Studio Racket

The Present History (small one)

Paul — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:06:15 +0000

This was a series we produced for Humus Magazine and also where the title ‘The Present History‘ was first used.

Image Fulgurator

Paul — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:55:33 +0000

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

My Street

Paul — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:39:31 +0000

This is another interface we produced for a Radio National feature project. The project is called My Street and it’s objective is to capture peoples stories of place: This is your chance to get creative. Your story could be about the people in the street, a building, an issue, a time in history, the environment…anything you like! Upload your own story, and view and comment on the stories of others. Get feedback on your work from ABC radio producers.

House of Cards

Paul — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:27:16 +0000

Radioheads new video:

And the making of, which is almost more interesting…

Ocular Envy

Paul — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:48:06 +0000

Stumbling through the interwebs I found a site called ‘Graphic-ExchanGE‘. I was surprised that neither Rachel nor I had ever come across it before, because the particular aesthetic which the sites founder Fabien Barrel admires is very very closely aligned to our own…. infact I have not spent this much time on a singular site since I first stumbled across Misprinted Type and {ths} a long long time ago. His excellence page is exactly that, a page of pure graphic excellence, covering genre’s such as Identity, interior, editorial and graphic design as well as illustration and photography - I will pull out a few particular graphics below… but I strongly recommend visiting the site and spending a healthy amount of time there.

Tolleson design

AvroKO

Craig Atkinson & Café Royal

Paul — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:29:02 +0000

Craig Atkinson is a UK based illustrator producing some lovely scratchy illustrations… sometimes naïve in style - but still wonderfully expressive in terms of capturing mood & expression.. love the celebrity portraits:

Craig is also the joint founder of Café Royal, a zine & underground press purveyor which sells some lovely wares through it’s online shop.

Highland Lake

Paul — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:56:59 +0000

We recently travelled across the New South Wales highlands scouting locations for a photoshoot - to be incorporated into a couple of exhibitions later in the year… These are a couple of the shots with a quick treatment…

Engaging Visions Invite

Paul — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:45:45 +0000

An invitation to one of the exhibitions associated with the Engaging Visions project that we are doing the website and print work for.

The Wordpress 2.5 Appreciation Post

Paul — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:42:12 +0000

It seems inevitable that this post be written… so why write another one? I guess because there are so many different Wordpress appreciation posts / top plugin lists, each person focuses on their own particular application of the Wordpress system to their context and requirements, meaning each is slightly different - and while I have read many excellent posts covering these topics, in building this site I have used various bits and pieces drawn from a variety of sources. This post is also a way of giving something back to the Wordpress developer community - as the best form of marketing in any context is having people talking positively about your product without have to ask them to do so. So here is a roundup of the techniques and plugins that make this site tick:

Plugins (all these plugins are 2.5.1 compatible)

Admin drop down menus: This plugin ends up in every build of Wordpress we do, essentially it creates a drop down menu for each of the Wordpress categories (Write: Page / Post etc). The developer is Ozh and in his words: Replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads!

Configurable Tag Cloud: As the name suggests, this provides you with a bit more control over the tag cloud display. Developed by Keith Solomon.

Dashboard Editor: Again, this plugin goes into every build. Very useful for cleaning up and customising the Wordpress dashboard. Developed by Aaron Harun.

Fold Page List: The great this about this plugin is it’s compatibility - all of the existing functionality of ‘wp_list_pages‘ can be used, “simply replace the code fragment that looks like this
with this: . But what does this plugin actually do? In short it enables you to display the top level pages in a list, then once you click into a particular top level page, the listing of pages will now display the child pages aswell. Describing this plugin using text is kinda like describing a painting using text “Well there is a tree on the right hand side and err… a human.. and the sky is nice… yeah real nice…”. I recommend viewing Webspaceworks visual explanation.

Similar Posts: This is a great little plugin (and much easier to explain). It enables you to generate a listing of similar content found elsewhere on your site. All settings are configurable, meaning you can adjust the way the plugin decides how content is actually related - for example: 30% heading, 50% content, 20% tags. Developed by Rob Marsh, SJ.

Simple Tags: This is another plugin that extends functionality already present in the Wordpress build. The main reason we use this plugin is for the ‘Click Tag’ functionality (display all preexisting tags for one-click insertion) - so we don’t create two very similar tags when one would suffice. However, it also has a swag of powerful global tag management functions which seem good aswell. Developed by Amaury BALMER.

WP Super Cache: This plugin create a static HTML version of your Wordpress site. In the developers words “WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts.” They also brag somewhere that this plugin will make your Wordpress site Digg proof… Developed by Donncha O Caoimh.

Role Manager: Great for client sites. Allows custom roles to be created and named something relevant. Useful even if all you do is rename the existing User accounts. Developed by Owen Winkler.

That’s it so far. I plan to do a couple more these Wordpress posts that delve deeper into the Wordpress web… but this should serve as a useful initial roundup.

Marvellous Museums

Paul — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:02:15 +0000

Just completed another interface for a Radio National project, this time for the national project / competition Marvellous Museums.

“Australian museums come in many shapes and sizes, with themes and collections of infinite variety. Millions of Australians visit museums every year, enjoying the chance to see the objects and the images that reflect both our past and our present.

From Sunday 18 May, ABC Radio National will celebrate these inspiring institutions with a museum-themed week of programming and the launch of the first Marvellous Regional Museums Awards.”