Tag Archives: colossal

Colossal has popped up in the news here and there lately so I thought I’d share some of it here right quick. Most recently Jacquelyn Gleisner from Art21/PBS wrote a really nice piece about how Colossal began and what’s happened over the past year, head over to Art21 blog to read Becoming Colossal with Blogger Christopher Jobson.

A tweet I made comparing incoming traffic from Pinterest versus Tumblr sparked a few healthy conversations via email and Twitter, and lead Philip Bump to write an article for the Atlantic. Check out The ‘Cliffs Notes Web’ Has Won. To be clear, I love both services dearly for different reasons, but users of Pinterest appear to be much more likely to leave that ecosystem to explore elsewhere, versus Tumblr which appears to be more closed.

Lastly, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art wrote a wonderful recap of the fallout after Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room went viral in January including a killer shout-out to Colossal. Thanks guys!

Wow. In August of last year I started this blog on a whim, wanting to catalog the neat design-related things I was finding online. I had no goals, direction, or expectations and by the end of the year I was getting a couple dozen visits each day, enough interest to keep me going, but not enough to convince me that my mom wasn’t sitting at home hitting refresh. Then 2011 happened. Based on some success with a few posts involving art, I decided to shift the blog strongly in that direction, focusing the daily stream of posts on sculpture, street art, photography and other unexpected creative projects. The internet responded quickly and Colossal reached over 7 million people this year, including a number of surprise visitors. Ahem.

I’ve had to switch hosts three times, the site crashed and burned on numerous occasions, but with the help of Media Temple (and especially CloudFlare), things seem to be humming along now.

Without further ado, here’s the top 10 things you found interesting on Colossal this year.

10. Glass Beach. A California beach polluted beyond recognition is gradually returned to normal with the help of the unrelenting surf, leaving behind millions of polished glass shards.

9. Customized Book Side Tables. Furniture maker Jane Dandy’s side tables designed to perfectly encapsulated your favorite books took the design blogs by storm.

8. One Day on Earth. A film shot in every country in the world in a single day.

7. Skull Nickels. A macabre sub-genre of numismatic treasures known as Hobo Nickels.

6. A Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand. Harnessing the power of the sun has never been so incredible.

5. Sagaki Keita. The illustrations of Tokyo-based artist Sagaki Keita contain thousands of whimsical characters that are drawn almost completely improvised to form representations of classical artwork.

4. Money Trees. In several wooded areas around the UK, passersby have been stopping for decades (if not centuries), meticulously hammering small denomination coins intro trees.

3. A Portrait of Tobias Wong Using 13,138 Dice. Canadian artist and designer Tobias Wong died last year at the young age of 35, or more specifically, 13,138 days. In tribute, his friend Frederick McSwain created this immense portrait of Wong entitled Die using 13,138 dice.

2. High Speed Liquid and Bubble Photographs by Heinz Maier. Incredible photographs that appear more like sculpture than liquid.

1. One man, 100,000 toothpicks, and 35 years: An incredible kinetic sculpture of San Francisco. You saw it here first.

Thanks so much for following and I hope you’ll stop by in 2012. It’s going to be an awesome year. Did you know you can follow every post to Colossal on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+?

Last Friday Google launched a new application for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices called Google Currents that allows you to subscribe to your favorite websites and view the content in a lovely magazine-like format. I was fortunate to be asked to kick the tires of their content publisher tools, but due to time constraints was unable to provide any valuable feedback prior to launch (so if anything is even slightly imperfect it’s entirely my fault). As a welcome surprise Google featured Colossal in their launch video, showing explicitly how to add this humble art and design site to your Currents app. How cool is that? You can download it for free right here.

Hey Colossalers, I need your help.

As you may know, the advertising on Colossal is sold through Nectar Ads – The Ad Network for Art, which includes Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Art Fag City, and Art Market Views.

Nectar Ads is running a short survey to better understand overall readership across its entire network. This information will help us tell potential advertisers about the types of people visiting Colossal, and hopefully lead to not only more but also better advertising that helps keep this site going.

We are not collecting or sharing any personal information about individual people, we are only compiling aggregate demographic, occupational and lifestyle data.

So please take just a few moments to take the survey, it will mean a great deal to me and the awesome folks at Nectar Ads.

Photo above by Giovani.

Hello folks. So I’m going on vacation for a bit to a place where there’s lots of trees, more than a few animals, no running water, and no internets. It’s a place that will not look like Neil Craven’s (nsfw) image above. Due to a spectacularly busy schedule and terrible planning I have no posts to run for the next few days, for which I deeply regret. Regular posting will resume next Tuesday, and until then here are some sites I’ve been getting tons of inspiration from lately.

iGNANT Bumbumbum Cubism Dream Design Work Life DudeCraft

Spoon and Tamago Kuriositas Plenty of Color Quipsologies Sweet Station

Illusion Junk Culture The Black Harbor This Isn’t Happiness CollabCubed

And don’t forget, it’s always fun to look at 100 random posts. See you next week!