Culture

In one form or another, batik has worldwide popularity. Now, not only is batik used as a material to clothe the human body, its uses also include furnishing fabrics, heavy canvas wall hangings, tablecloths and household accessories. Batik techniques are used by famous artists to create batik paintings, which grace many homes and offices.
[edit]Indonesia

The Javanese aristocrats R.A. Kartini in kebaya and her husband. Her skirt is of batik, with the parang pattern, which was for aristocrats. Her husband is wearing a blangkon
Depending on the quality of the art work, craftsmanship, and fabric quality, batik can be priced from several dollars (for fake poor quality batik) to several thousand dollars (for the finest batik tulis halus which probably took several months to make). Batik tulis has both sides of the cloth ornamented.
In Indonesia, traditionally, batik was sold in 2.25-metre lengths used for kain panjang or sarong for kebaya dress. It can also be worn by wrapping it around the body, or made into a hat known as blangkon. Infants are carried in batik slings decorated with symbols designed to bring the child luck. Certain batik designs are reserved for brides and bridegrooms, as well as their families. The dead are shrouded in funerary batik.[1] Other designs are reserved for the Sultan and his family or their attendants. A person’s rank could be determined by the pattern of the batik he or she wore.
For special occasions, batik was formerly decorated with gold leaf or dust. This cloth is known as prada (a Javanese word for gold) cloth. Gold decorated cloth is still made today; however, gold paint has replaced gold dust and leaf.
Batik garments play a central role in certain rituals, such as the ceremonial casting of royal batik into a volcano. In the Javanese naloni mitoni “first pregnancy” ceremony, the mother-to-be is wrapped in seven layers of batik, wishing her good things. Batik is also prominent in the tedak siten ceremony when a child touches the earth for the first time. Batik is also part of the labuhan ceremony when people gather at a beach to throw their problems away into the sea.[11]
The wide diversity of patterns reflects a variety of influences, ranging from indigenous designs, Arabic calligraphy, European bouquets and Chinese phoenixes to Japanese cherry blossoms and Indian or Persian peacocks.[1]

Contemporary men batik shirt in typical Solo style, sogan color and lereng motif.
Contemporary batik, while owing much to the past, is markedly different from the more traditional and formal styles. For example, the artist may use etching, discharge dyeing, stencils, different tools for waxing and dyeing, or wax recipes with different resist values. They may work with silk, cotton, wool, leather, paper, or even wood and ceramics.
[edit]Popularity
In Indonesia, batik popularity has had its tidings. Historically, it was essential for ceremonial costumes and it was worn as part of a kebaya dress, which was commonly worn every day. According to Professor Michael Hitchcock of the University of Chichester (UK), batik “has a strong political dimension. The batik shirt was invented as a formal non-Western shirt for men in Indonesia in the 1960s, not long after the country’s birth.[12] It waned from the 1960s onwards, because more and more people chose western clothes as fashionable, decimating the batik industry.
However, batik clothing has revived somewhat in the turn of 21st century, due to the effort of Indonesian fashion designers to innovate batik by incorporating new colors, fabrics, and patterns. Batik is a fashion item for many young people in Indonesia, such as a shirt, dress, or scarf for casual wear. Kebaya is regarded as a formal attire for women. It is also acceptable for men to wear batik in the office or as a replacement for jacket-and-tie at certain receptions. After the UNESCO recognition for Indonesian batik as intangible world heritage on October 2, 2009, Indonesian administration has asked Indonesians to wear batik on Friday, and wearing batik every Friday is encouraged in all government offices and private companies ever since.[13] Batik had helped improve the small business local economy, batik sales in Indonesia had reached Rp 3.9 trillion (US$436.8 million) in 2010, an increase from Rp 2.5 trillion in 2006. The value of batik exports, meanwhile, increased from $14.3 million in 2006 to $22.3 million in 2010.[14]

Garuda Indonesia flight attendant uniform in kebaya and batik parang gondosuli motif.
The existence and use of batik was already recorded in the 12th century and the textile has since become a strong source of identity for Indonesians,[15] and to lesser extent Malaysia and Singapore. Batik is featured in their national airlines uniform, the flight attendants of Singaporean, Garuda Indonesia and Malaysian national airlines wear batik prints in their uniform. Although the uniforms are actually not real batik because the production is not using the traditional way but using mass produced techniques. The female uniform of Garuda Indonesia flight attendants is more authentic modern interpretations of kartini style kebaya and batik parang gondosuli motif, which also incorporate garuda’s wing motif and small dots represent jasmine.[16] The batik motif symbolizes the ‘Fragrant Ray of Life’ and endows the wearer with elegance.[17]

