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Our minds process visual information at a rapid rate, which makes it tough for designers who need to create both instant impact and depth.

However, if people get the chance to click their mouse and move away because their perception tells them there's no point to going deeper, it means impact is everything.

Recent research conducted by the University of Vienna shows just how fast people process visual information. Its study focused on art and asked subjects to compare similarities and differences in various pieces.

Researchers found that subjects could register content in less than 1/100th of a second.

Within 1/20th of a second subjects had already started to interpret style.

All this happening before recognition of the whole object.

It shows that art directors and designers have less time than we originally thought to capture attention and stop people from clicking away with their remote button or mouse.


Posted by Ed Cotton RED, the brand designed and built to raise money for Africa, has been keeping a low profile in the last few months that was until yesterday.

As we all know, money talks.

In a single day, RED raised an incredible $42.6 million to add to the $50 million raised to date through its efforts with brands.

It did it with an auction of contemporary art.

Here's are 7 reasons why its brilliant.

1. Contemporary art is simply the hottest and most valuable product out there- prices have been going through the roof in recent years

2. Big name artists are the hottest brands there are- especially guys like Damien Hirst who had work in the auction

3. Rare and limited editions have a premium value- so art created especially for RED- fitted that criteria

4. RED leveraged its celebrity founders to give the art and the auction cache.

5. Playing to the guilt factor- like the RED brand in general- purchasers can feel good about buying and artists feel like valued contributors

6. Partnering with Sotheby’s added status and value to the event

7. Holding the auction on Valentine's Day, gave the event a theme and an anchor

This piece, a collaboration between Banksy and Damien Hirst was supposed to fetch $200k, but ended up going for $1.8 million!



Economists frequently tell us that we are a time of incredible wealth with a new class of super-rich, RED's strategy of pushing its brand upstream, creating an event to capture this wealth and line its own pockets, is pure genius.

Posted by Ed Cotton creativity + assignment + crowds + prizes = published work (37.76589748519095 , -122.44998693466187) Pixish is a new site from the mind of Derek Powazek that's all about helping creative people get their work published.

The role of the site is to help "clients" connect to a creative community and source the precise images they are looking for.



It's an alternative to the time consuming and expensive process of working with artists and the challenge of using a micro-stock agency.

Pixish also incorporates a voting feature that gets the community to vote on the images that best fit the assignment. The reward for artists is the opportunity to get their work published and there are also some prizes up for grabs.

Clearly this idea flies in the face of the established creative process and its unlikely that professionals are going to want any part of this.

The idea here is to level the playing field and let amateurs and young artists have a shot at the big time and build their portfolios. There are thousands of people out there willing to do this and its likely that the quality of their work is pretty good.

It's another example of the combination of the internet and the crowd weakening the power of the expert. We are just going to see more and more of this in the coming months and years.


Posted by Ed Cotton The visualization of data is fast becoming the next art form.

This is a nice example that comes from JK Keller



Here's how he creates the visuals.

"This is a program I wrote that reads a source text and looks for words that are used repeatedly. The more the word is used, the larger its cube gets. Red cubes are words that are not unique, blue cubes are. The size of the rings is determined by the size of the paragraphs."

Found by This is That

Posted by Ed Cotton A couple of weeks back, I took a trip to the New Museum in New York.

It’s the latest and greatest designer museum complete with amazingly radical architecture and a gift shop.

The museum was full of hip “global” twentysomethings looking to grab their latest art fix.

I began to feel like the whole museum thing was turning into a giant clich� of itself. A cultural formula that we feel obliged to consume like any other brand, but hopefully one that comes with some rich, intellectual stimulation.

My problem with the main exhibition, Unmonumental, was that I didn’t get it or understand any of the meaning of the works, to me it just looked like a random collection of art from the fringes of the scene.

I became somewhat cynical about the idea of how quickly art gets discovered and placed in museums. To me, the works seemed embryonic and not fully realized, but clearly I am no expert and I was missing the point.

A few days ago, I was looking at a pile of old papers and found a leaflet describing the exhibit. One of its paragraphs immediately stuck a chord, seemed massively insightful, made perfect sense and, of course, helped me see the work in a completely new light.

“The opening of the new century seems defined by the disappearance of monuments and erasure of symbols, marked by the indelible images of destruction and ruin, from the fall of the Twin Towers to the obliteration of the Bamayan Budddhas, and the toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein. It comes as no surprise that this first decade of the 21st century has produced an artistic language of fragments and of debased, precarious trembling forms, sounds and pictures. This millennium appears more concerned with iconoclasm than with creating new, empty and shiny icons. Like the time we live in “Unmonumental” marks the passage from clarity to complexity. It presents artworks that are violent and delinquent, but also expresses the urgent need to start picking up the pieces and rebuilding this world from scratch.”

What I am taking out of this experience is two-fold; it’s always good to read the instructions and there’s always time to take a second look and to revise your first impressions.

Here are some shots of the exhibits and museum.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Posted by Ed Cotton Cool story about the Movable Type art piece in the new New York Times building in New York.

The concept is all about breaking the original content down into small elements and finding connections between the pieces.




Posted by Ed Cotton