This is the personal website of Dashiell Dunn, a South Australian student with an interest in technology and a song in his heart.
The powerful pork lobby has managed to get the WHO to call the current worldwide influenza outbreak ‘Influenza A(H1N1)’ instead of swine flu, because they believe consumers may believe pork products are now unsafe.
Instead of asking for a confusing and unnecessary name change, Big Pork should be actively trying to get consumers eating more pork. Here is my idea of a poster for such a campaign:
I made some Iron Chef wallpapers a few years ago, but they weren’t that good. These new ones are more stylish (click the thumbnails for the full 1600×1200 versions):
The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought by Japan and China between 1937 and 1945, around the same time as (but starting before) World War II. There is a collection of civil defence posters from 1938 on the National Archives of Japan website. They’re available in ultra high resolution but at large sizes you can only view small sections of them at a time. I found this frustrating, because I liked these posters (I like most government/propaganda posters). They’re haunting, unsettlingly elegant and beautiful depictions of the horrors of war in a country which had suddenly come into the modern age.
I liked these posters enough to want high-quality offline versions. So, I made them, by downloading the images piece by piece and then reconstituting them. I figured I’d put this convenient collection back up onto the internet for anyone who’s interested. There are 55 images in total, divided into four categories. Each ZIP file is around 60 MB. Each image is around 2000×3000 pixels—this is only a quarter of the maximum size available on the original website, but it was going to be way too time-consuming to get them at full size. The image filenames include the posters’ titles from the original website, whose English I cannot be held responsible for, but they do provide some clue as to the meaning of the poster.
If you are at least casually interested and have a reasonable internet connection, you might as well download these. If you are casually interested but only have a poor internet connection, I’d recommend at least having a look at the original website.
I was watching clips of old Japanese commercials, news reports, and station idents on Youtube, as one does, and I saw a slide that caught my eye during a weather report:
It’s minimalist, I like it. The left side says it’s cold and dry and the right side says something about Russia. Or dew.
So, I decided to copy it and come up with a Photoshop version or two. Clean:
‘79 style:
Unfortunately my version is typographically lacking—I tried to find a nice round Japanese typeface but had no luck. I’ve put together some desktop wallpaper versions, to suit various aspect ratios:
Clean: 1600×1200 / 1280×1024 / 1680×1050
‘79 style: 1600×1200 / 1280×1024 / 1680×1050
Remixing (i.e. changing the text on) vintage World War II propaganda posters is just something I do. This time, they’ve got nothing to do with the 2007 federal election.
And, as special bonus for anyone who has never had someone look at them weird after seeing their desktop wallpaper, I present the 1600×1200 “That’s Corn” wallpaper.
Today I have launched the latest version of www.maestrosync.com, which I have given the rather uninspired title of Novus. Fundamentally, it’s based on the latest versions of WordPress and K2. There was then much designing and coding (HTML, CSS, and proper PHP) and the site was born. Some brief notes:
There are still a few rough edges that I’m working on, so ignore them for the time being.
Had a go at a little World War II propaganda. The rhyme is original (hopefully) and the blur is deliberate (because I drew it roughly).
