Blue Stag Selects: May

Welcome to Blue Stag Selects: May edition, where we serve up some of the most inspiring and interesting stories we have seen each month.

Celebrating and showcasing the innovative work that is shaping and influencing our culture today, May Selects include Spotify’s listening together site, connecting listeners worldwide and copy and pasting real objects into Photoshop using AR.

Re-imagining classic movies as vintage-looking books

Matt Stevens has used his skills as a designer to re-imagine his favourite movies as old books. Giving each film a gorgeous transformation into a vintage-looking book that feels like you can take it right off the screen.

It’s a great personal project from Matt which I think will really relate to people. More often than not, films come out with their advertising and they are quickly forgotten by the majority of people. In doing this, Matt is bringing the attention back to these films. You remember movies that you loved and then seeing that he has re-imagined these as a book, it’s a breath of fresh air seeing them like this.

Another thing that is great is that each ‘book’ is treated as an individual and it’s not a blanket design. Matt has put a lot of consideration and care into each design. The John Wick, Drive, Knives Out and The Prestige are some personal favourites.

As this project garners more attention, Matt has decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign where you can get prints or even a book version of his designs. You can find the Kickstarter here.

The “Fuck, I wish I knew that” curated link list

A link list called “Fuck, I wish I knew that” by Piet Terheyden, irregularly curating interesting and good to know content from around the internet. So often, you find yourself scrolling through the internet or social media and coming across really interesting facts, articles and resources, but not having one place to store them or a way to share them. Many of us resort to sharing the links via email, social media or a messenger or saving them to our bookmarks bar and forgetting about them.

Piet Terheyden instead decided to share these gems of knowledge with everyone, rather than a select few friends or to privately hoarding them. The design of the site is minimal and the user intuitively scrolls back through time, getting lost in a list of interesting information.

The site even has a dark mode for late-night gazing.

Spotify launches ‘Listening Together’

‘Listening Together’ – Harnessing the power of music and technology to bring the world together.

Spotify has launched ‘Listening Together’, a global visualization revealing when two people start playing the same song, at the exact same time, and it’s amazing!

Every moment, more than 30,000 people around the world press play on the same song on Spotify.

Built using WebGL, a 3D graphics tool for the web, the microsite allows users to explore the globe and connect with people that have the same taste in tunes. At a time when people feel so apart, Spotify has harnessed the power of music and technology to bring them together.

Check out the Listening Together microsite here to watch in real-time as fans around the world listen to the same track, at the same time.

An illustrated storybook to help children understand and come to terms with COVID-19

The pandemic has been a confusing time for us all. Big changes to our usual routines, new lockdown rules to follow and transformations to our social etiquette. These changes have been especially confusing for children and young people – Not going to school to see their friends, avoiding contact with anyone else, even grandparents. And it’s been difficult for parents to know the best approach to take when explaining COVID-19 to their children in a way they can understand.

The WHO has released a number of resources under the campaign #HealthyAtHome to help people during the pandemic, including ‘Healthy Parenting’ resources. These resources help parents to support their children at this time when they may be feeling more isolated, anxious, bored and uncertain during the pandemic. One of these resources is the storybook “My Hero is You – How kids can fight Covid-19”. It covers a vast amount of topics to help parents pass on a better understanding of their children in how we are tackling the Virus.

This beautifully illustrated book is a sweet story of a dragon and a little girl sharing the message about coronavirus to people around the world.  It is so important that the WHO tailored the approach they took when communicating to children. This is a format and language they can understand, without scaring them and making the key messages clear and digestible.

Copy & paste real objects into Photoshop using AR

Gone are the tedious days of taking a photo, sending it to your computer, cutting out the object and inserting it into your Photoshop creation, all thanks to Cyril Diagne. Cyril is a designer/artist who has launched a prototype of an image editing program that enables you to cut elements from your surroundings and paste them into Photoshop.

When you take a photo with the AR Copy Paste program, it identifies the object and can automatically remove the background. Once you hover over the item, it is cut out, then move back to your computer screen with your phone and the cut-out image is placed straight into Photoshop. It almost looks like a magic trick, and I had to rewatch the video a couple of times and read the comments to check it was real.

At the moment, AR Cut & Paste only works with the Adobe products and early access only available upon request. But in the future, Cyril is looking to develop this and pair with other platforms.

Art + Typography + Isolation = HOME

HOME is an open collaboration between the art of talented people with @alepaul‘s Fixture font during COVID-19. Everyone may be separate and isolated at the moment, but that doesn’t stop creativity and collaboration blossoming.

Ale Paul is a graphic/typeface designer and Founder of Sudtipos, an awesome type and lettering foundry in Argentina. Ale launched this project via Instagram, with a story calling for anyone to participate by downloading the templates in the bio and letting their imagination and creativity do the rest. The idea is to interact with the words and the theme – HOME.

Ale launched this the project at the start of May and has already had 75 amazing entries. If you’re feeling creative, why not try submitting a piece of your own?

Thanks for reading Blue Stag Selects: May! If you’d like to catch up on last month’s here’s Blue Stag Selects: April. Check back next month for our next selection of inspiring and interesting stories from around the world.