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batik

Share and Enjoy

A logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organization (a logotype or wordmark).
In the days of hot metal typesetting, a logotype was a uniquely set and arranged typeface or colophon. At the level of mass communication and in common usage a company’s logo is today often synonymous with its trademark or brand.[1]

History

Numerous inventions and techniques have contributed to the contemporary logo, including cylinder seals (c.2300 BCE), coins (c.600 BCE),[2][3] trans-cultural diffusion of logographic languages, coats of arms,[4] watermarks,[5] silver hallmarks and the development of printing technology.
As the industrial revolution converted western societies from agrarian to industrial in the 18th and 19th centuries, photography and lithography contributed to the boom of an advertising industry that integrated typography and imagery together on the page.[6] Simultaneously, typography itself was undergoing a revolution of form and expression that expanded beyond the modest, serif typefaces used in books, to bold, ornamental typefaces used on broadsheet posters.[7]
The arts were expanding in purpose—from expression and decoration of an artistic, storytelling nature, to a differentiation of brands and products that the growing middle classes were consuming. Consultancies and trades-groups in the commercial arts were growing and organizing; by 1890 the US had 700 lithographic printing firms employing more than 8,000 people.[8] Artistic credit tended to be assigned to the lithographic company, as opposed to the individual artists.

A coin from early 6th century BC Lydia bearing the head of a roaring lion with sun rays
Innovators in the visual arts and lithographic process—such as French printing firm Rouchon in the 1840s, Joseph Morse of New York in the 1850s, Frederick Walker of England in the 1870s, and Jules Chéret of France in the 1870s—developed an illustrative style that went beyond tonal, representational art to figurative imagery with sections of bright, flat colors.[8] Playful children’s books, authoritative newspapers, and conversational periodicals developed their own visual and editorial styles for unique, expanding audiences. As printing costs decreased, literacy rates increased, and visual styles changed, the Victorian decorative arts lead to an expansion of typographic styles and methods of representing businesses.[9]

The First logo to be trademarked was the Bass red triangle in 1876
The Arts and Crafts Movement of late-19th century, partially in response to the excesses of Victorian typography, aimed to restore an honest sense of craftsmanship to the mass-produced goods of the era.[10] A renewal of interest in craftsmanship and quality also provided the artists and companies with a greater interest in credit, leading to the creation of unique logos and marks.
By the 1950s, Modernism had shed its roots as an avant-garde artistic movement in Europe to become an international, commercialized movement with adherents in the United States and elsewhere. The visual simplicity and conceptual clarity that were the hallmarks of Modernism as an artistic movement formed a powerful toolset for a new generation of graphic designers whose logos embodied Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, “Less is more.” Modernist-inspired logos proved successful in the era of mass visual communication ushered in by television, improvements in printing technology, and digital innovations.

