graphic design | Kenneth Ronkowitz

Tilt Brush is a room-scale 3D-painting virtual-reality application available from Google, originally developed by Skillman & Hackett and it is one of the things in the Google Arts & Culture Experiments.

In a Fast Company article about Tilt Brush, one of the creators said that the idea of drawing in 3D space came from a chess game prototype: “There was a happy accident. Tilt Brush came out of an experiment with a virtual reality chess prototype, where we accidentally started painting the chess pieces in the air, and it was incredible”. In the earlier versions of Tilt Brush, it was only possible to draw on two-dimensional planes.

In early 2021, Google released the source code of the application under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

These videos give you a sense of what it can do.

MORE INFORMATION tiltbrush.com

One of the visual design assignments I would give my students was to design a movie poster. It would be for a film of their own invention, so as not o be influenced by existing posters. The assignment required them to use a number of course topics (composition, color, line, etc.). Obviously, fonts were part of the design but I realized after I received my first semester submissions that students had not given enough consideration to fonts.

I would point them to the ScreenFonts series of reviews focusing on movie-poster typography. I especially like the examples that are really type-driven designs.

One poster that I had used as an example that appears in that series is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. The one above was a teaser poster used in the U.K. that used a very font-driven design. More traditional are the two posters below. You can analyze the use of typography (Futura Black, Surveyor Fine Bold) and discuss which of the two is more effective and why. And is one more American, one more Italian?