Some of the most amazing colors can be found in the eyes of the creatures looking back at us. Here’s a gallery of some of mother nature’s remarkable gazes.

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With a long and colorful history that dates back to the 60’s, concert posters have moved far beyond their roots of simply informing people of when a band was playing, into a full scale art movement with shows of their own dedicated to the art.

Here are 20 colorful concert posters from some of my favorite designers and printers in the scene.

Delicious Design League

Delicious Design League

Delicious Design League

Delicious Design League

Delicious Design League

Steve Walters

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As we’ve brought up before here, color is an innate visual language that can be an extremely useful tool in conveying information. The use of color in information graphics groups, highlights and sorts the necessary information, simplifying the meaning and making it easier to communicate to a larger number of people.

Two great places to come by colorful infographics are visualcomplexity.com and GOOD Magazine’s Transparency section. Here are 12 infographics from those very places.

“Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.”
- visualcomplexity.com/about

Obesity System Influence Diagram

Full Interactive Map

Developed for the Foresight Tackling Obesities project, this causal loop map was designed to provide systemic insight into the multiplicity of factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Behind the simple result of people becoming heavier, lies a complex web of often reinforcing causal factors that range from individual psychology and physiology to the culture and economics of food production, food consumption, attitudes toward physical activity, and structure of the built environment.

The 108 variables shown on the map - the drivers of obesity - were compiled by shiftN, from the 38 science reviews produced for the project and then vetted by the project’s science team. The drivers are woven into systemic picture by the positive and negative influence arrows that link the variables into a web of causal relationships.

Visualizing the Bible

This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. He had already done considerable work visualizing the data before contacting me. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data, where users could zoom in and prune down the information to manageable levels. However, this was less interesting to us, as several Bible-exploration programs existed that offered similar functionality (and much more). Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible. This ultimately led us to the multi-colored arc diagram you see below.

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

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It’s no big surprise that the art world tends to favor the left leaning candidate during a campaign, but what might be more surprising about this years election is the sheer number of artists who are rallying around and using their talents to support Barack Obama.

Well known artist like Shepard Fairey, Ron English, and so on… have brought the most attention to the ‘Art for Obama’ phenomenon, which is documented nicely in this Wall Street Journal Article, but it’s not only well known artist showing their support with great design and art. The Obama camp itself brought in 29 pages of great designs in an open submission for their Tees by the People campaign, and Etsy has nearly 2000 items tagged Obama, not to mention the almost 10,000 items on Ebay. Obviously campaigns are big business for everyone, but the outpouring of support by the U.S. art and design community has made this one of the most colorful campaigns in history.

Here are 12 palettes inspired by many of these wonderful prints. By the way, today is the last day to register to vote.

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Today, the most comprehensive assessment of the world’s mammals, the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, was revealed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.

The IUCN rates species based on a number of factors, and assigns them into these categories: least concern, near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild and extinct.

The new study to assess the world’s mammals shows at least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction. At least 76 mammals have become extinct since 1500. But the results also show conservation can bring species back from the brink of extinction, with five percent of currently threatened mammals showing signs of recovery in the wild.

Photo © Mathieu Ourioux.

The Fishing Cat ( Prionailurus viverrinus ) has changed category from Vulnerable to Endangered because of the severe decline throughout much of its Asian range over the last decade. It is a medium sized cat and a skilful swimmer, found mainly in wetland habitats such as swamps, oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks and mangrove areas. Over 45 per cent of protected wetlands in Southeast Asia are considered threatened, including those that are home to this species. Sites like the estuaries of the Karnataka coast (Southwestern India), and the deltas of the Irrawaddy, Indus, Mekong and Red rivers. Threats to the Fishing Cat include human settlement, draining of its habitat for agriculture, pollution, excessive hunting, wood-cutting and over-fishing. In addition, clearance of coastal mangroves over the past decade has been rapid. The depletion of fish stocks from over-fishing is likely to be a significant threat to this species which relies heavily on fish for its survival.

“Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live,” says Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN Director General. “We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives.”

Photo © Simon Goodman

The Caspian Seal ( Pusa caspica ) has moved from Vulnerable to Endangered. It occurs throughout the Caspian Sea, using the winter ice sheets as a surface on which to give birth and nurse pups. Its population has declined by 90 percent over the last 100 years due to unsustainable levels of commercial hunting, habitat degradation and pollution; it is still decreasing. Since 2005 the number of pups born has plummeted by a catastrophic 60 percent to just 6,000-7,000. A low survival rate among pups has led researchers to fear there are barely enough breeding females to keep the population viable.