Logo design

Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo (ideogram), is the image embodying an organization. Because logos are meant to represent companies’ brands or corporate identities and foster their immediate customer recognition, it is counterproductive to frequently redesign logos.
Color is considered important to brand recognition, but it should not be an integral component to the logo design, which could conflict with its functionality. Some colors are formed/associated with certain emotions that the designer wants to convey. For instance loud primary colors, such as red, are meant to attract the attention of drivers on highways are appropriate for companies that require such attention. In the United States red, white, and blue are often used in logos for companies that want to project patriotic feelings. Green is often associated with the health and hygiene sector, and light blue or silver is often used to reflect diet foods. For other brands, more subdued tones and lower saturation can communicate reliability, quality, relaxation, or other traits.
The logo design profession has substantially increased in numbers over the years since the rise of the Modernist movement in the United States in the 1950s.[11] Three designers are widely[12] considered the pioneers of that movement and of logo and corporate identity design: The first is Chermayeff & Geismar,[13] which is the firm responsible for a large number of iconic logos, such as Chase Bank (1964), Mobil Oil (1965), PBS (1984), NBC (1986), National Geographic (2003) and others. Due to the simplicity and boldness of their designs, many of their earlier logos are still in use today. The firm recently designed logos for the Library of Congress and the fashion brand Armani Exchange. Another pioneer of corporate identity design is Paul Rand,[14] who was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. He designed many posters and corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS, and ABC. Rand died in 1996. The third pioneer of corporate identity design is Saul Bass.[15] Bass was responsible for several recognizable logos in North America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969) and successor AT&T globe (1983). Other well-known designs were Continental Airlines (1968), Dixie (1969), and United Way (1972). Later, he would produce logos for a number of Japanese companies as well. He died in 1996.
[edit]Logo Design Process
Designing a good logo is not a simple task and requires a lot of involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if outsourced). It requires clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group as marketers call. Broad step in logo design process would be formulating concept, doing initial sketch, finalizing the logo concept, deciding the theme colors and format.
[edit]Psyche of Symbols
The effective design and use of a logo employs the understanding of human behavior. Whether cultural, or internal, people recognize and react to color, shapes, lines, fonts and other symbolic forms with emotions tied to their experiences.
Colors have a broad range of meaning according to different nations and cultures. A color could mean one thing in a particular setting, and something completely different in another.
People’s minds have been trained to recognize the motion of a line. Horizontal lines often communicate a leveled security. Vertical lines convey dignity, and diagonal lines are full of energy, suggesting either rising or falling, or movement in one direction or another.

Texaco logo
[edit]Dynamic logos

Nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink), 1898 poster of the Michelin.

Coca-Cola logo
In 1898 the French tire manufacturer Michelin introduced the Michelin Man, a cartoon figure presented in many different contexts, such as eating, drinking and playing sports.

The MTV logo.
By the early 21st century, large corporations such as MTV, Google, Morton Salt and Saks Fifth Avenue had adopted dynamic logos that change over time from setting to setting.[16]
[edit]Internet Compatible Logos
A company that use logotypes (wordmarks) may desire a logo that matches the firm’s Internet Address. For short logotypes consisting of two or three characters, multiple companies are found to employ the same letters. A “CA” logo, for example, is used by the French Bank Credit Agricole, the Dutch Clothing Retailer C&A and the US Software Corporation CA Technologies, but only one can have the internet domain name CA.com.
In today’s interface adaptive world, the use of a logo will be formatted and re-formatted from large monitors to small handheld devices. With the constant size change and re-formatting, logo designers are shifting to a more bold and simple approach, with heavy lines and shapes, and solid colors. This reduces the confusion when mingled with other logos in tight spaces and when stretched and squeezed between mediums.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo

DO YOU NEED LOGO DESIGN SERVICE ??
VISIT THIS LOGOFREESTYLER.COM

Share and Enjoy

Source : http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_19820084

Share and Enjoy

The curly-haired ‘Talk That Talk’ creator visited the Shamrock Social Club tattoo shop in Los Angeles Tuesday night (Jan. 24) and sat under the tattoo gun to get “thug life” tattooed on her fingers. Reminiscent of Tupac Shakur’s famed tattoo of the same name, which was placed on his stomach

Source : http://www.theboombox.com/2012/01/25/rihanna-thug-life-tattoo-singer-inks-hands-like-tupac/

Share and Enjoy

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Official Presentation and Demo

Nexus Prime with Android Ice Cream Sandwich demo!

Great Review Gadget >> expertgadgetreview.com

Share and Enjoy

Brooklyn-born Farentino, who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows and even earned an Emmy nod for his performance as Saint Peter, died of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital after a long illness, said the spokesman, Bob Palmer.

Farentino starred alongside Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen in the 1980 science-fiction film “The Final Countdown.” The movie featured a modern aircraft carrier that travels back in time to Pearl Harbor hours before the Japanese attack.

Farentino also starred opposite Patty Duke in 1969′s “Me, Natalie.”

In 1967, he won a Most Promising Newcomer Golden Globe for his performance in the comedy “The Pad and How to Use It.”

He also had recurring roles on “Dynasty,” “Melrose Place,” “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers” and even played George Clooney’s estranged father on “ER.”

In 1978, he was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Saint Peter in the television mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Also a stage actor, Farentino won acclaim recreating the role of Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and playing a porn producer in the 2003 Los Angeles production of “Boy Gets Girl.”

A four-time divorcee, Farentino’s tumultuous personal life made headlines, too.

