07.06.17
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 60: Everyman and Ariane


“A stick, a stone, the end of the road…” is how the song Águas de Março (The Waters of March) begins. For the 2014 Alliance Graphique Internationale conference in Brazil, Michael took Antonio Carlos Jobim’s list-like lyrics, did a Google Image Search, and put the first result on a poster:

What the song is about is the beauty of everyday life — you know,  that just these boring things that surround us is what life and existence is all about — and it was an attempt to hijack the boring character of Google Image Search to generate a similarly quotidian attitude about the world.


The Atlantic's James Fallows rounded up some favorite versions of Águas de Março a couple of years ago, including one in Slovenian, a paean to Trader Joe's, and this long instrumental:



Also mentioned:


Posted in: The Observatory




Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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