
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