tl;dr #026
January, let’s do this again soon.
Last tl;dr it was December, and now it’s January. Or is it February? Unsure, your computer can probably tell you better than we can. It’s meant to be summer down-under, but apparently some people (human-beings) have irreversibly changed the climate or something? Nonetheless, summertime means we shut down for two weeks to soak up some SPF50 while cruising or riding on the back of our crushes’ Harley (or BMW R100). Anyway we’re back now, having adjusted our standing desks, shaken the sand out of our hair, and gotten stuck into the first month of the calendar year (sun-kissed-but-sun-smart).
And damn has the work absolutely sizzled this month– it’s as if the BBQ grill had never been turned off. Creative work flying off the screens & onto smaller screens.
But before this pastiche of summer nostalgia gets out of hand (just kidding, we’re aiming for sickly overdrive here), let’s give the final word to this now 20 year old tune from Death Cab, turn up the bluetooth audio in your helmets, open the throttle up on your whip, and head for the New Year.
#graphic-design-is-my-passion
At LAM, we love good looking words. Maybe not as much as these guys, but enough that we’ve had some pretty scrumdiddlyumptious type content float through our slack channels lately.
Basement Foundry makes us feel like we’ve entered a room of cool young-thangs that use backlit keyboards to DJ on the weekend (that’s how it works, right?). A favourite is this wicked looking pixelated blackletter typeface.
It seems the almighty SPIN have upgraded their site in the past year. We’ve been drooling over their bespoke typefaces for the recent Mubi campaigns; bouncy letterforms for Italian director Tinto Brass, an otherworldly alien language for Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton, and an adrenaline-fuelled title treatment for Titane.
Lorraine Li’s Font Remix tool uses opentype.js to arrange letterforms. Select two existing typefaces, pick a configuration, and it generates an opentype file of your new clashy font.
An honourable mention from ol’ mate Midjourney. Have a great week, don’t forget to Liv, Loe, Vie my friends.
#rubber-duck
As we got into last time, AI is haaaaat right now, it makes sense that our pick-up lines are hitting differently this month. What’s next you might ask? Codes. We got onto the topic of AI pair programming services like Codex and CoPilot. They were met with 3 ❌ emojis, so we had to do some research…
Pair programming, or bro-gramming for Gino, is when two developers work together on one repository, to share knowledge and sense check their ideas, you could say one’s a pilot and the other is a CoPilot, so I guess that solves the mystery of the name CoPilot. What does that mean? Well Gino, it means less balling with your bros, and more time balling with a bot(?).
The pros: it can do easy stuff like create components or classes and writing self contained functions. It learns as you go, autocorrects, can lead to fewer mistakes, getting better with time.
The cons: it’s missing some libraries or recent versions and language features, you can’t change prompts, and it raises some very real privacy concerns (as if robots care about that).
As for 3D and AI, it’s an interesting field. Sure, we have AI art generators, but they’re only capable of producing images. They haven’t quite taken over our jobs yet by creating custom particle and fluid simulations or morphing logos into lungs (don’t ask). But, one game-changer is Topaz which uses AI image enhancement so you can blow up tiny images to full resolution (up to 8K?!?). This means, we can save hours, days, even YEARS of render time by rendering it out at a much lower resolution and letting the robots clean it up.
And, we are currently testing some pretty cool workflows with real-time rendering, API-driven 3D simulations, and interactive online experiences. So, keep your eyes peeled, who knows, next time I might just have a 3D interactive heart for you to play voodoo with.
#vibe
We left 2K22 with the Kooks (big vibe depending on the trained model you’re consulting), we started 2K23 with Death Cab. We did it together, you’re listening to Transatlanticism now aren’t you? Don’t cry. It’s a vibe, see.
Speaking of trained models and rock bands, we took a collective tumble down a ZZ Top shaped rabbit hole which involved a man giving the definition of 110%, and an AI generated homage created by running lyrics from the band through a Markov chain (fancy maths thing). Musicians, time you start saying please and thank you to your Siris and Alexas because our future overlords are coming for you too.
And now for something a robot definitely didn’t make: lingscars.com, probably the vibiest website ever built. We’ve all seen so many trendy modern websites competing to be the sleekest, smoothest, most minimal and unconfrontational. Which is why it’s so refreshing to stumble across something so positively BRIMMING with personality. It feels at once like a time capsule and a window into an alternate reality. Bravo Ling.
#processes-and-platforms
Scrolling through #processes-and-platforms it’s hard not to notice a theme running strong (also in our TL;DRs), yes AI is amongst us and frankly, I’m here for it. While I hope I don’t run into an AI humanoid robot anytime soon, some things are quite simply delightful;
Writer - When lorem ipsum isn’t cutting it anymore, load this into the Fig and cut copy with a glitzy AI pocket copywriter. Add your requirements then sit back to receive beautifully penned placeholder, automatically, automagically, programmatically.
Notion AI - This one’s not currently out yet but ohh boy. It’ll write your meeting agendas, press releases, emails, social media posts, heck, it’ll even write a love letter.
Trending in the Multiverse - Studio Moniker mashes up GPT-3 with Stable Diffusion to create fictional news stories as if it were written by Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway or J.R.R. Tolkien. A perfect filler for all that spare time you just found.
What next? Probably more AI, more GPT. Definitely February. Wherever you are.
Question for you Dear Reader, do you think you could tell if this article were generated artificially? Might there be some sort of Turing Test? Make sure you’re subscribed, and call us out should you suspect we’re up to something.
tl;dr
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