Tag: new year

#38 Form & Function

Chaz DeSimone 3 Comments

Form fol­lows func­tion, form meets func­tion, form & func­tion. It’s all about effi­cien­cy, sim­plic­i­ty & aesthetics.

Lamps that dou­ble as sculp­ture, sculp­ture that you can sit on, even a cool graph­ic that’s real­ly a cal­en­dar. Prob­a­bly the most ubiq­ui­tous exam­ple of form & func­tion is the wrist­watch. The rarest could be the 3 that dou­bles as an amper­sand (sort of) in the lat­est Amper­Art edition.

Form & func­tion is every­where: our cloth­ing, a build­ing (although some are so ugly they are mere­ly func­tion­al, & some are so poor­ly built they don’t real­ly function).

Anoth­er exam­ple of form & func­tion is a beau­ti­ful­ly dec­o­rat­ed serv­ing of food. How about some writ­ing instru­ments? And of course my favorite, my Mick­ey Mouse cof­fee mug. Fun to look at & very functional.

chaz sez:
Movie Night

Recent­ly I dis­cov­ered the IMDb, or Inter­net Movie Data­base. It lists the top 250 movies by pop­u­lar­i­ty accord­ing to the gen­er­al pub­lic, and it is con­stant­ly fluc­tu­at­ing, espe­cial­ly re-​ranking the new­er flicks quite frequently.
I have trad­ed in my habit of read­ing sev­er­al (actu­al­ly, too many) chap­ters of sus­pense and mys­tery nov­els every night that I’m not push­ing pix­els, for watch­ing every movie on the 250 list.
So far I have been tru­ly delight­ed with oldies like Char­lie Chap­lin’s “On the Town,” Lau­rel & Hardy in “Babes in Toy­land” as well as the lat­er Dis­ney ver­sion star­ring “Anette.” I’ve enjoyed “The Sound of Music,” “A Street­car Named Desire,” and “Har­vey” – a real delight. Also saw for the first time “The God­fa­ther” – sur­pris­ing­ly, since I’m Sicil­ian. Pazien­za!
But the most allur­ing and cap­ti­vat­ing movie I saw from this list – or from my entire life on this plan­et – is “The Foun­tain­head” from 1948. It express­es exact­ly how I feel about design where every sur­face, angle, col­or and detail must have a damn good rea­son to be there. The movie is about not giv­ing into soci­ety, not giv­ing up your prin­ci­ples, liv­ing your dream in the face of ridicule and even con­dem­na­tion – just because one artist is too bril­liant for the mass­es. The movie also fea­tures mid-​century mod­ern archi­tec­ture, my absolute favorite (aside from futur­is­tic archi­tec­ture – but back then it was futuristic).

Per­haps you’ve guessed that movie inspired my “Form & Func­tion” Amper­Art piece.

The TO DO & TO DON’T List

Chaz DeSimone 2 Comments

AmperArt-TO-DONT-LIST-cyan

  Click on the image to download your own TO DO & TO DON’T list.

Final­ly, a TO DO list that real­ly works — the TO DO & TO DON’T list.

Want to feel like you’ve real­ly accom­plished some­thing? Accom­plish noth­ing — and cross it off the list!

Here’s a TO DO & TO DON’T list but with only a few lines on the “to do” side, which real­is­ti­cal­ly is all most of us ever get through in a day. Right? The TO DON’T side can eas­i­ly be filled with reminders to DON’T answer every email, DON’T read more than 3 chap­ters in a mys­tery nov­el when you real­ly need some sleep, DON’T eat too much junk food, DON’T answer the tele­phone every time, DON’T for­get to smile, and DON’T make too many lists.

Down­load your own TO DO & TO DON’T list and print out as many as you want to use your­self & dis­trib­ute to your friends and col­leagues. You might want to fill theirs in for them before­hand with DON’T bor­row any more mon­ey from me, DON’T both­er me when I’m engrossed in a good movie, DON’T be late again, DON’T for­get to pick up the lunch tab next time…

DON’T miss out on a fun & fab­u­lous piece of art each month fea­tur­ing the amper­sand. It’s absolute­ly free.

DO sub­scribe and start your Amper­Art col­lec­tion now!