Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg have made some very cool and wonderfully subtle animated GIFs that may possibly be the most interesting use of that technology that I’ve ever run across. Sadly, a lot of what they’ve done with it isn’t that exciting (lots of clothes and hair moving gently in a breeze), but there are a few examples (such as the one above) that are real gems. If you’re interested you might check out “Far Better Than 3-D: Animated GIFs That Savor A Passing Moment”, a nice article on their work (which is I where I learned about it). You can also see more of their animations here and there.
Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.
"A tongue tied in knots" (My original photo of Jess's girdle as posted on Flickr)
One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!
Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.