“The reality is that the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent,” says Jan Schipper, of Conservation International and lead author in a forthcoming article in Science. “This indicates that conservation action backed by research is a clear priority for the future, not only to improve the data so that we can evaluate threats to these poorly known species, but to investigate means to recover threatened species and populations.”

Photo © Dean E. Biggins.

The Black-footed Ferret ( Mustela nigripes ) from North America is no longer Extinct in the Wild after a massive effort to reintroduce captive animals back to parts of its range. The species is highly dependent on prairie dogs as its food-source; the widespread extermination of prairie dogs throughout the 20th century, and the spread of disease, caused massive declines in the Black-footed Ferret population. In 1985, the species was on the verge of extinction when its last free-ranging population collapsed from an outbreak of canine distemper. Once widespread in central North America, it now exists only in reintroduced populations and is currently listed as Endangered. From 1991 to 2008, a captive breeding programme by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service brought the Black-footed Ferret back to Mexico and eight western states in the US. At present, it is considered self-sustaining at only three locations; two in South Dakota and one in Wyoming.

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Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.

Art

Photography by Alex Maclean

alexmaclean.com

No Escape Parking at Old Memorial Stadium; Baltimore, Maryland

Pilot and photographer Alex MacLean has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes.

Dinghies Clustered Around Dock; Duxbury, Massachusetts

His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments. MacLean’s photographs have been exhibited widely in the United Sates, Canada, Europe and Asia and are found in private, public and university collections. He has won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Rome’s Prix de Rome in Landscape Architecture for 2003-2004 and grants from foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Graham Foundation.

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Digital art is only in its infancy and already we have seen so many great examples of amazing work. It is hard to imagine what we will see as this medium continues to develope and the images and colors become even more unbelievable…

Here are some of the more colorful videos and images created using one of the programs making this art possible, processing.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, and it can be freely downloaded from www.processing.org.

Videos

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Another lovely flickr set from Joe Kral inspired this post (the last two can be seen here & here). This time we’re taking a look at the premiere issues of some of the best design magazines.

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Though the palettes of caterpillars vary greatly, some colors are seen throughout the species, or at least in the photos in this post, but what may be more interesting then the palettes themselves is the patterns in which these colors are displayed.

These voracious leave eaters whose movements are graceful and fluid have six times as many muscles as a human and can be very harmful to humans. Some color inspiration is harmless, so here are 24 caterpillar inspired palettes.

Nigel Jones

Caterpillars are the larval form of a member of the order Lepidoptera (the insect order comprising butterflies and moths). They are mostly phytophagous in food habit, with some species being entomophagous. Caterpillars are voracious feeders and many of them are considered pests in agriculture. Many moth species are better known in their caterpillar stages because of the damage they cause to fruits and other agricultural produce.

wiccked

Most caterpillars have tubular, segmented bodies. They have three pairs of true legs on the three thoracic segments, up to four pairs of prolegs on the middle segments of the abdomen, and often a single pair of prolegs on the last abdominal segment. There are ten abdominal segments. The families of lepidoptera differ in the numbers and positioning of the prolegs.

Caterpillars grow through a series of moults; each intermediate stage is called an instar.

wakalani

Caterpillars have 4,000 muscles (compare humans, with 629). They move through contraction of the muscles in the rear segments pushing the blood forward into the front segments elongating the torso. The average caterpillar has 248 muscles in the head segment alone.

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I was asked by the lovely folks over at Etsy to be a featured buyer on their blog. My picks were inspired by the current top colors here on colourlovers. Reposted from here.

This week’s Featured Buyer is Davey Sommers, editor of the art and design blog for color trendspotting site COLOURlovers.com. In addition to analyzing color palattes, Davey is a member of the The Post Family — a group of Chicago gallery and event curators, an artist collective and a print shop all rolled into one. He also sometimes makes stuff out of recycled things. Here’s Davey.

I love Etsy because it is an unbordered community that brings artists and art lovers together. It’s a great example of a market economy, too: one without lobbyists and tax cuts for nonlocal businesses.

Using the Colors tool on Etsy, these picks are inspired by the top colors currently on COLOURlovers.

Blue, or ‘balls’ blue in this case, is a reoccurring hue in the work of Mike Best, aka BestArtStudios2. It’s a nice match for the thoughtful, and at times vulnerable, facial expressions of this character seen throughout his work.

Not eaxtly the same as ‘The Order of the Wen’, but it shares the same warm color composition as this wonderful illustration by ashleyg.

In TheaCphotography’s Bounty, she melds shades of green, allowing the deep color of the berries to pull the viewer’s eye. As many of her photos contain a single prominent color, and since they are all sized 8×8, you could easily create a cohesive color palette made up of her work.


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