In March 1994, he pleaded no contest to stalking his ex-girlfriend Tina Sinatra, daughter of Frank Sinatra.

In the 1990s, he faced drug possession charges in Canada and in 2010, the actor was arrested at his Hollywood home on suspicion of battery when he tried to physically remove a man from his home.

Educated in Brooklyn and at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Farentino is survived by two sons, David and Saverio.

Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-57365598-10391698/actor-james-farentino-73-dies-of-heart-failure/

Share and Enjoy

Should Mets now retire Gary Carter’s No. 8? by Matthew Cerrone on January 19th, 2012 at 7:39 pm. Earlier tonight, I asked this question and got these responses from fans on Twitter: The way I see it, the Mets should definitely use this summer.

Source : http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/gary-carter-fight-brain-cancer-takes-turn-worse-tumors-found-ny-mets-hall-famer-brain-article-1.1008797#ixzz1jwOHPXPp

Share and Enjoy

This is just…unbelievable. The Raiders fire a head coach every other year it seems and Jackson, who took over for Tom Cable who was fired in 2010, barely made it a year as the head coach.

The Raiders hired Reggie McKenzie as GM last week and it had been reported that he could end up firing Jackson. I read the reports but I didn’t believe the Raiders would fire their head coach…again.

Oh, Raiders…never change.

Source : http://www.arrowheadpride.com/2012/1/10/2697124/hue-jackson-fired-oakland-raiders

Share and Enjoy

Cannon took to Twitter to post a photo of himself in the hospital, getting his hair cut. He tweeted, “getting back to business.”

Cannon was transferred to an L.A.-area facility after initially being hospitalized in Aspen, Colorado, where he was vacationing with his wife, Mariah Carey, and their twins, Moroccan and Monroe.

Nick Cannon: ‘Everything I Do Is For My Family‘

The cause of Cannon’s kidney failure is still unknown. In fact, the term “mild kidney failure” doesn’t exist in medical terminology. He may have been suffering from a condition called acute kidney failure, Dr. Bryan Becker of the National Kidney Foundation tells The Huffington Post.

Acute kidney injury occurs when the kidneys stop functioning properly, thereby allowing fluids, waste and electrolytes to store up in the body. It can be diagnosed by an elevated level of serum creatinine, a blood measurement. Find out more about the symptoms and causes of acute kidney failure at themayoclinic.com.

Treatments for acute kidney injury may include treating the underlying issue that caused the kidney condition in the first place (for example, stopping medication if medication is causing the kidney issue, or re-hydrating a person if he or she is dehydrated), Becker, who has no connection to Cannon’s case, said.

“If it’s acute [kidney injury] and people recover, then they should be pretty much back to their normal circumstances once they recover,” Becker said. “I can’t tell whether [Cannon's] needed dialysis and I can’t tell how serious it is … but the use of the word ‘mild’ would suggest to me that someone noticed the numbers were not normal, and was taking a precaution that there is some kidney injury associated with whatever reason he was hospitalized for, and wanted to make sure it doesn’t get worse.”

Becker speculated that Cannon’s condition could have been caused by a general illness that then affected his kidney function, or it could be related to medication he was taking. In addition, because Cannon and Carey are in Colorado, it’s possible that the weather and atmosphere there played a part as well — “he could be more dehydrated than normal,” he speculated.

Cannon’s wife has been updating the couple’s fans via Twitter. “As always, he’s in good spirits considering the situation,” Carey said, noting that he was “in a lot of pain” and that “the situation is not easy. We really appreciate everybody’s love and support.”

Source: http://www.parade.com/celebrity/news/2012/01/06-nick-cannon-kidney-failure-explained.html

Share and Enjoy

After the All Stars exchange heartfelt hellos in the streets of New York City, model and Project Runway: All Stars host Angela Lindvall informs the contestants that though there will be no immunity in this competition, they will be up for an amazing prize: exclusive boutiques in select Neiman Marcus stores and NeimanMarcus.com, a fashion spread in Marie Claire and a guest editor position with the magazine for a year, industrial sewing and fabric printing equipment from Brother, office technology from Hewlett-Packard, and $100,000 cash from L’Oreal—a total prize package worth half a million dollars!

Source: http://realitytvmagazine.sheknows.com/2012/01/05/project-runway-all-stars-recap-return-to-the-runway/

Share and Enjoy