is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
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is it beautiful because of the way/what it is, or because of your familiarity with mona lisa?
Tom, definitely because of my familiarity with the original work.
It’s a shame the “artist” can’t come up with anything original and has to copy someone else’s work–and then demand money for it. It’s blatantly derivative and ads nothing to the original work.
Wikipedia tells me the original artist is dead, so I can only hope his estate pursues this creative theft to the fullest extent of copyright law.
Andrew – you actually had to check with Wikipedia to see if Da Vinci is dead or not? Tut tut…anyway, you actually hit the nail on the head. This work contains no shapes nor colours from the original work, and so hardly constitutes creative thief of any sort. You recognise it as the Mona Lisa, but it is NOT the Mona Lisa, and that’s the point. It’s an illusion. (Thanks again Khol for the feature!)
Gary: Initially I had a similar reaction to Andrew’s comment. But after a moment I realized he’s joking. I think.
i was only half-joking, but now, grouped with Andrew, we sound like trolls (which was not my intention, and i also think he was joking).
i asked because i didn’t see the “beauty” beyond “recognition” — of the kind a 32px icon would evoke.
i didn’t and i don’t wish to diminish the art or the artist (especially now that he showed up here 😉 but would a similar image evoke the same reaction from you if it showed up as an app icon on your iphone, and/or if it was not signed by Gary?
Definitely a joke. My brain connected Gary’s deconstructed Mona Lisa with the deconstructed Miles Davis that Andy Baio commissioned for his Kind of Bloop project: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/
I really shouldn’t leave comments when it’s past my bedtime.
Da Vinci might be dead, but Damien Hirst is alive and well …
personally, i am LOVING this! in an art class in school years ago, we had to do the same, only with much smaller dots to understand how print created pictures (back then). to do this with a ton less dots and colors and still be reconizable at a distance, i have to admire. well done, khoi! (phew….and, sure glad to know andrew was kidding! really had me worried there, for a minute! lol)
ooops! i apologize….good job, gary andrew clarke!
hhmmm seems like the “artist” has produced something strangely similar [carbon copy] to this:
http://scriptographer.org/tutorials/images/working-with-images-and-pixels/
Logan – Wrong. Never seen that before. I converted a jpg of the original into a small 10 x 14 pixel image, and used the colours to hand colour a grid of circles.
The image on their site is from April 2010. Mine dates from summer 2009 – see my Flickr. I guess I time travelled into the future to do my carbon copy?
I’ll take your word for that, my apologies.
While I cannot comment on the age of the image specifically (as it may have been altered or re-saved since it was first used), I believe the script and tutorial have been around since 2006